Is there something wrong with digital media? No. Or, well, maybe we could still improve compression methods, or make playback more universally robust. Hell, maybe there are ninety-nine problems with digital media, but those problems do not concern our physical world. I’m not here to talk about digital media—which works just fine. You’re the one trying to talk about digital media. There is no equivalence between physical media and digital media, so when I plead about physical media, stop asking, “Is there something wrong with digital media?” They serve entirely different purposes!
Let me begin again. Don’t interrupt this time.
We had VHS tapes, cassettes, vinyls, CDs, DVDs, BluRay discs. Everything came and went so damn fast. What did we even end up settling on in this rapid series of innovation? Surely, something magical. Surely, media that broke all barriers to accessibility, portability, and quality?
Didn’t I tell you not to interrupt? Are you daft? Digital media are, again, not the answer to these questions. Oh, you think they are, ‘in some sense,’ do you? Do you think we should stop printing books? Do you think all books belong in your rectangular swiz-army slot machine? No? That’s different? Think about why you think that is while I continue.
Let’s remember what we actually did with physical media. We listened to music. We watched movies, and played games. We do those things today without them, but we did more than consume the contents of physical media. We collected them; we owned them. Forever. We shared them—made simpler on account of owning them. Underscore this. Sharing was simple. Only one way to do it, really: Get it into the hands of the recipient. Why are we told to shut up and expected to underscore this?
In contrast to digital media, which you are strangely obsessed with, you cannot always share the music or movie you have enjoyed. Want to share an audio-book you loved listening to via Spotify? Well, if your friend lacks a subscription, a link does them no good. Listening to music is currently free on Spotify, if you can tolerate ads and limited features, but how long until those links send your friends to another paywall? What if Spotify decides or is forced to discontinue their services in any or all capacities? Netflix among other film-streaming services have already tried cracking down on account-sharing. Some have introduced ads into their paid subscription plans. You are paying for conditional access to someone else’s computer containing an ever-changing assortment of files you might want. This may be useful, and something which we want, given that the service feels fair, but it is not the same.
Physical and digital media can co-exist, for fuck’s sake! My gripe is that we stopped innovating on physical media. Why is there no physical medium that our phone can simply read and showcase? I can plug in a USB-C stick into my phone and transfer the data, sure. However, when I feed a DVD into a DVD player, the content just starts right up! Why can’t I get that kind of experience? Nobody seems to care enough to make it.
Editor's note:
"We got what we wanted," (Convenient, portable, accessible digital media,) "but abandoned what we had," (physical representations of the art we love, that we can hold in our very two hands or share. Important social and cultural phenomena were lost alongside the loss of physical media. We lost development, playback devices, and content.)
Abandoning physical media upon the invention of digital media is like abandoning milk the moment we invented butter. That makes no sense, even if you *did* spread them both on bread. THEY ARE DIFFERENT THINGS. (Find better metaphor?)
Could you recount every book you’ve ever read, every movie, or every game? Could you recount half of them, or a tenth? Could you recall two TikToks that had a profound impact on you, or two Instagram Reels that you’ve saved to a collection? What were they about? Who made them? Where were you when you first saw them?
One of my greatest anxieties is forgetting the things which I love, the things which have made me the way I am, and the things which inspire me to keep going. The famous linguist Adam Aleksic keeps a [[Happiness Wall]], a sort of wallpaper made up of gratitude spread across hundreds of sticky notes. Russell Barkley, lifelong Ph.D researcher on ADHD, emphasises time and time again that for those with ADHD, external stimulation is key for self-motivation; Sticky notes as reminders, posted where the reminder is relevant, a living person working in parallell next to you, or a physical, real timer which visualises the passage of time beyond numbers.
To what extent is digitalising our systems and media making us forgetful?