As life increasingly moves online for work, entertainment, education and much more, forms of earlier media in my study present the picture of a spider caught in its own web
For one who spent a lifetime practising journalism and teaching Media Studies, it feels strange to say that I have a problem with the media. This has nothing to do with the prevailing news culture, but with forms of media that have remained with me over the decades, across continents, surviving several city-moves and rounds of de-cluttering as part of an increasingly minimalistic life. There are some things you just cannot give away or discard.
As life increasingly moves online for work, entertainment, business, education, shopping and much more, forms of earlier media in my study present the picture of a spider caught in its own web; the study has become a sort of ‘media mortuary’. Many books, audio cassettes, DVDs, VCDs, CD-ROM discs, video cassettes and newspaper clippings have survived, defying my attempts to de-clutter. Much of the delights they provided me can now be easily accessed and enjoyed online.
Filtering items over the years and retaining some that hold unique value means I still have a large number of such media, unable to discard them, yet unable to make any use of them (the cassette and DVD players were discarded years ago).
Yet, almost every item, every form of media is framed in a unique context. Every time I go to the study, books in the floor-to-ceiling shelves challenge me to spend some time with them: many have remained half-read, skimmed through, waiting for the day when the required bandwidth and attention-span will dawn on me.
Digital media has not only annihilated the physicality of books, but also the many delights that were associated with them: talk of lending, borrowing and returning books; the fragrance of print in a new book; the dropping and picking up of books and the significant interaction that would lead to; sentences underlined or paragraphs marked to return to someday; discovering dried flowers or other bits pressed between pages; the many delightful bookmarks and fonts; or discovering when and where a book was bought and by whom.
Perhaps the oldest book I have is one containing finely-worded profiles of ‘Prophets, Priests and Kings’. It is so tightly bound that there is no cover and there is no mention of the author. It took some research online to discover that it was written by the British journalist and writer A G Gardiner, published in 1908. Helpfully, the date and place it was purchased by my grandfather is scribbled, 18 October, 1927 in Allahabad. Much of such magic of books has vanished, replaced by clicks and swipes to turn pages on banal, boring screens.
The biggest transformation has been in music. Some drawers in the study are full of audio cassettes that have remained untouched for years. Again, it has been impossible to let go of a collection that organically built itself as I moved across several cities and provided much succour to the soul over the decades.
Of the thousands of songs that one comes across during a lifetime, some become special and are hard-wired in the mind for a host of reasons that are subjective and specific to individuals: this could be because of the time they were heard and enjoyed (childhood, teenage years, adulthood) or the context, or for the quality of words, beats, composition, singers or bands. Over the years, they evolve to represent something of the comfort of home, a kind of heimat, that you return to every now and then for what they do to you and your state of mind.
One cassette contains songs heard while growing up in Goa, but not heard much for years later, until they were recorded (badly) in New Delhi in the early 1990s: Uday Bhembre’s ‘Channeacherati’, Lorna Cordeiro’s ‘Yobaileyo’, Sudhir Phadke’s ‘Dehachitijori’, Jitendra Abhisheki’s ‘Sarvatmakasarveshwara’, ‘Uthiuthigopala’ in Kumar Gandharva’s stentorian voice heard almost every morning on AIR Panaji, Lata Mangeshkar’s ‘Pail to gekaukokatahe’ and Ramdas Kamat’s ‘Devagharchegyatkunala’.
Another unique cassette has a collection of ghazals and old film songs as part of a narrative, recorded in response to one I had recorded and presented to someone special (people used to do such things decades ago).
As in the case of books, technology has ensured that all those songs and more are instantly available now, but it has also taken away so much that used to happen around cassettes and what they meant.
In sum, my efforts to de-clutter continue to face resistance from such old media with strong emotional pull; they are likely to stay even though there is almost no occasion to use them. For now, this is a problem I am happy to leave unresolved.
The larger question is what happens to the old media when new media arrive? Do they fade into obscurity, or do they find new ways to adapt and thrive? The answer seems complex and multifaceted. When new forms of media emerge, old media often undergo significant changes, and their fate can vary widely. Some old media become obsolete, relegated to the dustbin of history. Others find new life by catering to niche audiences or evolving to incorporate new technologies.
(Prasun Sonwalkar is a columnist and former academic.)
