Somewhere in between early college and late college, my media purchasing habits changed. I went from needing a physical copy of everything, to preferring a digital copy or a free copy I could return once I was finished with it. Maybe this could be because I was sick of moving all that junk every time I moved during college (every year), or maybe it was because I got older and was more realistic about whether I was really going to watch that movie or read that book again. I’ve been purging all the stuff for years now and only a few choice books and comics remain. All the CDs and DVDs and video game boxes are gone.

I’d like to think that I’ve matured, but it’s probably more likely that I was swayed by social trends alongside getting older. I remember being a kid and dreaming about having a house someday with a library that would rival Neil Gaiman’s – that’s the motivation behind keeping all that stuff, but now, as an adult thinking about buying a house in the next few years, I dream about a Spartan dwelling wired with media access devices, but no physical media.

And I don’t think it’s just me. People are embracing e-books, digital downloads, streaming, and other non-physical methods of media access. These things get more prevalent every day.

I think people are coming to realize that physical media, under all that pretty, colorful packaging, is just a portal to an experience. If you own a DVD, you own something physical: a plastic disc in a pretty cardboard and plastic holder. If you watch a movie – you have an experience. While plastic disc peddlers have done a damn fine job of creating the link in our minds between the experience of a movie and the movie’s physical media, the more digital becomes the norm, the more that link is shattered.
And rightly so.

Maybe I just make a bigger deal of things because I like to believe the world is a complex and interesting place. Maybe it’s not – it could really be that digital is just cheaper and more convenient and that explains most, if not all, of digital’s popularity. But I don’t think it’s that simple. I think there is a paradigm shift in our perception of what media is – and now, with digital getting more and more popular, the notion that media is an experience (an event, i f you prefer) is much easier to divide from the idea that media is a plastic disc or a paper book. Maybe books are a slightly different case because the act of reading is an important part of the experience, whereas opening a DVD and loading in a disc is more negligible.

But no matter what, you can never repeat an experience. Of course, you can try by owning the media that gives you a portal to a quantifiable portion of the experience.

But that time you watched Garden State with a girl and then kissed her for the first time on her couch? Or sped down a dirt road in the pounding rain with the windows down, soaked the to the skin, quivering with young lust and listening to Coldplay’s Yellow? Or that sunny cicada summer you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in your car, eating hot french fries, after class and before you had to go to work, in those glorious stolen hours?

You’re never gonna get those back even if you buy the physical media.

I’d like to think people are seeing that idea – but maybe it’s easier to Netflix something from the couch than to waddle down to the local Wal-mart to buy a copy.

Hard to tell.