Day 6: Digital Discord

These days my teaching partner is reading THE WESTING GAME to our classes at the end of the school day. The important thing to know here is that this book was originally published in the late 1970s.

A couple days ago there was a moment in the story when one of the characters was listening to a transistor radio. I’m very confident I was the only person in the room then who had actually done that in real life. After my cousins introduced me to American Top 40, I adopted my dad’s transistor radio and would listen to it with the 70s precursor of an earbud, which was an uncomfortable parabola of plastic you had to jam deep into your ear canal to hear. It also kept you tethered to the radio by a cord that couldn’t have been more than eighteen inches long. I didn't care. There was more than one night, especially if Casey Kasem’s weekly countdown was on, when I fell asleep with that thing stuck in my ear, or, if I couldn’t stand it anymore, with the radio volume turned way down so I could lie in bed on my side and balance the radio on my ear until I fell asleep.

It wasn’t long after that I was buying records, both albums and singles. Truthfully, it was usually albums. Having the hit song was good, but if it was a favorite band there was a good chance there would be deeper album tracks I’d like as well. When my parents bought a cassette deck, I started adding some tapes to the collection, which eventually led to an infinite parade of obsessively planned mix tapes. If you didn't know me back then and you think I ever would have made a mix tape for you for whatever reason -- you missed out. I had it down to an art form.

Compact discs came in college. My roommate Steve had a CD player and didn’t mind if I bought a few discs of my own for us to play. It wasn’t many years later until I had my own stereo in my first apartment, at which point my CD collection began to slowly take over my life. At least until the iTunes store went live and I bought the first in a series of several iPods, and downloaded more songs and albums than I will ever admit.

Somehow though, my evolution stopped there.

I still have two iPods, and I keep music on my phone. I’ll still buy and download most of the albums I listen to. I have maybe three CDs stashed in my car for emergencies, but I’ll usually listen to one of my six preset stations from the Twin Cities radio market. No streaming services, no satellite radio, no Alexa.

Television is basically the same way. I still haven’t cut the cable, and I rarely order up anything from On Demand. I have Netflix, but I hardly ever use it. With that in mind, what about all of these other streaming services, more than any of us could ever name? I’m sure they all have good shows, but am I really missing out if I don’t know anything about them?

If I subscribed to a music streaming service, how much of it would I use to really explore the potential of what’s out there I don’t already know? If I did unload cable this summer, how would I know which streaming services were really, truly essential for what I would want to watch?

And really, how much would any of that enhance my life more than being able to listen to the radio while reading a book on a summer afternoon as my dog naps beside me?

I'm kind of serious, though. Why would I ever consider getting a streaming service, either for music or television? For people that use them -- what am I missing?