Hidden Progress
Because of all the entertainment that awaits the press of our fingertips, some movies from my early marriage years go unwatched because of the seemingly outdated technology. I still possess a pile of, perhaps, one hundred shows on VHS. I have kid shows that I used to watch with my children and Spanish language versions of some Disney classics. Thanks to Netflix, iPads, and the internet in general, I don't usually expend even the minimal effort required to watch a videocassette. In case you have forgotten, you first have to find the tape, eject the tape that is already in the machine; and when you find that the show you want to watch wasn't rewound, you then have to rewind the tape before you can watch it.
I hate to sound like the old guy sitting on my porch yelling at the kids to stay off of my grass, but I remember the days before a VHS. The idea that you could own a movie and watch it at your own leisure didn't arrive to me until high school days. The simply reality meant that you could watch what was on either of the three primary networks. While this meant that particular choices at any given moment were kept to a minimum, there was certainly no clutter or searching through stacks of videos to find the one you are looking for. Once I had children, I remember many early mornings with a child who wouldn't sleep, but we could sit on the sofa and watch an episode of "Bob the Builder" or some other animated program.
Fast forward a couple decades and I look around at myself and my family and we each possess our individual devices where we can enjoy our individual entertainment all by ourselves. Whether we're using a tablet or a laptop we don't even have to store the data on our devices because we can stream the movies from an internet database. Not only do we avoid the clutter, but these entertainment providers monitor our selections to suggest new shows that we probably would have never discovered, even if we browsed through a complete Blockbuster video library.
Setting aside the certain reality that I spend too much time with mass-marketed entertainment, a fairly recent advancement in technology is bringing us back together. We find that we love the ability to mirror our devices to a larger screen so that more of us can watch the same thing at the same time. This has been a bonanza during the World Cup as we can live stream the beautiful game and make some family memories as we cheer our favorite teams together. I'm sure we could do something better with our time, but as long as we are enjoying the world around us, it is clear that it's better to do it together. But tonight, even though we could find something online, I searched through the videos, found the VHS, rewound the tape and then pressed play.
I hate to sound like the old guy sitting on my porch yelling at the kids to stay off of my grass, but I remember the days before a VHS. The idea that you could own a movie and watch it at your own leisure didn't arrive to me until high school days. The simply reality meant that you could watch what was on either of the three primary networks. While this meant that particular choices at any given moment were kept to a minimum, there was certainly no clutter or searching through stacks of videos to find the one you are looking for. Once I had children, I remember many early mornings with a child who wouldn't sleep, but we could sit on the sofa and watch an episode of "Bob the Builder" or some other animated program.
Fast forward a couple decades and I look around at myself and my family and we each possess our individual devices where we can enjoy our individual entertainment all by ourselves. Whether we're using a tablet or a laptop we don't even have to store the data on our devices because we can stream the movies from an internet database. Not only do we avoid the clutter, but these entertainment providers monitor our selections to suggest new shows that we probably would have never discovered, even if we browsed through a complete Blockbuster video library.
Setting aside the certain reality that I spend too much time with mass-marketed entertainment, a fairly recent advancement in technology is bringing us back together. We find that we love the ability to mirror our devices to a larger screen so that more of us can watch the same thing at the same time. This has been a bonanza during the World Cup as we can live stream the beautiful game and make some family memories as we cheer our favorite teams together. I'm sure we could do something better with our time, but as long as we are enjoying the world around us, it is clear that it's better to do it together. But tonight, even though we could find something online, I searched through the videos, found the VHS, rewound the tape and then pressed play.
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