Getting physical
The end of DVDs? Not so fast ... I hope.
Back in the 1980s, my family would spend every Christmas with my grandparents in the South Australian seaside town of Victor Harbor. After decades working their fruit farm, my mum’s parents had retired to Victor and it became a tradition to make a late afternoon visit to one of the town’s two video rental stores to figure out what the extended family would watch that evening.
Actually, there was no real choice. My grandfather was wedded to his Betamax VCR, and one store had a significantly larger range of Beta rentals. Yet every year, the number of Beta tapes shrunk and shrunk, while the VHS section grew—a triumph of scale over quality (my grandfather wasn’t misguided—Beta was superior, which is why television networks around the world stuck with it for years after the consumer market went full VHS).
In the end, of course, neither survived. DVDs appeared in 1996 and quickly killed them both, for good reason: the picture and sound quality were fantastic and (this is critical) you no longer had to worry about being fined for not rewinding the tape. In fact, one of the crazy joys of the early days of DVDs was the ability to jump instantly to any scene in a movie. It felt … spooky, like humans had triumphed over time itself.
It was also a harbinger of doom.
Within a nanosecond of DVDs appearing, the act of rewinding a video cassette just seemed excruciating—how long is this going to take? Same with CDs. I used my very first paycheck in December 1989 to buy a Sony Discman and there was no way in hell I was ever again going to endure the sheer torture of rewinding an audio cassette.
It’s amazing how quickly our behavior adapts to these technological shifts. Yet I was reminded of the old days twice in the past month. First, Best Buy announced its stores would stop selling physical DVDs and Blu-rays. While I fleetingly thought “Best Buy still sells DVDs?”, I was depressed by the news for reasons I’ll explain in a sec. The second time was when I was trying to figure out what to do with my DVD collection. It had been years since I looked at or played any of the discs in the carefully curated albums in which I kept them (I long ago ditched the cases), yet I just couldn’t bear to get rid of them. And it wasn’t the thought of how much I’d invested in the 400-odd movies and TV shows I have on DVD, but the act of physically parting with them and what that would mean.
My seven-year-old regularly emits a intense howl that has me run from another room, wondering if he’s lost a limb or woken in a bathtub of ice, the victim of an organ harvesting syndicate. The drama? An ad has interrupted whatever show he’s watching. This is usually followed by me explaining how lucky he is to watch whatever he wants on demand, with a lecture on “when I was a kid, we had four channels to watch and cartoons only aired once a week, on Saturday morning.”
Of course, he doesn’t know any different. But I do. And while I’m grateful for and slightly amazed by the ability to watch or listen to pretty much anything at any time, I worry I’ve been so focused on what I’d gained (all that extra time to … waste more time) that I didn’t think too much about what I’d lost.
When CDs landed, gone were the days of hovering over my boombox to push “record” with cat-like reflexes when a song I liked hit the airwaves and then carefully transferring it (with the no-doubt abbreviated intro and DJ commentary at the tail end) to another cassette as I curated my mixtapes. Was it frustrating and laborious? Absolutely. But it was a labor of love, not just tapping “add to playlist.” And it forced me to think carefully about what to include and exclude, and the precise order of songs to elicit a certain emotional response.
As an example of critical thinking, curating a mixtape probably isn’t that great. But my wider concern is how technology degrades critical thinking more generally, at a time when it seems more important than ever. People in this country are banning books because they incapable of critical thinking (or, more precisely, they’re afraid of it), and we’re on the verge of being flooded with AI-generated fake news, fake video, fake art, fake music, fake literature, and who knows what else. I’m not suggesting critical thinking can always detect what’s real and not, but it surely helps if you can put something into broader context and make an independent determination.
I guess that’s why the DVD news was a canary in my mental coal mine. Physical objects force us to slow down. There’s something tangible about selecting a DVD and putting it in a player. You’re thinking about the mood you’re in and what you want, but your options are limited to what you have. It’s an act of commitment to insert the disc and flop on the sofa, precisely because who wants to get back up, eject the disc, pick something else, put it in the player, and go back to the sofa? Picking a movie at home is a serious business and it was even more so at the video store, where the hottest movie was usually unavailable (“we have five copies, and they’re all rented”) and you’re not just heading to the sofa, but to the car to drive home and the store closes at 9pm and then you’re really stuck with whatever you have. I can’t recall a time, for instance, when we didn’t finish a movie, no matter how awful it was. You committed, man!
Similarly, playing music on vinyl inclines you to actually listen to more than a song at a time. Albums are mixtapes curated by the artist: songs are placed in a very particular order for very particular reasons known only to the musician(s). I mean, if I was cherry picking songs on Spotify rather than listening night after night to the full album of Sting’s The Soul Cages back in 1991, would I have even noticed he whispers at the end of the final track, “Goodnight”? OK, maybe that’s too much insight into my 18-year-old psyche.
It’s easy to dismiss concerns about technology by labeling someone a Luddite or sentimental or whatever. And, on balance, the benefits of technology absolutely outweigh the costs (although social media makes that equation iffier by the day). But that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t consider what we’re losing against what we’re gaining, both as adults and for our kids who are being issued iPads in first grade.
Thankfully, there are encouraging signs: after the vinyl revival, a CD resurgence is under way, with sales in the US last year increasing for the first time since 2004 (it’s no coincidence Apple’s iTunes Store opened in 2003). Heck, demand for nostalgia even saw the New York Times today declare LA Law is being rediscovered. Is a DVD renaissance inevitable? I hope so, and not because I’m sitting on 400 of them. I’m just becoming one of those people who views it as positive when something—anything—forces us to slow down and think, rather than mindlessly consume.*
* I fully accept the hypocrisy here given I just got sucked into a Hallmark Channel shocker.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.