Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [93]
Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning.
—Marshall McLuhan, educator and philosopher
Format is not the same as function
While you’re upgrading your life, give your media an upgrade as well. It can be all too easy to hold onto the physical carriers for our media experiences long past our desire to engage with that content in that format again. Even if you strongly associate an album or film with a period of growth that helped make you who you are today, keeping this old copy is not what maintains the influence it had on you.
Audio/visual day
Take a paper sack and go to where you keep all your videos and DVDs. Find the ones you don't plan to watch again in the next year and put them in the sack. We will sort through the sack later, so go ahead and put in those old family videos. Hunt down the other stashes of video entertainment and do the same. Got a box of old 8mm home movies in the basement? Bring it up. Find every form of generating a flickering image on a screen and pull together all the examples that you have to confess you won't watch this year.
Sort these media items into three groups:
1. Ones to return it to their rightful owners;
2. Anything that wasn’t mass produced (e.g., those old family films) or with which you’re determinedly not ready to part, despite not watching it every year.
3. Everything else.
Put all the #1 items with other things to return to the library or to individuals. Sort the #2 items by media.; they are now archiving or replacement projects. DVDs are probably okay for the moment but, since it's easy, I'd recommend making a backup copy of anything home produced that could not be replaced. Movies on laser discs are almost certainly replaceable with current media. Do you still use the laser disc player? Don't keep things you don't have now or plan to get soon a means on which to play it.
Videos are kind of a pain. If you still have a video cassette recorder, which works great and which you use regularly, then it's probably fine to have a box of old home videos in the basement. However, I strongly recommend periodically backing up home-produced items onto alternate media, such as DVDs since all magnetic materials degrade and you might as well move things to a format that’s more convenient to turn into multiple copies.
For videos and older movie formats, such as film, it's advisable to read up on how to store them for optimal survival and to investigate ways to make backup copies on current formats. Most communities have services that will transfer old media to new. This can be a very good investment for families, who want to have multiple copies of those movies of great-grandpa and grandma.
Donate all the #3 things to charity.
In short, keep the things you use, protect the things you don't use regularly but treasure, and get the other stuff out of your way.
Tune tune-up
Repeat this process with your music, whether digitally stored or in physical form. Over time, your opinions and tastes change. Look around your place. Do you have a collection in pride of place that you actually never play? If you’ve made the switch to digital storage, does your home know that?
My friend, author and community consultant Derek Powazek, describes his moment of recognition: “My CDs had become this snapshot of who I was, like carrying around a driver's license with a 5 year-old photo where you're wearing old glasses and a shirt you wouldn't be caught dead in now. And here I was displaying them like a shrine in an immense tower in my living room.”
Go through your physical music media—CDs, records, mini-discs, cassettes, 8-tracks, reel-to-reel tapes, wax cylinders, or whatever you’ve got your tunes on—and gather all the things you don't care that much for anymore. Sell them, trade them online through a site like Swap.com, or give them away.
Delete all the music on your computer and any other music player that makes you say, “Meh.” There is better stuff out there for you. If you're like me, you're using your CDs as a storage device and listening to your music