Record

When I talk to my Grandmother she sometimes says "Feature this." What she means is "Picture this." Her expression, however, comes from a long time ago, when the lead films were called "features." Now they're called "films," or "movies," or "pictures." At some point they were called "talkies." At least the ones with sound. After sound, the older ones were called "silents," defining the past by the present.


Soon, with the advent of digital projection, the films will no longer be distributed as "film." Instead, a giant removable disk will contain all the information for the movie as a digital document. This will contain sound, image, and perhaps other items, such as links to the studio, an area to record the number of times the movie was viewed, and information regarding configuration of the theater itself.


Television, or TV, currently isn't changing, although Congress has mandated that we all switch to High Definition Television some point in the future. At that time will we call it HDTV, or just TV? What will we call the old TV?


Speaking of old, if you talk to someone born after 1980 about a record, they will probably be thinking you're talking about a piece of information in a database. With CD's and tape players, records have quickly disappeared. And without the piece of hardware to play the record, the language is quickly lost (Perhaps, twenty years from now, CD's will be archaic, and all music will always be stored digitally in RAM or ROM hardware). 45s and LPs don't really mean much unless you understand that you can adjust the RPMs of the player. On the other hand, records are really lo-tech ways to achieve instant sampling.


In my basement I have a hundred ¾ inch videotapes that are quickly decaying. The metal oxide on the tape flakes off everytime I play one. I have audiotapes that have sat unplayed for so long that dropouts are occurring due to magnetic polarization. Computer disks that are only a decade old are no longer compatible with the system I'm using now. Magazines tell me that my CD collection may disintegrate in 20 to 30 years. The vinyl in my records is slowly seeping out of shape. I have comic books from the 1940's that were printed on acid based newsprint, so they are slowly self-destructing.


On the other hand, the stuff that really needs to be remembered will propagate by itself, like a flu traveling passed around an office. There really was a WWII, Nixon resigned, and Kennedy was assassinated. But, like a virus, it may mutate. Were there concentration camps? Was Nixon a crook? Who killed JFK? Maybe it's better to forget all that stuff and just rely on our most permanent record - our DNA.