3 ms·
No song, movie or show can escape the digital age’s revisionist urges
- warning26 4y agoTurns out George Lucas was ahead of his time with his constant "special editions"
- dTal 4y agoThe thing that strikes me most about this article is that "digital" has become synonymous with "rented" - both the article copy, and the supposed 'experts' they interview, use it this way. When you consider that digital media and its inherent ability to be copied indefinitely without generation loss represented a nearly fatal blow to the media industry's historical control over distribution, this is a staggering turnaround of marketing that makes it difficult to even express the concept of rejecting rent culture. Consider this confused passage: > "I always tell my students, if you really love something, buy it in hard copy, own it, have a DVD of it, a Blu-ray or a CD of it,” said Paul Booth, the associate dean of DePaul University’s College of Communication, who has extensively studied fandom. “Because if you only have a digital version, you don’t have a finite finished product. You’re renting a product from whatever service that you have.” This is really just describing the language shift - if you replace "digital" with "rented", it becomes tautological! And all of those formats mentioned are, of course, digital. You don't need a hard copy. But apparently you can't just say "obtain a digital copy" anymore, because that language has been appropriated. As a collector of digital media for exactly the reasons describes, who is increasingly seen as eccentric for doing so, it gives me the creeps that I can no longer reliably even verbally describe my rebellion.