In the form of a VCP, technology was the change agent.
That is no mis-spelling. A Video Cassette Player. Not the standard Video Cassette Recorder finding a home with millions of Americans.
My parents had made the call that there wasn't anything worth recording on TV. The full splurge avoided. Roughly 15 years later, they would have two functional large screen TVs within 30 feet of each other. Further, both parents currently possess cellphones and at least one Kindle whereas the flip phone in my possession remains in its original packaging, unactivated. I am collateral damage to the influence of thriftiness.
Frequent rentals included Aliens, Star Trek IV, Dragnet, and the likely candidate for the most viewed of them all, Three Amigos.
The frequency of viewings played off of the comic book collector's bug. Month in, month out, you nab the newest number in a series. The standard formula for $.75 issues translates to today's four-colored $3.99 editions. It's all about the beats. Intro situation, present conflagration, a slight rumination and catching of breath, and then hell-bent to the final panel, either for resolution or set-up for continuation of the journey. I liked what I liked, and I liked it over and over again.
Feeding into the change was the existence of Premiere, an oversized and fat monthly dedicated to new releases. The introduction of home video options added fuel to my conversion. Arguably, without the technological revolution of video machine ownership and videotape renting, I would have stayed on the comic book path. Between Pendleton, Hermiston, and La Grande, the Eastern Oregon theaters within driving distance provided a grand sum of (likely) nine screens; not nearly enough avenues to channel Hollywood's weekly output, and posing almost systemic opportunities for dreaded product overlap.
I know the first issue of Premiere I bought featured a cover story on Good Morning, Vietnam. The thing I can't remember is the chicken-or-egg value to the situation. Did the fact of the cover story push me towards the movie or did seeing the film in theaters push me towards the magazine? And then there is the wild card, the potential infinite regressive, that the Pendleton cinema didn't show the movie. Would I still have come into possession of the magazine? If not, would my migration away from comic books have stalled out? A certified Rumsfeldian 'unknown unknowns' quandary.
Buying comic books from a subscription service warped me significantly. Breathless ads or 'word on the street' often determined my consumption. I probably wouldn't have gotten into Alan Moore's Miracleman except for the ad Ecplise Comics ran in Comic Buyer's Guide. I wouldn't have subscribed to the inaugural Prestige format title The Dark Knight Returns except for a DC house ad.
That's the low wattage damage. Far worse, to this day I am compulsively indecisive when it comes to reading a book by an author simply due to the length of their bibliography. I fret and frown and have measurably thinned my scalp due to the inexcusable notion that if I eat one Anne Perry or Julian Barnes potato chip, I must then consume all of their potato chips. Once upon a time, the notion to war my way through every entry in multiple oeuvres was feasible, but there is the physics of the stomach, and there is the physics of the dinner plate plus the inelasticity of time marching on, variables culminating in the deduction that I cannot cram it all in, not in this lifetime. Once injected into the bloodstream, the completist virus renders rational thought opaque.
The desire to be informed about movies fattened into near-obsession. I know I had at least a one-year subscription to American Film and then about a similar run on US Weekly, the latter courtesy of Publishers Clearinghouse discounted magazine subscriptions.
Once we moved from Ukiah to Pomeroy, I'd breathlessly flip through the school library USA Today, scrounging for the latest Tinseltown tidbit in the 'Life' section. That's where I first learned about the John Hughes magnum opus Uncle Buck and the never made but oh-so-tantalizing Tom Cruise/Michael Keaton Some Like It Hot remake. I watched Entertainment Tonight religiously, never quite taking to Mary Hart's goddess stems and happily never going into seizures courtesy her voice.
The diagnosable event signifying the destructive nature information possession inflicts was the constant check out of the same issues of Newsweek and TIME from the Ukiah School Library just to keep near the paragraphs informing readers about movies in the works featuring SNL alumni. The Newsweek 'Newsmakers' column commenting on Funny Farm, The Great Outdoors, and Scrooged while the TIME 'People' snippet concentrated solely on Scrooged -- something of a bigger deal than your normal big screen comedy given the 1988 release was Bill Murray's first "starring" foray since Ghostbusters (important enough a Lewiston, Idaho theater brought it to town, providing an accommodating if not life-altering experience. Meanwhile, Funny Farm and The Great Outdoors proved underwhelming home viewing experiences. This didn't stop me from buying a movie poster of the former and push-pinning it on my bedroom wall).
At some point the obvious solution to constant checkout presented itself, and I Xeroxed the articles. I must have. I still possess the Xerox copies of a 1983 People magazine article celebrating Chevy Chase's Vacation movie success and the 1988 Newsweek behind-the-scenes report from the London set of Tim Burton's first Batman film as well as several William Gibson articles, a Starlog Douglas Adams interview, and innumerable newspaper clippings devoted to media figures. Having recycled dozens of Premiere and Rolling Stone issues over the last few years, it only stands to reason multitudes of Xeroxed articles and clippings experienced the same pulpish fate.
My addiction to movie news seems so quaint compared to the current allowable state.
Armed with phones, co-workers a good 20 years my senior scroll and swipe and flick past information for minutes at a time. I don't think they are particularly seeking anything other than an outlier. It's like running your fingers over a flat surface, only coming to a stop upon the blemish. Blemish investigated, the search resumes.
When I collected comic books, most courtesy the Westfield subscription service, I gleamed some industry knowledge from Bullpen Bulletins but most of the comic book education sourced from The Westfield Newsletter, the 'bonus' tucked in with my monthly wad.
In one preview of the summer's upcoming releases, the Amazing Heroes Preview Special was touted by The Westfield Newsletter as a must-have for the simple reason that 'often reading about comics is more fun than reading the comics themselves.'
It would be impossible to find the human being who would actually read a Preview Special cover-to-cover. Clocking in at 146 pages, for example, the summer 1986 Preview Special hosts teeny-tiny type inviting browsing rather than submersion.
Fun could be the driver in people's phone habits. Swiping through a vast multitude of possible immersion points bestows a certain godlike air. You stay as informed as most other people. Knowledge is a mercurial, liquid concept. There are levels of knowledge, deep to intermediate to surface to surface-fleeting. Come the deluge every waking second, surface-fleeting acts as status quo, a placeholder until the next device arrives, gimmick-rich, attention-thinning, fracturing the current state into even more tranches. The important part is that the processor works and information flows. Knowledge of the information is superseded by the knowledge that there is information.
I would say I am as sick as every person owned by their phone. Just in a different way.
Comic book collecting and then the movie obsession were states controlled by narrow supply, income level, and tactile experience. The Hey !! Kids Comics spinner typical to grocery stores could store only a finite amount of goods. The Westfield Comics monthly order form could only list so much, and I could only buy so much. My movie viewing habits were limited by the local grocery store stocked titles and the timeclock my parents were on when we went to town, first Pendleton, and then later, Lewiston.
It's not to say that there aren't time and financial limits facing people possessing nomadic devices but those aside, in the moment, the interaction with something as basic as browsing the Newsarama homepage presents multiple links, multiple opportunities to start drilling down (although the likelihood of sequential progress is anathema to our friend the cloud).
Thrusting teenaged-Me into a world where the whole world more or less could rest in my hands frightens me. My capacity for focused thought is as damaged as anyone living in the world of screens. I can't help but worry that any adult that might steer the 2017-thrust teenaged-Me clear of phone-addiction/normal phone-use would be the type of animal I often see walking down the street, pocketing their device for a full ten-count before drawing it back out of its temporary holster, signing in, and then rejoining the slow-motion murder of their brain, now in progress.
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