Incase you missed it, the Steemit Blockchain Memory Project was launched last week and am excited about the comments and posts that are being generated.

A huge THANK YOU to all who have participated thus far!

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Our individual human perception, the lens which filters our interpretation of events before they’re solidified as memories, is vastly subjective. This why I believe that sharing our memories with others and others deeply contemplating them is so valuable. Hearing and trying to understand another person’s experience and point of view can afford us the opportunity to reach a deeper and richer understanding of our place in the world. In some circumstances it can bring us closer to the truth than we were before.

Life for me began at 5:22am on June 18, 1971 at Doctor’s North hospital in Columbus, Ohio. I’m lucky enough to have a continuous string of fairly vivid memories of childhood and some fractured ones stretching back as young as two years old. I was lucky to have been born into an intact lower middle class family. My father was a welder by trade, my mom stayed home to raise my brother and I.

Before my brother was born, when I was three and a half years old, my mother would read to me in the afternoons. I can remember looking forward to that quiet time, she was animated and her voice carried an abundance of inflection as she read. Danny and the Dinosaur and anything by Dr. Suess were always my favorites. I also remember the precise moment I learned to read at age four, I opened up If I Ran the Circus by Dr. Suess, just “got it” and read the book entirely on my own.

The afternoon that I learned to read I remember being elated, empowered, and felt like a whole new world was unlocked.

The very couch I learned to read on. This was taken years later after my brother was born. That's me on the far left sporting my favorite Sesame Street shirt.

As I take a deep dive into my memory banks, the one takeaway I have from my childhood is the world was a vastly different place in some important ways. The most profound difference between life then and now is the proliferation of computers and mobile devices. Up until the widespread use of smartphones people gave their undivided attention when in one another’s company without glancing at their devices every few minutes.

Total attention from the person I’m communicating with is probably the one thing I miss the most in our modern world. When I was a boy it was considered rude to even look at your watch when you were speaking with someone.

Short of a total collapse of civilization or some Luddite backlash I can’t see us ever going back. The mobile phone will likely soon evolve to a combination of wearables and AR/VR glasses but, sadly, our attention will be forever fractured.

I hope you enjoyed these memories, there are lots more to come!

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Steemit Blockchain Memory Project Rules of Engagement

• Share any significant memory you’d like to. Think about things that have shaped who you are or may be unique in some way. Think about memories you’d like your great-great-grandchildren to read about....now write posts about these memories in your Steemit blog.
• Use proper tags (see below)
• Share a link to this post in all of your Blockchain Memory Project posts so others can find the rules.
• Share your posts with your friends and family on external social media outlets (optional but encouraged).

Tag Suggestions

We want your memories to live on forever. We also want those memories to be searchable by those who might be looking for them in the future.

For this reason, I suggest the following tags for your first four - “Story Life Blog BlockchainMemoryProject”.

Your last tag should be very specific to what you’re writing about in your post, something that will help people who are searching for it on the internet.

I'll be sharing memories of my own along the way.

Prizes

Each month I will comb through the posts tagged with “BlockchainMemoryProject” and choose my favorites. The post owners will receive a surprise in their wallets...a portion of a monthly prize of 10 Steem! Note: all rules of engagement must be followed for your post to qualify.

As always, I thank you for reading.

Yours in the Chain,

Eric

Please follow our official Steemit account for the film series @hardfork-series. Did you miss our last post? If so CLICK HERE to read it!

*I am an American novelist, poet, traveler, and crypto-enthusiast. If you’ve enjoyed my work please sign up for my author newsletter at my website. Newsletter subscribers will receive exclusive updates and special offers and your information will never be sold or shared.
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