ERASE AND REWIND: THE NOSTALGIA OF PHYSICAL MEDIA
BY KOURTNEY GIERKE ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF GRACE CALLAHAN
Spending my summer confined to one apartment room, where my usual fast-paced college lifestyle is nonexistent and replaced with nights of endless nothingness, I’ve started to take note of the decorative media in my room. Even though my record player hasn’t worked in years (and only ever tore up my records), I still buy vinyl. Even though I own a Kindle, I can’t help but shop at bookstores. And I’ve dedicated every summer to binge-watching “Gilmore Girls” on my mother’s old DVDs.
While there are clearly more practical ways to get your daily fix of media, there’s a certain charm to slowing down and enjoying the process of inserting a CD in your best friend’s car, flipping through the glossy pages of a fashion magazine, or finally cracking open a book that’s been sitting on your shelf for the past three years. But why does our generation collectively find nostalgia in what’s arguably more expensive and less efficient? In a world where everything tries to be perfect, we gravitate toward what's not. My Spotify plan could end any minute, but I will always own my own copy of The Strokes’ “Is This It.”
Growing up in the transitory period between analog and digital, we romanticize the life we never got to know. Y2K nostalgia has never been more in full swing than it is now, and with low-rise jeans and frosted makeup comes the resurgence of CD collections and disposable cameras. The nostalgia is almost selling the offline experience, which is something our generation equally dreams of and dreads. The idea that you could live a night in the moment and only have one low-quality flash photo to remember it is almost incomprehensible in this age.
Owning media is equally as much of the consumer experience as hearing, watching, or reading it. When you own a record, you can feel the ridges in the vinyl, or smell the powdery, fragrant scent of an old book, or hear the quiet rumble of static from a DVD player. Additionally, owning physical media is decorative in a room of one’s own. Cover artwork from books and records showcases your personality in a space that can’t exist digitally: your own bedroom.
Yet, I think the idea of slowing down is most attractive to the average college student living on queued playlists and streamed sitcoms as background noise to their busy lives. Taking the time to look through bins of records, from shops like ROAR Records to your grandparents’ authentically vintage collection, actually gives you time to stop and consider what is worth consuming. My mother’s DVDs, including “Sex and the City” and “13 Going on 30,” show that she valued those shows enough to purchase them instead of just turning them on to fill the silence. In a digital age where algorithms decide your fate, physical media gives the purchaser the power.
Physical media may just seem like another buzzword or trend as a part of the Y2K resurgence, but at its core, it’s about slowing down and enjoying the permanent things in a world living online. I’m not saying owning a magazine is a form of resistance … but I’m also not saying it isn’t. Physical media is, however, a small way to push against endless algorithms and overconsumption. It skips, it tears, it collects dust, and at the end of the day, it is stubbornly our own.
