The mothballing of traditional media—when digital strikes
A couple of days ago, Josh Marshall’s article about his Kindle on Talking Points Memo got me thinking. He relates how on experiencing the device, he surprisingly got sucked into using it, which was subsequently followed by a dark epiphany:
“In our living room we have two big inset shelves where I keep all the books I feel like I need or want ready at hand. And last night, sitting in front of them, I had this dark epiphany. How much longer are these things going to be around? Not my books, though maybe them too. But just books. Physical, paper books. The few hundred or so I was looking at suddenly seemed like they were taking up an awful lot of space, like the whole business could dealt with a lot more cleanly and efficiently, if at some moral loss.”
This is the kind of statement I’d have scoffed at a few years ago, but we do seem to be rampaging ever onwards into a digital-only future regarding media. Newspapers are struggling, being replaced by online equivalents. The CD is clearly on its last legs, about to be obliterated by digital formats for all but those in the niche space. And although video has resisted this transition, things are on the move, and it’s clear that a combination of bandwidth and storage issues is the only thing holding this particular shift back.
And so, wither books? Almost certainly, and largely for convenience. As living spaces get smaller and the amount of crap we own grows, space is at a premium. Although I’m a staunch buyer of CDs, I almost never play them, instead ripping them to a Mac and playing the music back via iPods and amps. I keep threatening to put our CDs in the loft, but at that point, why bother even buying new CDs in the first place? (And, yes, I’m fully aware that online music purchases are generally in compressed format, but for the most part the formats are now in a decent enough quality that I can’t tell the difference, and most music is mixed so poorly and compressed so heavily that it makes no odds anyway.)
The danger, of course, is in terms of longevity. In moving from physical product to digital-only, we’re in danger of creating very temporary history. Already, people are finding that digitally printed photos often fade frighteningly quickly, massively at odds with faded but still perfectly visible black and white photos from the early portion of the last century. And digital file formats rapidly change and evolve. JPEG and MP3 may be dominant today, but what about in ten years? What about in 100? Are we rapidly moving towards a time where everything we create will be potentially lost within a few generations, all in the name of convenience?
Maybe we are from the last generation who will cling to that physical need to “possess” something for our purchase, a physical manifestation that we bought the product? I still prefer buying a CD to downloading. I collect computer games and where possible I buy them boxed – because the WHOLE product is the whole product, in my eyes.
I think you’re probably right. I’m also rather worried about the incoming generation (current teens) that have an expectation that all media should be free. ‘Open’ software is a lovely goal in some senses, but you only get the best and most consistent work out of people when they’re paid. The same goes for media, be it music, journalism, video, etc. (That’s not to say free stuff is always rubbish, because it isn’t. However, if I was paid for this blog, for example, people would be getting several updates per day that have as much attention paid to them as my mag articles, rather than something on here whenever I have ‘spare’ time.)