Though most of my recent thought has been turned towards the future of the Internet, much inspired by Kevin Kelly's TED talk called "The Next 5,000 Days of the Web, it's impossible to focus on that without some reminiscence about the past. Not only have I been thinking about the last 5,000 days of the web, but also the last 5,000 days before the web, which seems like a completely different world from the one we inhabit today, let alone tomorrow.
Another thing that brought this all to mind was a recent article in the New York Times, entitled "Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes," which told the story of a recent funeral held at an audiobook publisher's offices for the good old analog cassette," that ubiquitous friend of the 80's and early 90's. Audio tapes never offered the sound quality of either the phonograph records which proceeded them or the Compact Discs that followed them, but they had some endearing qualities worth remembering. Before the cassette, there wasn't much in the way of portable and personal music for the car, though that is admittedly before my time. In my early driving years, we mostly had tapes in the car, and CDs at home. Car CD players existed, but were out of my range. Tapes were cheap; when the CD came out the price of new music purchases doubled, if you chose the new format. Quality was appreciably better, and the skip track function was a marvel, but there were downsides, too. Along with the ability to skip from track to track came the tendancy to skip at the tiniest scratch or stain. For that reason the CD was never really ideal for the car, since it's hard to handle them with the gingerness required, while driving the car. They landed on the passenger seat, found their way to the floor, and then the underside of the passenger seat, possibly rendering our favorite track unplayable. It was never the crappy track that got destroyed by a scratch. The tapes had an amazing feature, which was that they still played after rolling around under the passenger seat for a week, possibly somewhat degraded, but they didn’t get stuck in a skip and refuse to play on.
We also could not copy CDs, at least not onto other CDs. This probably had as much to do with the price of them as anything. For the music industry, it was a return to the secure intellectual property model of the phonograph record. We did, of course, copy them onto tapes, and by the mid 90s I hardly saw any new tapes, just copious copies.
The mix tape was an art form, and a long labor of love, even if mixing a tape from a stack of CDs was somewhat less labor intensive than mixing them from other tapes. Some people have waxed poetic that a mix CD is just not the same, especially the ones which pass so freely in many relationships, since one can just throw it together in iTunes and burn it. It simply lacked the hours of effort and dedication to properly symbolize the love the old mix-tape conveyed.
If I can shed a tear for some of the finer qualities of the cassette, no such love is lost for the card file at the library. Though some librarians may remember them with fondness, the rows and rows of sliding drawers filled with index cards are hard to miss, in light of the sleek efficiency of the computers used to search the local library, and additional, all the other ones available through inter-library loan. The web will, however, have to tear the actual paper books out of my cold, dead hand. Finding a book through the web is one thing, reading a book through these devices is another entirely. Then again, I haven’t tried the Kindle, supposed to be an eBook without all the pain and discomfort, and I may find that while I miss books in a poetic sense of antiquity and charm, that they are eventually better replaced by these new electronic paper devices, once they reach a certain level of ubiquity and the bulk of our paper resources are available for immediate download.
As a writer, I still have two typewriters, and use them to this day. There is something linear and fluid about these undistracting, simple machines. The computer always threatens to lure me away from the task at hand with some internet surfing, or a quick came of mah-jongg, or a thousand other opportunities to task switch and waste time.
One thing I will never miss is the time we spent sitting around the house, waiting for a phone call. The cell phone can be a truly liberating device, if you can teach yourself how to manage it. For more people than not, it seems like it’s as much a strangling leash as a source of freedom, but I try not to let my contacts expect immediate responses and answers all the time. Though the always connected nature was initially alluring, I have become a big fan of silent mode, and use my phone more as a voicemail I keep in my pocket and can respond to from anywhere, at liberty; I will not however lose my wandering time to the thing.
All things being said (for now), it is hard to miss too much about the analog world, but some of its alluring advantages should not be forgotten as we hurtle forward into the new world of amazing access to information, and each other, but also a world that moves at light speed, leaves little space for the accidental free time borne of waiting but probably essential to our sanity, and the alone time that can be completely lost in the web of facebook, text messages, e-mails, and phone calls.
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