My hand at being a narcissist UX Researcher!
So in design we are always told to avoid our own biases I never knew one could ever become their own user, before I got this assignment of doing an autoethnography. Hahaha….for a person who decided to create her own portrait in an oil painting assignment or who had her own picture as wallpaper on her devices it sounded really exciting to observe the social, technological, cultural changes in her own life.
So here I am describing those to you:
“Dad I need canvas for my art project by what time will you be home ?”
When I was in school I used to rely on my father for a lot of things like going to my best friend’s birthday party or buying stationary for my school projects and what not, whereas now there is a seperate digital product present out there for each of these actions which has allowed me to accomplish these tasks in just few clicks. This technological change in some way has affected the dependency on my father.
“OK Google! You kicked a part of Microsoft outta my life”
Gone are those days when I had to spend hours finding cracks of MS office. Thank you Google because of you I don’t even have that installed in my laptop now and solely rely on your Docs/Slides etc just because of it’s ease and accessibility.
“It’s a Thursday…..I can’t wash your clothes today”
“Oh mom come on!”
When I was young my mom always used to tell us not to wash clothes on a Thursday. When we used to question her she never had an answer for that. We grew up telling her “Mom, kuch farak nahi padta”. I don’t know why but nowadays I don’t see her telling that in fact I find her washing clothes on a Thursday.
“Sun, do you have a netflix account….would you mind if I used it for watching just one series?”
I used to spend a lot of time watching TV because of this reason when I came in 11th standard till the time my brother completed his 12th my dad removed the cable connection so that we could concentrate on our studies. Due to this both of us lost that habit of watching TV. Now in campus as well we don’t watch TV and majorly rely on Netflix or Amazon Prime. And hence our medium of entertainment got replaced.
“So Bye Bye Router WIFI”
Earlier when there was no JIO i.e. “sasta internet” in India I used to very judiciously use internet on my phone. I used to continuously on and off the mobile data and used to track the data used but now I have lost the habit of doing that. Increase in the Internet penetration has had a tremendous impact on my browsing habits I started heavy careless use of internet. I don’t care about data usage any more in fact now I listen to music while streaming it on YouTube where earlier I used to struggle to store songs on my phone. In fact wifi router at my house just got replaced by the JioFi a few days back.
“New years eve….yaaay….family vacation time”
So we as a family used to manage a vacation together every new years eve before I reached my 11th standard. The moment that happened my family stopped planning trips together as I was expected to concentrate on my engineering entrance exams and was supposed to have no distractions :P
The exams happened and I managed to get into IIT Guwahati. Then my brother’s turn came he was expected to do the same, he managed to get into IIT Bombay. Meanwhile my father got posted in Guwahati for 2 years but my mom since she is working stayed in Delhi. All four of us got separated in different parts of India, since then we haven’t continued that in fact all four of us started to go for trips individually and go out to travel with our college or office friends.
PS: Mom Dad if you ever get to read this I needed a FAM vacation badly :(
So this is it!
Thank you for bearing my narcissism!
