Buying Amazon’s new Kindle was an interesting transition for me. I have always been passionate about physical collections. I started out collecting comics and Games Workshop figures as a youth. Later in life it was records for DJing and books. A full bookcase or room of milk crates packed with vinyl is a thing of beauty. Like the rest of the 21st century I am slowly making transitions towards new mediums for these items. There wasn’t a specific defining event which instigated this and the transition will never be 100% (Which is why record companies are so wrong when they assume the digital downloader isn’t also buying hard-copies). This is why beautiful album art and companies like McSweeney’s will always have a place on my bookshelf.
It is the uniqueness and ambiance that physical items have. You remember when and where you bought that music album by looking at the jewel case. Or maybe you can’t quite remember, but you still romanticize about it. “Yah, I got Nirvana album the day it came out!” Perhaps you can even remember where you purchased a particularly old and faded book or that good friend who lent it to you then moved to the other side of the country and never got it back. It is the same way with photos. Those old, grainy, washed-out pictures from the 1970’s look like the 1970’s! Super 8 videos look…well dated.
Not as much in the digital age. As I begin to capture high-definition video (I can barely believe HD camcorders are a consumer product) of my new-born daughter, and fill up my hard drive with digital pictures, I wonder if she will be able to visually “date” them when she is older? And I am not talking about dating via the subject of the photo. Will she have the experience I had of going through my Mom’s scrapbook of poorly taken strangely-contrast Polaroid’s where it’s hard to make out if the photo is me or my brother? What is the digital version of the yellowing borders around an old photo, or the grainy image and artifacting on a VHS tape? Does an external hard drive with a hand made sticker saying “Baby’s First Year” emit any sort of nostalgia?
There is beauty to things that physically age. Are we loosing this in a digital age? Once video and photograph resolution exceeds human ability to discern between real and captured, will everyone’s life be perfectly preserved for all eternity just as if the images were taken the day before?
Oh and the Kindle... yes I love it. It has lightened my bag by at least 1-2 pounds and I already have three more books queued to read. Maybe it is the engineer in me, but I am still excited to see what the next new compact, greener, easier to manage digital tool gets invented for me to buy.
