Growing up in the early 2010's in Ecuador (media/tech-related)

This is a photo of me taken sometime in 2012. I was born in '04 so i was about 7 or 8 years old in this picture. I love this photo because it encapsulates what it was like growing up in Ecuador during that time. Most people were a little behind when it came to tech compared to the first world countries, so in 2012 you were still seeing a lot of people with CRT TVs running in analog signals (i had cable tho, and most local channels didn't have HD back then), kids playing on their PS2 and of course, that beauty i had for computer. That PC was actually almost as old as i was, but we had it for a long time until eventually it broke down in 2013. It had Windows XP and everything, although we also had a laptop with Windows 7 running. Also, having an iPhone or something like that was really a luxury. My mom used to have Samsung cellphones with keys.

I had a kind of hybrid childhood because of that. I grew up with a lot of media that was kinda before my time. I grew up playing Super Nintendo (although what was really old even for us, most kids i knew didn't have it), PlayStation 2 (this was common as hell) and old PC games like VirtuaCop 2 and several flash games. Had my DVD's for every movie i wanted to watch (or ilegally downloaded using Ares, lol). Still played with tons of toys and went outside. While also being in some social media, i used YouTube a lot and Facebook was THE trend among the teenagers (i have an older sister so i know, lol).

It was like being in the 2000's but with a little of the 2010's hinted in and i think a lot of ecuadorian kids from my generation can relate. I mean, we were dancing to stuff like LMFAO and Gangnam Style. The girls were screaming for One Direction and Justin Bieber. I also remember seeing the first Avengers movie in the theaters that year. Lol.

This began to change really quickly around 2013. That was when we were getting "up-to-date" and a lot of people were updating their tech and buying new stuff. And funnily enough, in 2013 i started to use the Internet more than ever, before that it used to be something to kill time in the weekends for me, but i'm gonna talk about that transitional period in another post.

Man, i miss those times.