I took my son down to visit his grandparents for a few days, and took the chance to finally venture up into their loft to retrieve enough boxes from my childhood to fill the back of my car (and once opened, most of the living space in the house). Besides bringing back a lot of old memories, it’s also sparked some thoughts on how influences and memories are evolving so rapidly as online storage becomes cheaper, online marketplaces have opened up buying and selling, and what we are (in terms of music, books, films, etc) is able to be scrobbled, tagged, logged and interrogated.
For example, I recently wrote about a sci-fi book I’d finished on one of the many sharing sites, and claimed that I didn’t really get into science fiction when I was young, and it was only really in my mid and late 20s I started reading Gibson, Doctorow, Clarke, Strauss etc.
Turns out I was mistaken, as a box full of ‘teen fiction’ sci fi books have proven, along with the obvious omission of the Warhammer 40,000 manual and about 5 years worth of White Dwarf magazines from the hallowed halls of Games Workshop, depicting all kinds of Space Marines.
Just some of the recovered treasure. The high heeled shoe isn't mine, by the way!
Will my son have any memories to re-discover?
It’s a fairly safe bet that in the next couple of years my son is probably not going to be receiving many more print books, as most of what he’ll read is likely to be electronic. Certainly by the time he reaches his early teens, which was the peak for me in terms of accumulating books and magazines, things will have changed a heck of a lot. So everything he reads can be tracked and logged by retailers or by him.
What will it be like having his entire literary history at his searchable disposal? Is there something he’ll miss out on in finding an old box sealed up by me at the age of 11, and opening it 20 years later to find some of the books I’d loved but forgotten?
The loss of ‘mythic scarcity’?
I was pretty fortunate as a child in that my parents and grandparents were able to indulge me in a lot of the interests and hobbies I had. But even then, there were certain toys and gadgets that weren’t obtainable even despite my constant pestering – which is the cause of a lot of adult collections of pop culture and toys.
But online marketplaces for everything from books to comics to toys means that it’s easy to see how quickly they depreciate (rivalling new cars in price drops), and suddenly everything becomes attainable fairly quickly. How will that change his desires, buying habits, and that sense of achievement when 20 years later you actually do own a mint condition Millenium Falcon in the orignal box, or the mint copy of Street Fighter Collection on the Sega Saturn?
Is there a value in having something to strive and desire as a child which isn’t readily available 6 months later on eBay?
Am I selling my own memories too soon?
As I’ve switched to a more digital existence for all my entertainment, I’ve been selling off a lot of stuff. Generally it makes sense that someone else might benefit from books I’ll never re-read, or magazines for things I no longer have interest in, and I’m still keeping a selection of my most valued possessions for myself, and the most reasured objects I want to pass onto my son.
But I can’t help wondering if I’ll regret it at some point in the distant future. I combine the hoarding tendecy of a neurotic squirrel with the cataloguing habits of a particularly obsessive librarian, and that’s taken a long time to overcome in digitising my music, and accepting that most books will now reside on a Kindle or similar device, rather than being displayed on a shelf to possibly impress visitors.
Whereas the author Umberto Eco apparently has a massive library of books he has yet to read, mine are all queued up in wish lists and notepad files for a time when I have the money and space to actually read them – is there the same impetus as having a print copy sat accusingly on the shelf nearby?
Beautiful visions of a past future:
One thing I do know is that it’s fascinating reading all sorts of encyclopedias and factual books from my childhood on space and computing, and seeing what visions of the future existed in the 1980s (and the 1970s in some of the books I must have inherited from other family members). It’s quite poignant given the final flight of the space shuttle programme so recently, and also thinking about the time and context they were written in.
I’m sat with a phone that packs more technology that a moon mission, I do business via the internet and communicate via videochat. Hybrid cars are increasingly common, commercial spaceflights are an evermore practical proposition in my lifetime, and robots are now picking my shopping from warehouse shelves and are starting to be used for household chores.
One of the robots at the British Library's Science Fiction exhibition
Still, whatever happens, there’s one reassuring thing – if I do change my mind about letting any of my childhood artifacts be sold – I can always buy someone else’s online with just a couple of clicks. Which is handy, considering I now have a bag full of articulated Action Force figures in 3 parts as the rubber connecting them has perished, and there’s the sad sight of a small army in pieces spread across the floor beyond practical repair.
Now if only I could go back in time and prevent my parents giving away my huge collection of original Star Wars toys I’d be able to stop worrying about a nest egg for my old age…
