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I was recently rummaging through some stuff in my home, cleaning stuff out. When I found something that really got me thinking: My dads old music CD collection. It was an odd look into my dads childhood, even stranger he listened to a ton of the music I listen to nowadays. I guess what made it especially memorable is that it was a window into my dad in his youth, about the same age as me. There's something about those the same age as you, like naturally your united by your experiences (or lack of it). You never really get that feeling with your parents, because its physically impossible to be united by age. So its the weirdest thing to see even a glance of that part of them.
This got me thinking: will my (theoretical) children ever experience the same? After all, what I'm looking at now is technology that has fallen completely out of use in the past 10 years. In my short lifespan I witnessed Disks being the primary data holder for media, being completely replaced with streaming services and "the cloud". I'm leaving no physical affect on the world for those after me to actually see. What are they going to do, lookup my old spotify profile? The best they'll probably get is looking at this damn blog, they won't see the music I listen to, or the shows or movies I watched. My entire footprint on life in this modern age is 70% online, mercy not to myself or nature, but to the companies we give so much power.
In many ways this is sad, the decline of physical media has had what I believe to be a negative affect on our society for the sake of convenience, money, and power. No longer do we really have control of even what makes us most human: art. No longer does the average consumer own their media, instead we simply consume it and take a slap to the face when big streaming companies want more power, bigger numbers on their spreadsheets, or when they just feel like it.
This is a short one, I want to say more but there isn't much more I can without doing like a ton of research, and I don't want to just write essays in my already limited free time. So I guess
Thank you for reading,
- ARJester
(PS. in the 0.1% chance a future Jester is reading this, you can find my spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/user/31w3uzdjwbr5ivrascy4bw2ij6eq My favorite Artist is a 90's rap group named De La Soul, and although I don't have any CD's of them, I hope you can see a small peak of my youth years in listening to some of their music, like I have my father's)
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strawberrywafer
Super true honestly, like I personally started cd collecting a few years ago , but it kinda makes me sad the average person would probably think of physical media as "old obsolete junk that clutters your house"
Like I decided to see my parents old cd collection a few years ago AND DANG IT WAS A GOLDMINE, first of all there was a ton of PPOP (because they're from the philippines duhhh)
But my mom had a BUNCH of stuff like lady gaga, destiny's child, mariah carey, whitney houston, usher, michael jackson, boyzone, etc.
my dad also had stuff like eric clapton, bamboo, the smashing pumpkins, and stuff from random local bands.
And to think this all would've ended up at a local thrift store or a landfill if I didn't claim it...
My parents also told me stuff about what records and cassettes they had growing up and eventually threw out, AND DANG IF I WERE ALIVE BACK THEN I WOULD BE TAKING ALL THAT STUFF IMMEDIATELY
Kit
It's such a weird feeling to think about how little impact our lives can leave in the modern digital age, even if it feels so solid in the moment. I literally had a similar experience a bit ago looking through my dad's CD mixes from his college DJ days (he had some weird mixes lol) and realizing that like. I won't leave a lot of physical remnants. Like, the literature magazine I wrote for two years ago moved websites, and my column was totally erased from the web. Honestly, the column was a bit embarrassing, but I got a friend out of it! And now the only copy is on my google drive (which barely counts as a "copy"). And the kicker? One of my articles was literally about how corporations control everyone's intellectual property on the internet! Sigh. Long response to a blog post but I totally get what you mean. I think in this day and age, you've really got to be thoughtful and work to preserve the remnants of your life. Slowly trying to add to my physical media collection to fight for this, even if it's not really "convenient".