Life before digital consumers existed

All my ‘redundant’ possessions are stored in a friend’s loft.

I mean redundant as in I never use them anymore: CDs, cassettes, LPs, cookery books, old papers, university lecture notes. My kilt.

We were talking about cleaning the loft out the other day and since then it’s been on my mind to go through it and chuck out what I don’t need.

There are boxes up there which have stuff from when I first became independent from my family back in the early 1980s: daft plays, recordings, drawings, diaries, pay slips, bills.

Contrast that with today: most things I make are digital. If I want to write something I generally do it using a word processor, sometimes I draw using a pen and tablet, I record and store audio podcasts online, and I record and edit video on my computer. All my photographs are now stored on my hard drive.

I can remember buying a second hand typewriter in 1994 (though that appears to be on the way out) and ‘lifting’ un-recycled printer paper from council office bins (when I used to work for Dundee City Council in the mid-90s) to type out stories and plays. All those creations went into manilla envelopes which I salvaged from the same council office bins. And all that stuff, along with my inks and brushes, the modelling clay, electronics kits, crayons – all that stuff’s waiting for me to decide its future.

We don’t really have that dilemma with digital assets. We just save everything. We buy another hard drive and store more photos, files, movies and music.

This blog post is turning into one of the dozens of similarly-themed posts I’ve read by other bloggers: the evolution from analogue to digital in different parts of life.

It’s just interesting to experience it for myself.