What ever became of the CD

All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men. 
            Isaac Asimov

What ever became of the CD? The humble compact disc, the one that changed the very nature of the way we listen to music, the merging of data and music, the almighty shift between analogue and digital.

Now 700MB of information is barely enough to watch a TV episode; CDs are heavy, bulky and costly. Who wants to have a physical copy that can be scratched, broken or smashed? What use is an album that at most could contain 15 analogue songs or a mere 230 in digital format?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the CD has gone the way of the tape that proceeded it or the vinyl record before that… no, wait, scratch that last one…

The CD is obsolete, with its spinning motor that required physical movement and sucked the batteries dry, the extra skip protection that you could turn on but at the cost of perhaps a song of listening time.

But why mourn the CD? Surely the fact that technology continues to march forward at such pace that in a little over 20 years we have eliminated not only the CD but its successor(s), the DVD, laser disc and minidisc?

Well sure, I can now fit entire movies on my phone and access my e-mail and digital calendar from the middle of nowhere, but by the same measure my father’s records lasted him over 30 years. His heavy copper-filled stereo would still be running (had I not ruined it) {I was a teenager; leave me alone :P}. But I have to buy a new phone every two years to keep up. I must constantly update apps and spend my data on upgrades that I see no real difference from just to remain safe.

If you have ever been to my house you will have seen my wall of computer history. It contains items from the history of modern technology dating back as far the humble 2½ inch “floppy” disk. I used to have what was called a laundry drive but was silly and threw it out in my younger years. The reason that I bring this up is to emphasise just how much technology has changed even within my relatively short lifetime. But I have talked to people online (younger than myself) who do not know even the function of this technology. The now infamous save icon used in Microsoft Word has remained a pictorial representation of the floppy disc for as long as I can remember, and yet as newer generations of people have come to use the program, the relationship between the item and the representation has been lost.

The point then is not the lament of the CD, nor of the once important Horse and Buggy, but rather a eulogy of the knowledge and skill associated with the previous technology, that those who specialised in the older ways are now shunned and ridiculed, ostracised and stripped of their income for merely continuing in the way in which they had been taught, for practicing their craft to the best of their abilities.

We as a society have become impatient, narrow minded, and intolerant. Not, as some would have you believe, of things like gender issues, sexuality or race; we have long been intolerant of those and are as a whole becoming less so (but that is for another time). Rather, we have lost respect for the old, the long-suffering and the specialist, preferring instead to embrace the next best thing, the faster, more efficient and better-looking option no matter what other costs we may incur as a result.

So, when you purchase your next Samsung, or piece of fruit, remember that there is an importance in the old, in the tried and true, and in the traditional. That just because we can change something doesn’t me that we should change it. That progress for the sake of greed will not always yield the outcome desired. And that if we forget the mistakes of the past, we may end up electing another Hitler…