Raising a Generation That Will Never Hold a Movie

What impact will the lack of physical media have on children?

Photo by Stephen Holdaway on Unsplash

Some of you may have heard about Best Buy’s announcement to cease the sale of physical media - DVDs, Blu-rays, 8tracks, etc. I don’t know about your family, but mine has a pretty healthy DVD collection. One that’s taken years to build.

Prior to DVDs, I started collecting VHS cassettes toward the end of high school. (Do any of you remember the Columbia House Movie Company, see below)? There was a sense of pride in my movie collection. Before the Facebook Wall, where we tried to curate our identities/personalities by sharing the music and movies we liked, this is some of what my movie collection accomplished.

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My VHS collection told people something about who I was. As people came into my apartment in college, it would tell them a little about my personality. They would be drawn to certain movies or repelled by others, but it forged a connection. It fostered conversations where we shared favorite scenes, quotes, or argued over a movie being worthy of purchase.

That was another thing, buying a movie meant that this particular movie had entered the realm for repeat views. There are movies we watch but then there are movies we own. I would even talk about movies in this way, That’s a movie I’m buying when it’s released. Do you remember thinking and talking this way? This generation doesn’t.

While streaming technologies offer many conveniences I’m grateful for, one potential negative is that movies seem disposable. We don’t physically posses a movie anymore. This generation doesn’t have to go through the laborious process of taking a DVD off the shelf, opening the case, & placing it in a player. They just scroll, click, and then click on another movie immediately after.

Many of them won’t possess a movie library. They may like certain movies, but there’s no ‘proof’ of it. I had to defend the movies I owned, to a degree. I had to justify the $19.99 I paid to own it. This dilemma won’t exist for them.

That Didn’t Age Well

They also won’t walk over to their shelf and witness how their tastes changed over time. I can walk over to my collection of DVDs and shake my head at various purchases. As I matured in my faith, I had to throw away certain movies. For them, their ‘childish favorites’ or ‘unwise teen purchases’ will be forgotten. Lost forever in the ‘memory dump’ of their mind.

Sure, the movies they stream can’t get scratched, need to be placed back on the shelf, or take up limited space in our homes. At the same time, our children are still embodied like we were in our childhood. They still need to physically engage with creation and the less tactile their world becomes will impact them in various ways.

In the grand scheme of things, how important is it for our children to ‘hold’ a DVD? To physically possess a movie? Of all the things we need to be worried about, let’s not add tactile interaction with discs on the pile of our anxieties. At the same time, it would be unwise to simply dismiss this change.

Don’t be anxious, but don’t be thoughtless about it either. To be human is to inhabit physical space in this world. To be human is to physically engage our surroundings. Streaming has physicality to it, but it’s less tactile than the movie-watching process we grew up with.

At the very least, tell your kids about this. And be okay with their glossed-over, disinterested look as you talk about “olden times” of VHS cassettes and DVDs.