#dvds. cds. tapes. records.

[graham--folger]

man i miss physical media

[y2kgr4ph1cs]

requested by @millenniumbugs

[thebonesofhoudini]

Buy physical media. Buy CDs. Buy records. Buy tapes. Buy books. Buy physical artwork or prints. Take photos of yourself and get them developed at a photo processing booth. Write your thoughts down in a journal. Why? Because as this world get more digital, what's physical will slowly but surely disappear. There will be less things you can touch and feel, and more things that you can see and not touch. You can post all the digital pics you want on social media...nothing is assured and those pics and those platforms could be gone in an instant. An album on streaming platforms will never be the same as the original album in your hand with the liner notes, as versions of that album can get removed, and/or replaced with re-recorded material (since the artist doesn't own their masters). Books go out of print. And staring at a jpeg (no matter how much you paid for it *cough cough* NFTs) of an artwork will never be the same as owning the actual artwork or a print of it.

Preserve these things. If not for yourself, then for future generations.

[seekdestr0y]

[crunchity-munchity]

I love cds. They gotta be one of the best inventions. Truly the peak of physical media

[juiceboxgoat]

Oh, your love language is physical touch?

Mine is physical media

(we are not the same)

[stardxstsleep]

I just had a tragic realization

Gen Z (me) might be the last generation to grow up with physical media

[zibaldone-di-pensieri]

Man how I miss all of these...

[0nlyangel0910]

Physical media v.s. streaming

[tapesandelectronicsclub]

Streaming services, both music and video, removing everything from their catalogs and neglecting everything is one of the best, if not, the best ad for physical media I have seen so far…

[karrolinnn]

The Internet as a place to go, rather than a place to live

Hi! This is my first post on this blog and I really hope you like it. Please share your toughts on the matter in the comments or send me a request in my Ask Me Anything, if you'd like for me to give my opinion on a related, or a different topic of your choice.

Introduction

The title of this post is not actually an original thought of mine, but a statement I came across on TikTok awhile ago. Unfortunately, I do not remember the username or any other information about the person who stated this, therefore I cannot give credit. I can only be thankful that someone finally stated this problem in modern society so precisely. Nonetheless, this statement is regarding the Internet, that used to be a place to go in the era of the 2000s up to mid 2010s, and from around 2015 up to nowadays, it has become a place to live. In this post will elaborate on that and state my opinion on the matter.

Physical media being left behind

To begin with, I believe that the reasoning behind this is the tendency of people eighter forgetting about or volunterely letting go of all means of physical media. Physical media refers to DVD and CD players, vinyl players and records, VCR players and cassette tapes and digital cameras. As all of those means of media became outdated, the majority of people gave up on them and began relying on the World Web as a sourse of movies, music and books, and on smartphones as a main device that not only allows access to the Web, but can also be used for taking photos and videos.

What we let go of along with physical media

Quaility is the first feature we let go of along with physcial media. To give an example, the sound quailty of a vinyl is often said to be the highest. Despite that, very few people are interested in purchasing vinyls and listening to them on record players. The reasoning behind this could possibly be the price - vinyls are, in fact, quite expensive. So what about CDs? Most are relatively cheap and anyone could record a CD themselves as well - that makes them even cheaper. So it must not be the price that makes people prefer smartphones for listening to music. Another example, regarding a different type of quailty, is about the visual quality of a photo taken with a digital camera, as simple as a handicam, that is once again much greater than that of one taken with a smartphone, regardless of the brand and version. And, in spite of this, it is much more likely to come across someone taking a photo at a tourist destination, where photos are meant to be of high quality, with a smartphone, rather than with a digital camera. And once again, second-hand digicams are quite cheap. So price here is not a factor. Secondly, we let go of the authentic feeling of incorporating technology into our daily lives. There is nothing that makes you, quite literally in that sense, feel the music better than holding a cd in your hands. Same goes to taking pictures with a digicam and especially reading a book and turning the paper pages. So, despite the higher quality and the authentic feeling of physical media, why people prefer smartphones?

Sacrificing quality and authenticity for the sake of multifuncinality and accessability

The access to a number of actions, that would traditionally be preformed by a few different means of physical media, and those same actions being put together in a single device, makes smartphones exactly what they are - smart. They can be used for many different purposes and are accessible almost worldwide nowadays. Despite that, their muiltifunctional nature means that a person doesn't need to get off of their smartphone almost at all - it provides them with access to a ton of music and movies, pictures of different types of art and online books. It allows the user to take photos and videos quickly and easily, calls can be made and text messages can be sent in a matter of seconds. This is the main reason why so many people volunterely let go of physical media and before they realise it - begin living their lifes online - it is easy, quick and cheap.

Involuntarily living on the Internet

Now that the reason for usage is cleared, we should ask ourselves - what does that usage lead to? Despite smartphones being easily accessible and multifunctional, they are the main reason why the Internet has consumed a huge part of so many people's lives. Relying on a single device for a number of operations, especially a device that gives access to the Internet - a virtual space - really easily causes people to forget about the place where we are meant to live and where we feel best living - physical space. Many people forget about the feeling of real life in the process of preforming so many actions online and living on the Internet becomes something that they don't even realise they are doing.

How do we go back?

There is no actual way of going back to only or mainly using physcial media. Time goes on and we cannot interfere with that. Despite that, there is one thing that should definitely be done - incorporating physical media into our lives as much as we do with smartphones, laptops and computers. Listening to music on CDs, watching movies on DVDs or Blu-Ray discs. Reading physical rather than online books. Taking a digicam with us on trips and vacations. Going to the cinema or theathre. The Internet should once again become we visit, where we can talk to our friends, watch a movie or listen to music from time to time - when we don't own that CD or when that friend lives abroad. That is what it's meant to be - a part of our lives - not where we live them.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post, please share your opinion on the matter in the comments. ^^ - karolin

[voidrots]

[i walk in wearing a tshirt that reads “i ❤️ physical media”]

[cowboyviolence]

I need to do a chore in town today which means I have an excuse to go to the thrift store and Look at the Videotapes

[iamthemovie]

thrift store things + vegas image :D

[killyertelevision]

[fozmeadows]

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?