I think perhaps that task was more enjoyable or less annoying when physical media surrounded us because I spent hours browsing in record shops, video stores, bookstores, libraries, and sometimes I still do, though less frequently these days. Even though I’ve always loved being able to hold artifacts in my hands, they can get lost or broken, nicked or scratched, gather dust, get damaged by sunlight or water or other elements, in spite of being as careful as possible with anything I handle. Really think about the word “lossless.” Nothing is actually lossless. Whenever each of us eventually goes, it’s all permanently lost, at least to us. What will happen to the library of books and CDs and DVDs and memorabilia I’ve accumulated after I die? Will I be fortunate enough to have the foresight to donate it to a good library, where somebody can slap a plaque with my name on the door of a quiet little room in memory of me? Or if I die suddenly, will it all just end up in a Dumpster since I have no family to rescue the ephemera that I’ve collected? Will I be lucky to have someone to oversee my estate if anybody deems any of what I’ve written or gathered worthy of keeping? I’m a little stunned by the number of albums and books and posters and programs and concert tickets that I’ve had autographed and inscribed by various kinds of artists over my past three decades of living here in Boston, some of them quite famous, some of them mostly unknown. Several hundred of them at this point I’d estimate. Without physical media, which is clearly where things are now headed, you won’t have any of that.
Walter Benjamin also gets a bit spiritual in his meditation on physical reproductions of artworks when he considers the importance of the original object’s “aura,” which he wonders whether could ever be carried forth in a reproduction. Film, of course, is the medium that challenges this notion because of the human capacity to see and remember. We replay scenes from films over and over again in our minds, and the most indelible or mysterious or methodical or meticulous ones get absorbed into the vast imaginative machinery of film history, endlessly replicated, imitated, re-imagined, defiled. Benjamin’s central point is that reproducible physical media led to “a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind,” a shift that also “emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” Many people today still love attending cinemas, concerts, museums, and theatrical productions, just as I do, though the feeling of participating in a ritual has obviously become strained and diluted by commerce over time, and also by a slow death of community that’s (no surprise) coincided with the gradual demise of physical media. One might mention the resurgence in the popularity of vinyl records as CDs are currently on the wane, though I think that’s mostly a novelty or a fluke. I should have known and did sort of see the doom on the horizon when I overheard some crazy-eyed guy in the late ’90s blaring non-stop in an aisle of Tower Records in Harvard Square about how vinyl would make a real comeback someday…he just knew it! (Sure, revive the most easily scratchable medium that gets played with a needle. Crazy is as crazy does.) I also recall watching a documentary about Tower Records in which Elton John referred to the closure of Tower Records as one of the greatest tragedies of his life, from the point-of-view of a lover of music, not just as a musician himself.
