Wired

I sat in front of my personal computer the other day, feeling quite clever at my own personal evolution into the digital world. I was listening to my favorite music and reading the news while in the background I was keeping track of the scores from the gridiron. If I had half a mind to, I could make a couple more clicks and start watching the most recent releases from Hollywood, the ones I missed because I was far too busy at my computer. That's when I read the article. The one that changed my rosy outlook to dusky gray.
It seems that I was operating technology from the last epoch. I still own not one but two video cassette recorders. I have found myself on the cusp of buying the Star Wars trilogies in yet another permutation. I own the VHS version. I sold my laser discs of Episodes IV through VI along with the player I was using to show off my devotion to all things cinema back in the nineties. The box set of DVDs have had some use over the years, but now when we need to reference a scene or line of dialogue, we call it up on YouTube. We have all this software, and now we are being told that it's really not necessary.
I remember how I had to reconcile my sadness in losing the artwork of my vinyl LPs first for cassette tapes and then for compact discs. Now I occasionally take the time to download some of the liner notes on those special edition mp3s, but mostly I'm storing bits and bytes on my hard drive with the intent of reproducing them for the moment of playback. Amazon and Apple will be happy to store those for me as well, even if it costs me a few dollars a year. I won't have to worry about space.
I used to have a video camera. Actually, I have owned a number of video cameras over the years. Mostly they were replaced by better, smaller, flashier versions, until just recently when my son took most of our family vacation videos with his phone, much in the way our snapshots have become an almost purely digital domain.
And here I sit at my antiquated desktop machine, plugged into a bunch of cables sprouting from the wall. A tablet would be so much less effort and one less dimension. A single flat surface that could maintain and retrieve all the media that I could possibly care about. That can take pictures and video and send them to a storage farm someplace on a cloud, or somewhere in the Midwest.
Or maybe I should anticipate a time when the relics that I use currently carry the same cachet as the wind-up Victrola my wife inherited from her father so many years ago. And I await the eventual implant in my skull for receiving and transmitting data. Until that becomes passe.