[Kim Seong-kon] From Videotapes to VOD

In the 1990s when I was a movie buff, I bought tons of videotapes of movies I liked, both classical and modern. They were neatly stacked on the shelves of my bookcases in alphabetical order and I treasured them as my dearest possessions. Whenever I looked at them, I was the happiest guy in the world. When I got bored, I would pick one and insert it into a video player. Then I would become lost in a world of fantasy. My collection was so huge that my son used to mock me, saying, “Dad, you can open a video rental store after retirement.”

My happiness did not last long, though. Suddenly and brutally, the Age of Videotapes was over and I saw the advent of the Age of DVDs. Video players were no longer available at electronics stores; you could find them only in museums. Video rental stores displayed DVDs that rapidly replaced videotapes. When I had to dump all of my videotape collections, I almost shed tears, whimpering, “My precious!” like Gollum did in “The Lord of the Rings.” 

Gradually, my bookshelves were filled with DVDs. They were much thinner than videotapes and thus I could arrange them just like books on the bookshelves in my study. I was happier than before, because the resolution of DVDs was much better than that of videotapes and so was the sound. I arranged the DVDs according to the digital sound: DTS, Dolby 5.1 surround sound, and the plain 2.1 stereo sound. I spent lots of money on them, approximately $8,000. I treasured them.

Then, one day, high definition Blu-ray discs came out in the market. Suddenly, all of my DVDs were deemed useless. Once your eyes get used to high definition Blu-ray, you cannot go back to the standard definition of DVDs. So once again, I had to throw away all of my DVD collections and replace them with Blu-ray discs. Therefore, I purchased a Blu-ray player and many Blu-ray discs. They cost me a fortune, and yet you cannot cling to old technology.

Nowadays, Blu-ray discs, too, are on the verge of extinction, as Ultra High Definition TV sets are in the market and people watch movies through VOD, that is, “View on Demand.” You no longer need to buy a disc, whether DVD or Blu-ray.

The same thing happened to phones. In the beginning, man invented the telephone. But the landline telephone required your presence besides the phone. Then the Age of the Cell Phone followed. People were amazed by the revolutionary, wireless device connecting people instantly no matter where they were. Later, the truly revolutionary smartphones arrived. Smartphones were palm computers that conveniently replaced so many things such as a telephone directory, calendar, memo, navigator, subway map, newspaper, magazine, dictionary, encyclopedia and credit cards.

When I presented a paper at a seminar, “The Future of Books” at Chooncheon in 1990, the CD-ROM had just come out and was beginning to replace floppy discs in Korea. We gathered around the CD-ROM and looked at it with awe. Today, however, we live in the Age of the USB. In the beginning, the USB was called a thumb drive or flash drive. Today, however, USBs have become so tiny with amazing capacity, 16 or 32 GBs. The scientists I met in Germany told me that the Age of the USB will be over soon and another cutting-edge device will replace it.

When the XT PC was first introduced, there was no hard drive; a floppy drive played the role of a hard drive. Later when AT computers arrived, they had a hard drive, but with only 40 megabytes and 2-megabyte RAM. Gradually, they were replaced by 386, 486 and then Pentium models. Today’s computers are amazing machines with incredible memory and capacity.

Unfortunately, older people do not seem to be aware of the revolutionary changes that have taken place in our society for the past few decades. As a result, there is a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between young and old people in today’s Korean society. For example, older people in Korea tend to condemn electronic books as useless stuff, stubbornly arguing that only paper books are real books. They do not realize that tablets and smartphones have replaced paper books for the younger generation. Clinging to paper books these days is like clinging to videotapes in the Age of Blu-ray or VOD. Older people complain that you cannot turn the page in e-books, unlike paper books. Recently, however, I heard that when reading VR e-books, you can even turn the pages and moreover, become absorbed in the books by experiencing them in virtual reality.

We cannot close our eyes to the radical and rapid changes taking place in this Electronic Age. The times have changed and so has the world. We should catch the change and cope with it actively and swiftly. Otherwise, we will fall behind in international competition.

By Kim Seong-kon

Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. -- Ed.