Buying the last print issue of Newsweek in the bookstore a few days ago (headlined appropriately with #lastprintissue) sent me and my friends into a retrospective mood. We're barely in our thirties, but we realize that we will belong to a generation that will have memories of things that will soon be obsolete.
It's not just printed magazines, of course. Although that reminded me of an assignment in grade school to cut out all kinds of graphs from newspapers and compile them in a folder. My father had subscriptions to Time, Newsweek, and Reader's Digest magazines when I was growing up. And there were always stacks of them in the house. So I took my scissors and cut through all the shiny pages of the magazines to get the colorful graphs. I ended up with a good thick compilation and a great grade for the assignment. I'm just not sure if my parents were thrilled with the mutilated pages.
Today, anyone can find great infographics in the interwebs, without the need to print and cut them out. Which is a good thing for the decrease of paper usage. Speaking of which, books are also being transitioned from dead trees to electronic media. How long has Powerbooks and Fully Booked been around? It feels recent, but it's probably been ten, fifteen years now? It may be wishful thinking, but I don't think physical books will go away that soon. You will always have those nothing-like-the-smell-of-books kind of people to buy them. But think of the how far the e-book industry has come. You can get almost any title you like in literally seconds through Amazon. I bought my nephew Dr. Seuss books like the ones we had as kids. But there's also an interactive app version of "The Cat in the Hat" in iOS, which I'm sure he enjoys more. Yeah, we didn't have that in the 80s.
My friends were particularly nostalgic about Kodak. Now that the company has gone bankrupt, it won't be long when the phrase "Kodak moment" will lose its meaning. I remember film photography at a time when there was no other choice but to buy 24 or 36 shots of film from a store, taking pictures and choosing your shots well, and then waiting for an hour to have the prints developed. Nothing like all the digital cameras we have now that we use to mindlessly take hundreds of pictures with for a single album.
So I guess this part is as good a place as any to segue into digital media storage. It's amazing that some young people do not know what the "save" icon is. I read somewhere that a kid thought it was a washing machine. A washing machine! Zero concept on what a floppy disk is. We used to save one mp3 file into three of those. Now, even my trusty old 2GB thumb drive is sometimes not enough when I need to move files around. Makes me think of how life was so much simpler when I was buying a computer in college freshman year and can't imagine how I would be able to use up all of my 6GB HDD space.
I'm not a gamer and have never been, so I won't be able to reek nostalgia over old gaming consoles. My brother had an Atari when I was much younger. It was bulky, it had cartridges, a whole lot of wires. And that was pretty much all I remember of it. I have a Wii that I hardly use, and could also now be as obsolete as the Atari, for all I know.
I'm sure I missed a lot of great transitions in history. Would've been cool to see the period where the world changed from black and white to color (Calvin's dad is awesome, lol). But this is actually an interesting time to be in. I reckon if I keep my iPod long enough, it would become a relic like cassette tapes.
In the meantime, kindly refrain from trespassing within my lawn's premises.
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