In my house, music is a prevalent thing. We are constantly playing music in the background at any event because it can help set a mood. Nowadays, it is most common to hear of people using their phones to access their music libraries through Spotify, pandora, or apple music. It is crazy to think of how obsolete things like CD’s and cassette players have become. This is especially fascinating to my family, because my grandfather was the owner of a record label, Intersound. He would produce countless albums that were placed on CD’s and sold around the US. He sold this company in the late 90’s right as the music industry began to turn into a digital market.
With the generation today, CD’s have become residual media that are rarely seen due to the immense access people have to any and every song possible through their phones. No one feels the need to spend money on a complete album when they can simply buy a single song a download it on Itunes. Even simpler is the notion of Spotify. You simply pay ten dollars a month to almost unlimited access to all music. Although we have access to such vast amounts of music there’s no feeling quite like being able to pop in a CD to your car and skip around the album of your favorite artist with the windows down. These are the moments I have the most memories of not the moments I plug in my phone to the aux. In reality the digitalization of music is the same situation as the digitalization of books. It is all personal preference, but how accessible something is to someone definitely impacts how often it is used.

One piece of residual media that my family has completely abandoned is cable TV. Recently a few months ago my dad switched from using DirecTV to completely relying on antenna TV. Though it seems like we were reverting back to a an almost obsolete media, what made us switch was the emergent media of Netflix and other online streaming sources.

Because I have Netlflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, and other online streaming sources I have an infinite library of movies and TV shows at my finger tips, available to me whenever I need them. It allows me the ability to watch shows on my own schedule instead of keeping up with shows weekly, anxiously waiting for the new episode to come out. Instead I can just wait for a season to come out on Netflix or possibly find the new episode somewhere else online. It also saves me money because I can also just wait for movies to come out online too.

With DirecTV there were over 300 channels we could watch, but barely watched half of them. I only ever watched cable TV for all the cooking shows I never actually learned from to kill time after school or kept it on as background noise for other activities I would be doing around the house. My parents only ever watched local news channels or sports games, and the antenna is still able to provide that same entertainment, just limiting what games my dad can watch.

It is ironic how an emergent media allowed for a residual media to come back; however, because my parents are more old school and do not comply to newer technologies, I am the only one that uses the internet as my new source of TV entertainment.

Over my eighteen year lifetime, I’ve seen my share of media. As a four year old, I would record movies off the TV using a VHS. I can remember having several VHS tapes of all my favorite Disney movies. I owned cassette tapes of sing-alongs. I remember using a floppy disk for a project in the second grade. My parents upgraded the TV to include a DVD player and we started buying DVDs. I was given a CD player to listen to my sing-alongs (and later and MP3 player). I had a flash drive by the time I was in the fifth grade.

Truly it is amazing to know that I am a part of the generation that lived through the shift in media. We were the ones who saw the changes in technology. We weren’t immediately born into it. We were introduced to different aspects of it and were able to appreciate them both.

Apple’s release of the iPhone 7 and wireless earbuds made me realize that corded headphones will soon become obsolete media. I personally appreciate corded headphones and their ability to not be lost or easily broken; however, Apple sees the corded headphone as a hindrance and therefore must be replaced by wireless ones. Of course, Beats made wireless headphones popular as well, but with the iPhone’s exclusion of a headphone jack, the wireless headphone craze is bound to pick up speed. Truly, corded headphones will soon become old media.

It is interesting to look at the shifts between new and old media and how they’ve been such an important part in this generation. We were the kids who went from watching “Hercules” on VHS to watching “Mean Girls” on DVD to watching “Twilight” on Netflix. Times are changing, and luckily we are that bridge to keep both the old media and new media alive.

When I was younger, I used to be obsessed with reading. Every month my mom would have to drive me to the closest Barnes and Noble so that I could buy a few new books. When I finished reading those books, I would set them on my bookshelf and then have to go back to the store for more. I think my mom eventually got tired of driving me to the bookstore so often, so she instead went and bought me a Kindle so that I could just download the books I wanted on this digital device. This seemed so easy and convenient, and I could now read more books without having to worry about when I would be able to go to the bookstore next. But the reading experience on a Kindle was completely different than reading from the actual book. There is something about holding a paper book that makes it so much more special than reading it online. While holding the actual book, I felt more connected to the story that the author had written about. After some time, my love for reading began to dwindle, which I think is due to not only the fact that I was getting older and busier, but also that I didn’t enjoy reading as much on the digital device. Even though I do not read as much today, I still hate having to read anything online. If a teacher assigns a reading of an online article (like the reading for this week), I have to print it out and read it from the printed copy, which isn’t as convenient. This is one legacy media that I feel I will not be able to let go of. It seems like there are less actual bookstores today because less people are using actual books, and if they are, they just order them online. It is sad to see that something that was such a big part of my childhood is changing so much.

We might think of older media in a number of ways: as residual media (as opposed to media that are dominant or emergent in a particular place and time), as legacy media (we’ve inherited them from previous generations), or as obsolete media (ouch!).

Write a blog posting that focuses on your own experiences with residual, legacy, or obsolete media—or with one old medium in particular. Did you ever have to struggle with an older medium, perhaps because your assumptions had been shaped by newer media) ? Did you grow up with any media that hardly exist anymore? Did you come late to a medium that was already on its way out? Do you carry a torch for a legacy medium?

For class on 9/12, read “The End of Legacy Media” (WWW) (…but make sure you check out the date!)