There is a neon green CD storage box back in my childhood home in Indonesia. Some discs in the pile are more worn than others; their edges have faded white, and the screen-printed labels on top are practically illegible. I remember the careful way in which my dad would demonstrate holding a disc: by its edges or center, but never by the shiny parts.
Physical media were always central to my childhood memories. I used to race with my sister to find Nintendo cartridges of Harvest Moon and insert Jay Chou cassette tapes into my dad’s stereo player. Most of all, though, I remember the crappy 20-cent Barbie DVDs that my parents would buy from a nearby market after their late-night shifts. The sheer amount of Barbie CDs that decorated the shelves of every CD store back then meant that Barbie dominated more than half of the pile in my neon green box, and most of my friends’ collections at the time looked the exact same.
Despite being miles away from the West, most childhoods in Indonesia centered around Western media while Indonesian media almost always became the butt of the joke. My friends and I still reminisce about Barbie movies and cartoons like “Phineas and Ferb” or “SpongeBob SquarePants.” To us, the West represented progress, success and innovation — so when Western countries began adopting digital media, Indonesia followed suit. I moved to an international school in second grade and stopped using physical media entirely, and by third grade, had completely forgotten that it existed.
It wasn’t until years later that physical media became “cool” again in the pop culture, when mostly white voices started calling for the survival of physical media. Online, physical media communities always seem to be saturated with pretentious film bros on Reddit, manic pixie dream girls on Tumblr or wistful older men on Facebook, all of whom are singing praises about The Strokes or Fleetwood Mac or some other white band. The concept of “physical media” quickly became equivalent to that one scene from “(500) Days of Summer” (Marc Webb, “The Amazing Spider-Man”): the guy and the girl bantering over vinyl records in a soft-lit record store and the quirkiness of having Ringo Starr as your favorite Beatle.
With white voices dominating the discourse, it was difficult to imagine that physical media had once been something so personal to me. It became an aesthetic centering around white media, because mass media production — and the online social culture surrounding it — encourages white hegemony among works of art, dictating the media that makes you inherently “interesting” to consume. Back when I was 13 years old and had completely forgotten about the role of physical media in my childhood, I was envious of the teenage girls with vintage aesthetics and a love for old-timey white artists, because they were “cool.” At the time, the oldest artist I listened to was probably Chrisye, a legendary Indonesian pop icon whose playful melodies I could probably identify a mile away. But it wasn’t enough
When I received my record player and a boygenius vinyl for my 20th birthday, I was excited that it would be my first ever piece of physical media. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that this simply wasn’t true until I sat down to write this piece.
In the discourse surrounding physical media nowadays, it’s always one extreme or the other — either everyone should use physical media or physical media is garbage. No one takes into account the white centrism around physical media that makes it so unreachable today.
For something to be “physical media” and thus considered to have cultural value, it must be accessible and critically acclaimed, which are two qualities largely influenced by Western standards. When the mass production and reception of media mostly center around whiteness, it grants easier purchase and access to the work by the average consumer. The lack of work made by international artists in physical media production implies that “world” media are not as legitimate in dictating art. Today, even as I try to engage with physical media, I struggle to identify with it. There’s a beautiful small business around Ann Arbor, Digger’s, that sells used media for $1.50, and even then, much of the media it sells is white.
A lot of the articles I came across while writing this piece reference the death of physical media and their importance in the modern landscape. It’s true that the physicality of art is important; I still believe in this wholeheartedly, especially because digital ownership doesn’t really mean “ownership.” But how can we, in good conscience, encourage people to invest their life savings into collecting physical forms of art when a majority of physical media sold today don’t even begin to encapsulate the diverse tastes of the general public? And worse, many diverse voices that make up people’s identities are lost in the general discourse, making the culture around physical media more exclusive.
It’s easy to point fingers at others and demand them to buy their own records and VHS tapes — many of the articles I read center “you” in their titles as a call to action to bring back physical media — but it’s more difficult to look at the root cause of why people are no longer buying physical media. The culture of inaccessibility around physical media through social standards only serves to uphold the air of “coolness” around vintage objects and prevents embracing a universal love for art.
It’s not up to us to transform the entire modern physical media market. However, we can still impact those around us by the simple act of community. I often still argue with my friends about which of the cheap DVDs had been our favorite childhood media, and my family had actually been gifted my record player and vinyl to me. The recent closure of Ann Arbor’s Your Media Exchange, an independent record store seeking to resell used physical media, makes it even more important to locally support inexpensive and inclusive physical media. Shop at your local sellers, advocate for affordability and encourage diverse voices in art — and, most importantly, share your love for art with your loved ones, whether that be browsing record collections with your friends or watching crappy Barbie DVDs with your sister.
Daily Arts Writer Nat Shimon can be reached at nshimon@umich.edu.
