How many things did we do/use growing up that are totally outdated and/or non-existent nowadays. The most obvious to me is phonograph records. When I was really young, my sisters had (and may still have) a number of 78 rpm records. I remember playing them on our record player at home. The record player had 4 speeds. 16, 33-1/3, 45 and 78 rpm (for those of you neophytes that would be revolutions per minute). These 78s were about 12 inches in diameter, about an 1/8 of an inch thick and extremely breakable. You dropped them, they shattered. Because the rpms of the turntable were so fast, you could only get one song on a side of each 78 record before it ran out. By the time I was old enough to purchase my own records, 45s and 33-/13 long playing records were the style. 45s were for the single songs and 33-1/3s were for albums. These were also volatile. They wouldn’t break as easy but were susceptible to warping and scratches.
Remember those? If you don’t it is because you are too young. In only 40 years, phonograph recordings became a historical artifact, giving way to cassette recordings (my first tape recorder was actually a mini reel to reel tape recorder; we won’t bring up 8-tracks), then to CDs, to our present .mp3 and i-Pod players and digital recordings. I now own a small digital recorder that I use to tape performances and concerts. I then upload the recordings to my computer where I store them on i-Tunes, cut them to a CD, or upload them to my website.
Similarly to owning record players, my family started out with a Black and White TV that was made up of a lot of vacuum tubes. We had a collection of tubes from defunct TVs that were never the correct ones for replacing the broken ones in our working TV when it broke. I took an elective course in High School, my Senior year, on Television make-up and repair, little knowing that those skills would be useless by the time I actually graduated college when I might have had a chance to use them. Curse you transistors! Where we used to watch videotapes, in there various forms, on our TVs, we now have moved on to the DVD and Blue Ray high definition wide screen format, LCD, Plasma, screens, DVRs and even computers.
Look at our telephones. I’m not old enough to remember party lines and having to ring an operator to connect me to the person I wished to talk to. I am old enough to remember rotary dials. Our telephone numbers had letters in them too. Our phone number was KI 2-2728 (KI standing for Kingsbridge, our telephone exchange). There was no area code that I know of. Later on 212 was added as an area code and KI changed to its number value 54. I remember when you wanted to use a push button phone you had to pay extra on your phone bill, even when a majority of telephones being produced were touch tone. Of course that was in the day where there was only one Phone Company. I remember early in the 90’s when my school, still had a rotary dial pay phone outside the office. I had a 5th grade student that needed to call home. He put the money into the coin slots of the phone and tried desperately to push at all of the holes in the dial where the numbers were and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. Now there are wireless phones, cell phones, smart phones, etc.
I’m sure there are plenty of other things that I grew up with that are now extinct. All of these changes happened within a very short period of time. So I wonder? What are those things that we have and use now that in 30 years will be extinct? What will be using then to hear/play music? to watch and be entertained by? And as a storyteller, who tells stories now as it was done then, will there also be change or is storytelling a constant? Food for thought.
