With the recent shutting down of MSN messenger by Microsoft, one of the collective memories of the “post-90s” has come to an end. I was never a fan of MSN messenger, so I don’t share that sadness as many of my friends do. And thinking deeply, why should we miss that? The evolution of technology decides the life of a tool. As Henry Ho has said, things cease to exist if they become obsolete. Who still uses MSN messenger nowadays?

But that’s not what I want to talk about. Instead, I want to talk about another collective memory of the post-90s — Xanga, which is also becoming obsolete, if not already.

I was never a fan of Xanga either. I coded and maintained my own site, Anzyme.com. But no matter what, personal blogs were a vogue back in the 2000s. Everyone used to have a blog, sharing bits and pieces of life. Some blogs were better than the others. For the majority of them, entries were just one or two lines of “status update” that are omnipresent in today’s Facebook. Typical examples include:

開工大吉 :) — Y.C.L.

LP at home — M.M. 31

猶豫…
還是比較喜歡現在的我 — A.W.

Those were not entries I invented. They’re quotes from real people’s Xanga site, which they have long forgotten. Another type of typical contents found on Xanga was photo updates. Both of these are now replaced by Facebook. That’s why Xanga has now become de facto obsolete.

But for a few people, like my friend Ronald, they take blogging seriously. Every entry is carefully written; sentences are beautifully crafted. They aim at spreading a certain message with their entries. Some are moments worth remembering, some are their personal excitement or sorrow. No matter what are in those entries, they become an important part of the blogger’s life, that when reviewed years or even decades later, they still make our hearts beat.

Those few people of course include me, Kevin Chan, who has maintained a blog for more than a decade. (Yes, a decade!) Serious bloggers believe in the power of words, because words are a tool to express magnificent ideas. What happens in a day or two may be too trivial to remember, but when they add up, we can see what we think in that period, and they suddenly become relevant. It is always important to live a poetic life, because only through the process of writing can we filter out the impurities in life, and find out what is truly important.

However, it’s not always easy to live a poetic life. The natural enemy of poets is stability. When one lacks excitement in life, few is worth recording. This is exactly what I’m experiencing. Even more unfortunate is that for dentists, the opposite is true. Their natural enemy is instability. From a shallow point of view, they don’t want to see unstable dentures/crowns/bridges. From a serious point of view, instability means accidents, errors, … We want to see none of them in our work.

So how do I balance my life? How can we continue to keep this site? I don’t know. But because I consider this site a collective memory of all, I’ll just keep trying, so that Anzyme.com doesn’t become another ICQ, MSN messenger, or Xanga.