I love the DVD — the clarity of the image, the supplemental materials, and even the physical object itself. It’s such an elegant thing, a small, shiny silver disc that costs relatively little and takes takes up minimal space on my sagging, overloaded bookshelves. Even so, I was a late adopter of the format, and I haven’t entirely given up watching my old videotapes, either. My reasons for this insanely masochistic behavior are largely economic. You see, I have a huge financial investment in the outmoded VHS format, and I just can’t bring myself to flush all that money down the toilet just because there’s something better on the market, at least not all at once. I’m also philosophically opposed to our society’s wasteful paradigm of planned obsolescence and throw-it-all-away-for-the-latest-and-greatest consumerism; even though I always give in eventually, I hold out as long as I can before I upgrade. So, curmudgeon that I am, I keep on watching those inferior, deteriorating cassettes. But I also have to admit I’ve also got a kind of sneaky nostalgia for VHS tapes, especially the ones I recorded myself. I don’t think younger folks, who have been awash in home entertainment of increasing quality since they were born, fully understand what it was like to be able to bring home a movie or record something off TV for the first time ever, or why someone would still want to look at one of those horrible, lo-rez anachronisms today when there are so many flashier alternatives.
For the kids in the audience, Lileks explains:
I banished videotapes a few years ago, and [watching them again] instantly reminded me why: it’s a horrible format, at least by modern standards. (Hah! VHS tapes are now pre-modern.) You wait and you wait. You wait for the tape to get comfy; you wait for it to spin up. When you fast forward there’s an UNBEARABLE pause of perhaps one or two seconds while the machinery attempts to process your command. You always overshoot. You can never tell where you are in the tape – the counter resets to zero when the tape’s put in, regardless of the actual position.
But oh, how modern it was. How remarkable. The ability to record a TV show and watch it at the time of your choosing changed everything. Now you could go out on the weekend, strike out at a bar, AND have Miami Vice waiting when you got home. Of course it led to piles of slickery ugly black videotapes, unlabelled, cluttering up the house. It lead to dark despair when you learned you had taped over something you’d meant to save. It meant buying a brick of tapes every other week — a fresh tape! Highest Sony quality! Man, I’m going to see every one of those 200 lines of resolution tonight. The picture has degraded on the tapes, of course, but not much; it was never that good to start with. But we were used to seeing the world through a glob of Vaseline. It was a tiny price to pay for fast-forwarding through the commercials.
So what am I doing now? Fast-forwarding through the shows, and recording the commercials.
Ah, yes, the commercials… commercials from the ’80s are sometimes more entertaining — or at least more evocative — than the programs they interrupted.
This is funny, Jason. It’s not that you have resisted buying a DVD player, it’s that you have one and you still insist on watching those VHS tapes. Let yourself off the hook, man! You’re enough of a movie buff that you can look down your nose at VHS. Of course, I think downloadable movies will eventually make even DVD players obsolete, the way legal music downloads like iTunes are making CDs obsolete.
Having said that, I will be the first to throw a major public tantrum when the book market takes a similar turn in a major way. So far no one has created a workable interface for reading digital books, but you know they’re working on it. Some things are sacred, man. I say this as I lug thousands of pounds of books around the apartment to redo my home office.
I think you either misunderstood or I didn’t do a very good job of expressing myself, Robert – I do look down my nose at the VHS format. I’d be a fool not to, as tapes are obviously inferior. But I’ve got so much money tied up in them that it would bankrupt me to upgrade everything to DVD. I have replaced quite a few of my movies, but it takes time, and some things I probably won’t ever get around to buying again for various reasons; VHS quality, while poor, is good enough for those things. Also, the stuff I recorded myself years ago is kind of a little time capsule; as shitty as they look, I still enjoy those tapes because they preserve a lot of the essence of the ’80s, both in content and quality. VHS was what we had, man, and we thought it was pretty damn cool. Maybe someday these old tapes will be a collectible curiosity like phonograph cylinders.
Besides, I just hate throwing stuff away when it’s still usable.
As for the subject of downloading, I know the CD market has degraded considerably, but I think you can argue that an artificially high price point and the overall crappiness of current music are as much to blame as anything. I know I personally like having a tangible storage device that I can hold in my hand, and I don’t mean an iPod. I’m uncomfortable with the thought of my movie and music collections being reduced to a string of binary that is inherently ephemeral — i.e., you hit the delete button and it’s gone. With a disc, you need to exert some effort to destroy it. The content may not actually be any safer than on a hard drive, but it feels more permanent to me because I can see it and hold it. Illogical and old-fashioned, yes, but that’s me.
As for electronic books, my buddy Jack, who built this site for me, does a lot of reading on his PDA, and I have read about something called “e-paper” that would mimic the qualities of actual paper but be easily erasable and reprintable. I could see that becoming a substitute for periodicals. For books, however? I don’t know… again, the question of permanence comes to mind.
This is getting long, but I think we’re actually setting a dangerous precedent for the future. Imagine that all of our literature, film and music eventually becomes electronic in nature. How do we then make sure that any of it endures? We could be setting ourselves up to be forgotten by the future, and that really does trouble me…