Digital Life

The future is here.

It's digital.

Over the next few years we will all increasingly be living digital lives.

Online dating, social networking, music streaming, email forwarding, video embedding, is the not so new language of today's world.

In turn our current technological advancements have empowered us to dramatically increase our creative output and the number of people that we can share it with. But it also gives us the opportunity to become better organized, eliminate clutter, and to drastically reduce the amount of waste we produce, therefore helping the environment.

Personally I find that the better organized I am the more effective I become in every area of my life. This includes my creativity.

If you're looking to take your artistic career to the next level, you may want to think outside of the box and adopt some of these ideas to help you streamline your lifestyle, get rid of clutter, save money, and inspire your imagination:

The Roku is a device that allows you to access Netflix and instantly watch movies and TV shows (over 12,000) from your living room television. You will never have to rent or buy another DVD again. (Movies not available in the 'Watch Instantly' section can simply be ordered via Netflix's mail service).

The Kindle gives you instant access to over 190,000 thousand books, anywhere at anytime. It also has a wide selection of newspapers, magazines, and blogs to choose from, not to mention free access to Wikipedia. It was created by Amazon, and is without a doubt the future of books. The best part about it is that every book you ever purchase is maintained for you by Amazon in a cloud. Bookshelves are now a thing of the past.

iTunes is well known, but recently I uploaded my entire CD collection to iTunes thus eliminating boxes and boxes of CD's saving myself space and ensuring that I would have the music safe and secure as digital files. Coverflow (a function in iTunes) helps in reproducing if not surpassing the feeling of album ownership and of enjoying the artistic image associated with albums.

The latest thing I have been doing is moving all of my pictures to Shutterfly, where I can store a limitless amount of pictures and create digital photo albums which can be shared through webpages that Shutterfly provides. Once I have completed the scanning of all of my pictures, the elimination of my 15 to 20 photo albums will save me additional space and ensure that my pictures are intact for posterity.

Please rememer to back up your digital life to an external hard drive which you can keep neatly hidden away in your closet.

Wishing you continued success!

Cristopolis Dieguez
latinohiphop.org
cristopolis.com