From Korea to Colombia: an illustration of my cell phones

When I was a child, my family had an old fashioned rotary phone connected to the wall by a curly cord. The numbers were arranged in a circle, and in order to call someone, you had to spin each one to a fixed stop position. I can still picture my mother, with her post-eighties perm, hurriedly twisting the circular dial pad, winding a haphazard melody. Not until tenth grade did I first use a cell phone. It wasn’t mine. It was an extra phone from my dad’s work–a chunky Nokia, much like the phone I’m using today. I got my own phone a month before I started college. In 2011, when I moved back to Seoul to start my first full-time job, I decided to buy a smartphone. It happened on a whim. I was accompanying a co-worker on a mission to buy an iphone. When I looked at the rows of fancy gadgets and thought about the monthly salary in my new Shinhan bank account, I said to myself, what the hell. I became slightly obsessed with my phone, as most novice smartphone and iphone users are. I would check my Facebook constantly, take tons of photos, use Instagram, chat with friends on KakaoTalk, check my blog stats, […]