Ahh sweet memories. Looks like it's
roughly 2.5 years since I learned of the iHub, the nostalgia of that
experience partly drove me to write this post. [Planed to title this post "My iHub story" scrapped that.]
It was my first Semester in college,
still a fresher... more like the first month of college to be exact.
Like everything that I know about tech
in Kenya and around the globe I most likely found out about it on twitter, so it
is best to start there.
Prelude [My twitter story]
The story on how I ended up being a
tweep is still as interesting as any other. I would have left it out
for later but it plays a large part in everything else that the
puzzle would not be complete without it.
During my short wait [5 months!!!
wtf??] for my KCSE results I picked up several not so socialiable
habbits, some may call them that but I call them self development traits. One of them was the ability to facebook in my sleep. I should
probably say I was mearly stalking somebody on facebook. Let you'r
imagination flurish as I let you guess the gender of my stalkee.
[it's a girl off-course]. This nasty little habbit made me go through
countless posts as I waited for dawn to brake and my stalkee would
promptly, as most idle teenager do, post “Good morning ppl” on
their wall before setting of for Lord knows what people do shortly
after their final exams... Maybe college? Not really, most people opted to
do this funny courses like ICDL immediately after finishing high school, I
didn't. I took Computer Studies in high school and I thought I'd
gorge my eyes out if anyone ever asked me - “What is a computer?”
[2mks] - ever. *gags* Plus I tend to think that I killed it in that
subject. And that case was closed sooner than I landed in high
school. My proficiency is not to be doubted. [Geek aleart!!]
As I was saying. I took this time to go
through the internet properly. Though I felt that facebook was a
bubble, no referece to the company... Facebook felt like a filter
bubble. Every morning I grew weary of my friends changing their
profiles to read stuff like. "Went to college at IAT". I mean WTF. It's
hardly a month since this nikas sat for their KNEC exams and they're
already up for more mind bashing, well good for them. I found it
perfectly fine to lie in bed and spy on them, on facebook.
#np Vega Choir - Creep
[There is a reason I'm not doing this
on my computer... I didn't want to touch a computer again after
some mental scars I got from my high
school expreinse. I might find the courage to talk about one day.]
My freedom from the toxic facebook
filter bubble started when one of my more insightful friends posted
about twitter on his wall. We were CS students back in high school
and I really looked up to this guy for knowing what's hot in tech and
what's not... so I hoped on
the twitter band wagon. I already had an account so I simply followed
my very influencial friend and that was it.... not quite.
For a moment twitter never occurred to me as
anything more than an extension of fb. I saw no use of it after my
first day on the site, then everything changed when I learned how to
use it.
I had “LIKED” a very socialy active
TV repoter named Larry Madowo. The guy covered this new phenom that
people call tech and he even introduced me to new lingo like “Tech
junkie” which I quickly stole and used to update my twitter bio. I
wouldn't put tech junkie on my facebook profile, I know my friends to
be... ummm... moving on.
As Larry's feed came coming in I
noticed something, he posted a link to his twitter profile. The guy
had become less active on facebook and this broght me to wonder
whether it had anything to do with this new phenom called twitter...
Yes I could notice such changes in update trends across my whole
facebook profile. Did I mention I was stalking someone? Well that
someone turned out to be everyone! I was hungry for information and I
just didn't feel like my 260 friends at the time were satisfing this
thirst.
On twitter I was shocked at how active
people were, I mean my facebook newsfeed looked like a monthly
periodical compared to the speed at which my twitter stream was
moving. I can attest this to following my highschool friend MartinNgoro. [The guy did 50+ tweets per day. wth!]
Soon I discovered the internet. It was not
anywhere like I experienced it on facebook. People on twitter were
different. They shared information about anything, not just about
their lives. Links could be seen in every other tweet. Humour even. I found this
too awesome to pass up.
Soon I was tweeting... a lot.
I found out that I really loved to
tweet at night. The timeline was slow and the excitement brought
about by the large number of tweeps I had followed had died down.
Twitter was and is a very stimulating place to be and I love it. Soon
my hidden love for writing sprung and I ended up gaining followers
and following even more people... But what twitter really gave me was
the realisation that there were Kenyan content producers active on
the platform.
Through twitter I stumbled across a
tweep. Unlike everybody who joins twitter nowadays, I knew this tweep
was a girl form the get go. @savvykenya... everything changed form
then on. Right when I discovered her blog I couldn't believe how
entranced I was with her writing. Tales from university [jkuat] her
work experiences, which I later found out was an internships. Her
proficiency in posting was outstanding. I kept wondering “Wow, it's
one person that wrote all this...”
I was amazed. I had read every one of
my friends notes on facebook, including those cheesy lil Wayne lyrics
my buddy Martin Ngoro used to post (thank god facebook deleted them
lol). But nothing could even come close to what I was seening here. I
fell in love with blogs right then.
With a blog addiction brewing, I had to
find more of this stuff. Soon enough I was head over heels on
Wamathai's blog, Cdooh's blog, @WhiteAfrican's blog, Chiira's blog...
OMG I was reading every Kenyan blog! I read through a large number of
posts that were written by African writters. This was too good to be
true. I kept telling myself. Luckily I had time to burn, phone credit
too. Looking at the large collection of YU scratch cards I had amased
I quickly knew that this kind of habbit is only seen by junkies and
junkies alone.
After going through the entire archieve
of THE DIARY OF A KENYAN CAMPUS GIRL which btw I think I read so much while haburing a more than slight
wish of being admited to that university. Come to think of it. Savvy
seemed to lead the life that I scilently wanted. Computer Science
undergrad. Seemed social. I knew she was a geek and she liked Harry
Potter and listening to rock(!!!) I have two words for this. ROLE
MODEL.
That's when I stared defining why I was
on twitter. I wanted to learn form the obviously more experienced
more informed and elite flock that I had found myself in the midist
of. To do this I picked three people who would be my focus group.
This were the criteria on how I picked the three.
- All must be or have gone through University. [I had plans of not going to college... yeah you read it.]
- All must be active on twitter. [How else would I get info?]
- All must have active blogs. [Obvious, I like bloggers]
- All must have something incommon with me. [Harry Potter anyone?]
- All must follow me on twitter. [mutual follows]
I already had this people in mind. To
make this more interesting I made an oath. If the three of them
unfollowed me on twitter, I would deactivate my accout. Totally re-evaluate my life. This three would form that time be my rolemodels aka focus group.
Something like GPS triangulation system. Three setlites to know where
you are and hopefully where you're headed. Weird, huh? Simply: It makes sense to learn from other people's mistakes and/or successes. Still weird... okaaay.
[Just so you know one of them
unfollowed me already. Two more strikes and my online social life
would take a hit.]
Needless to say one of them is
@savvykenya. The other two shall remain unnamed... It's like Voldemort
talking about his Horcruxes :-P. [I have 7 btw lol]
Phew. Now what does all this have to do
with the my tech career or even the iHub???
That will come in later. Part 2. Maybe
