"the more it changes, the more it's the same thing"
--Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr
Why is it that the more we move forward...the more we tend to look back? As we tend to get new technology, better technology, the old will phase out and come back years later.
Case in point: Record stores are again selling vinyl records. Tapes (audio and video) have come and gone. 8-tracks = dead!. Even DVD has been replaced with HD-DVD (which died a swift death) and Bluray. So what's the fascination with something we were bitching about just a few years ago?
When VHS came out it was amazing. You could watch movies in your house! If you had a lot of money you could actually get a video cassette RECORDER allowing you to save your favorite TV shows to watch at a later date. After that amazing invention you had the hugely popular medium of Laser Disc.
Laser disc is what got me thinking about his topic. As I said recently I purchased a used Laser Disc player at the local Goodwill store and then went in search or movies to buy. I'm not going to go to crazy with purchases for this dead medium but I did get a few choice titles.
Titles include: Under Siege, The Shadow, Naked Lunch, Flashback, Apollo 13, Star Wars: A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back.
While watching New Hope the other night I got thinking about how awesome it was to see in the original, kind of gritty, transfer. Plus, it wasn't messed with by George and the boys at Lucasfilm. At the same time I was enjoying the low fidelity transfer I found myself thinking, "I can't wait to see this in Bluray later this year!"
So we are brought back to my main question. What's with the obsession with the past? Especially the near past? I can understand wanting to revist a simpler time when men and women worked with their hands or when our lives weren't bogged down with technology. I even understand the people who want to look at a simpler time combined with the technology of today. (Read hear Steampunk is cool) Fashion makes sense to me. But technology has always been the exception.
Will we ever get to the point where watching TV on a smaller screen is cool? I think we already have hit that point. I watched an episode of Firefly on my iPhone today at lunch...doesn't get much smaller than that. Will we ever yearn for the days of dial-up Internet connections? How about getting our news from a sort of paper like object, I think people called it a newspaper? Just kidding! But, when more people get their news from TV, the Internet, and alternate media it's not really that far off to classify newsprint as a dead (or at least on life support) medium.
What I'm really trying to say is that as much as I like to think I am hip the the current state of things. I like to have the new and shiny toys. But, I can't help but be caught up in the past. I keep feeling more like that old man you see who still thinks back fondly on a time when his phone number was one digit or when all he had to do was call up the operator and ask to be connected to so-and-so (yes dad I am mocking you!). Oh well...time to dust off my cassette tape copy of the soundtrack to Twister, pop it in my Walkman and go sweat to the oldies.
Bonus points if you now realize that the title has nothing to do with the post but you kept reading to see if I was going to be talking about Dr. Who.
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