A few nights ago we had a chap from a local building company visit us to start to quote for some work we are looking to do. At the end of the evening, he left us with a business card and a DVD.
The next morning my wife gave the disc in its sleeve to Oscar, our eldest, for something to play with in the car on the journey to nursery. We don’t use DVDs at home anymore, and haven’t really since Oscar became mobile as we figured that the player would merely become another place for him to store buttered toast.
Another digital format bites the dust in the Ballantine household.
It got me thinking, though, how much of our life now is not only digital, but also in the Cloud in some way.
Whilst we don’t have videos DVDs knocking around anymore, our TV is internet-connected and we have access to a series of commercial services to stream content on demand. In reality, that amounts to little more than episodes of Bob the Builder via iPlayer, but the options are there. Earlier in the year the London area switched over to digital-only terrestrial broadcasting, so all of the live content is now digital too (although the only times I saw analogue was on the occasions when the BBCs HD service didn’t switch out to local news updates).
For music, I’ve been using Spotify for about three years, and haven’t bought either CD or downloaded file since moving to their subscription service. I’ve listened to more new music as a result in that tome than probably since I was a teenager.
Newspapers are a tactile luxury that I rarely see these days as a result of the toddler-factor, but I have found that since getting my head around Twitter a few years ago my patterns of news consumption have changed dramatically. Flipboard is an interesting app that further pushes social as a source for editorial decisions, but I’m fearful that news chosen by my social networks runs the risk of becoming very myopic… Radio 4s Today Programme its usually on the radio for the drive into work, and the wonderful PM accompanies me home.
Books were the last major domain of analogue for me, but last June I made the plunge for Kindle, and haven’t looked back. Being able to pick up reading on any device is wonderfully liberating, and the last printed book I bought sits, mockingly, half-read at my bedside.
I think it’s a useful exercise every so often to take stock of how things have moved. It’s easy to lose sight, otherwise, of how quickly our world is changing.
mmitII 