<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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,\u00a0and most of my friends\u2019 collections at the time looked the exact same.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cPhineas and Ferb\u201d or \u201cSpongeBob SquarePants.\u201d To us, the West represented progress, success and innovation \u2014\u00a0so 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.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until years later that physical media became \u201ccool\u201d 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<\/a> on Reddit, manic pixie dream girls<\/a> 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 \u201cphysical media\u201d quickly became equivalent to that one scene from \u201c(500) Days of Summer\u201d (Marc Webb, \u201cThe Amazing Spider-Man\u201d): 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.<\/p>\n