On why the elimination of videotapes is a bad idea

    The concept of "progress" holds a lofty place in contemporary society--and rightly so.  However, when this concept is implicitly defined as "indiscriminate change" due to its association with "innovation", corporations manipulate this concept to push upon consumers changes of existing products which are actually detrimental to the consumer's best interest.  While not all product changes are necessarily bad, neither are they necessarily good--or simply necessary.  The case of the elimination of videotapes is one such example. 

    Videotapes are the natural repositories of history.  What began as corporate competition for the television market eventually ended up turning the bulky VHS tapes into the smaller Betamax, the Hi8, and eventually the miniDV tape.  This competition in and of itself was beneficial to the consumer because it drove corporations to actually innovate and produce a smaller sized product of increasingly sophisticated nature for a cheaper price.  In the process, the consumer got a bigger bang for their buck.  In this case, "progress" was good for the consumer.

    However, it would be an error to presume that the next step in this evolution--the use of flash-cards (smartmedia) is necessarily always a good thing.  Just the opposite.  The emergence of flashmemory videocameras, and the elimination of cassette videocameras are actually detrimental to the consumer's interest--something rarely publicly commented. 

    Videotapes have particular characteristics that simply cannot be reproduced in flashmedia.  For one, they hold a great deal of information, much more so than flash drives.  If you were to actually count the amount of information per unit price, you would be shocked.   A 2 GB mediacard costs around $20, or $10 the gigabyte.  A videocassette tape Hi8 costs around $4, but can hold at least 15 GB of information (90 minutes of high definition video), or a total of 25 cents per gigabyte--or 6% the price of flash media per unit of information.  (While existing flashcards of 2 GB can hold the 60 minutes of video, it does so at a reduced quality.)  Consider the difference in the amount of information between a regular 'chemical' photograph and a digital image, and you get the idea. 

    More importantly, upon using a videotape, you are immediately creating a backup of the information.  The information will, in some cases, enter a computer, which will then be processed to its final design and format.  While flashmemory makes the transfer process much easier, because flash memory is expensive, this means that the stick that was used to store a certain event cannot be lengthily used in this manner (as you would with a videotape)--which means that in order to preserve the information, the user is forced to use the computer to process that information into the final format.  The user cannot just tape the event and leave it at that given the need to reuse the flashmedia to record a second event.  In other words, flashdrives actually change the 'default' settings of the computer-user relation by forcing the user to process the information immediately (if they wish to use the drive again for another event.)   The use of the flashdrive is basically a mechanism which corporations  are using to increase the use of computers, and hence to drive up their overall consumer sales, making the promise of a digital future available principally to large institutions.

    Certainly, not all digital uses of flash drives are all bad--music and photos being a case in point.  MP3 and JPEG files tend to be small and many, and you generally want to carry them with you wherever you are.  As a result, flash media is particularly suited to the way in which digital images and audio are actually used by the consumer given its natural ease of transfer.  However, videos stand altogether in a different range, as any movie studio director will tell you (with regard to the dvd and Hollywood movies).  Because "video" is large, heavy and complex--each one consisting of a vast repository of images and audio files combined--safety and secure storage is the natural preference over the 'easy transfered and lost' setting.

    If you need a guarantee that your child's birthday party will be readily available for when they grow up, you will need to use the increasingly obsolescent videotape--or import the file to a computer to edit, compress, and burn onto a CD with flashmedia.  Which would you rather have?