Sure, you can stream something to your heart’s content right now, instead of having to wait for 8 p.m. Increasingly, though, Netflix, Spotify and their kin do share one key feature with broadcast TV and radio of old: impermanence. And instead of recording a favorite movie or a Christmas special onto a blank VHS tape when it airs and replaying it whenever the mood strikes, we just open a Netflix app and stream whatever suits our mood. So now, instead of handing over a mixtape to impress a friend, we share a Spotify playlist.
Likewise, while many of us once had shelves and boxes containing stacks of VHS tapes full of shows and movies recorded from live TV, we now have DVRs and on-demand cloud archives - less clutter, but without the charm of handwritten labels.
We’re all using smartphones and streaming media of every type. Those of us who can remember tape cassettes can remember hitting “record” on a boom box at exactly the right moment when a favorite song started on the radio or, as the ’90s waned into the shadow of Y2K, recording tracks off a bunch of CDs into one themed tape to play in the car or slip into the hand of a not-so-secret crush.īut the teenagers of today, only barely born when we of yesteryear were partying like it was indeed 1999, don’t have bulky stereos taking up space - and neither does anyone else. Once upon a time, in the long-long ago bygone years of the 20th century, teenagers communicated their feelings through a medium known as the mix tape.
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