Adapting to the DVD Lifestyle
For someone my age (I'm 24 years old), I have never taken well to change. Technology astounds me, and I am always light-years behind the latest advancement. I haven't the foggiest notion what the difference is between an Ipod or an MP3 player, or anything like that. In fact, I've only observed them as one does lions in their natural habitat-from a safe distance.
Naturally, with the advent of CDs and DVDs came my resistance to them. I was a wreck thinking about replacing all of my audio and video tapes. Furthermore, I didn't want to. Tapes were so sturdy, so durable. Practically indestructible. I'd had audio tapes that I had dropped into the bath tub while bathing and listening to music that I had simply blown into, unspun, let dry out, and spun back up, and they played as good as new. I had a video cassette that a friend of mine had stepped on, putting a stiletto heel hole right through the plastic in the center, and that tape plays to this day.
I've worked as a CSR and as mangement in three different video stores. Someone brings back a tape that doesn't work, you pop out the tape and splice it, screw the cover back together, and put it back on the shelf. If a DVD doesn't work, you label it and throw it in a drawer from which there is no return. It's sad, really, the DVD cemetery that all video stores have behind the desk.
The shame is that it's so easy for a DVD to end up there. A scratch here, a nick there. It doesn't take much-just a typical degree of nonchalance, and it's ruined forever. Such a delicate thing. The wound just needs to be deep enough, or in a certain place, and all its information will bleed right out.
I will concede that DVDs have certain benefits. Yes, they're more compact. Yes, it takes time and guess-work out of skipping to a certain part of a movie. Yes, there are added features on many DVDs. Yes, the image quality may be better. I can understand why people might enjoy them, perhaps even prefer them to VHS. But I have lots of room in my house for movies, so the compactness is not an issue, and if I sit down to watch a movie, I watch the whole thing, not just my favorite parts, so I have never used the "scene selections" option on a DVD. And the movies I tend to watch are old classics with no added features, and the image quality doesn't get any better. So, give me durability.
I suppose I'll have to adapt to DVDs. Just not today.