The Digital Media Revolution Will Not Be Televised
#TalkNerdytoMeLover's According to Adam
Be honest. When you buy music these days (or "obtain" music, if you're still going that route) how do you do it? Do you drive down to your local record shop and pick up the latest "album" from your favorite artist, or do you open iTunes and click on the "buy" button.
Based on statistics, it's likely the latter. iTunes has become the largest retailer of music, without ever selling a record, cassette or CD. iTunes libraries range in size from just a handful of songs all the way up to multiple terabytes of data.
I started thinking more about digital media when I made my latest purchase, a 4 TB hard drive to store all my media: music, movies, TV shows and photos. This amazed me, from a sheer volume perspective. The first computer my family ever owned didn't even have a hard drive: it ran entirely on 5 1/4 floppy disks (remember those?!). Our first computer with an internal hard drive was a whopping 40 MB -- or about enough for a single uncompressed audio file.
In 1999, I bought my first internal hard drive dedicated to MP3 files. It was 6 GB, which at the time seemed huge (and was about the same price as what I just paid for a 4 TB drive), but now would barely hold one-tenth of my iTunes music, not to mention movies, TV shows, apps and everything else in iTunes.
A couple years later I had a 20 GB drive for everything... then 40... then 100... then things just kept spiraling out of control until I filled my 2 TB drive and had to double my available space. Of course, a large reason for that is my recent quest to digitize my entire DVD library, ridding me of physical media.
Of course, it seems the industry itself is trying to do the same, pushing digital media over physical. iTunes is a huge reseller of music, and is making inroads in movies and TV shows too. Amazon's Kindle has been a major force in pushing adoption of eBooks, and now Apple's getting into the game with iBooks on the iPad. There are even movies that are filmed, shown and distributed digitally, meaning they never even make it on to "film" at any point.
I was discussing this with a co-worker the other day, and he pointed out that we may be the first society that seems bent on erasing all evidence we ever existed. The Digital Revolution is in full force, and while it sure makes things neater (a 4 TB drive takes up WAY less space than four racks full of DVDs), it's kind of eerie to think how close we are to actually living the pilot episode of "Dark Angel" (in case all you remember from that show is Jessica Alba, a quick refresher: a massive EMP destroyed the computer and communications systems in the U.S., turning it into a Third World nation overnight).
We take digital pictures, listen to digital music and watch digitized streams of video and pay for it all using digital money (seriously, who uses cash anymore?). Even this article you're reading right now is digital. If I don't print it out, and someone comes along and deletes it, did it ever really exist? Now, apply that same question to a more massive scale.
So, I guess what I'm saying is: back up your data in a separate location inside an EMP-safe building, so we don't have to rely on Jessica Alba to save us. I'm pretty sure she's busy with Cash these days anyway.
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