The human cost of a forced upgrade: What we lose when technology platforms fade away – Salon

In the new Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, high schooler Hannah Bakers suicide note is divided into seven cassette tapes, and each episode is split up by which side of the cassette is being listened to: side A or side B. When her co-worker Clay first receives the box of cassettes, they show up on his doorstop in a heavy shoebox, slathered shut with paper and tape. His first task is figuring out how to actually listen to Hannahs cassettes: he tries his dads old boom box (did they actually call it that? he asks his father when asking permission), then steals his friends Walkman. As the series continues, Clay fuses technologies from different eras together: The click and spin of the cassette tape delivers Hannahs story to Clays ears through black-and-red Beats Headphones.

There is something particularly intimate about listening to Hannahs reasons over seven tapes. The physical presence of the tapes exists in stark contrast to the lack of physical presence of Hannah. Throughout 13 Reasons Why, Hannah is a ghost that Clay is desperately searching for as he tries to understand why his friend and crush would take her own life. The tapes are clunky, heavy and hard to carry around they exist in the series as a constant physical connection to Hannah, even after she is gone. Each artifact, covered in deeply feminine doodles of flowers and labeled with a number painted in deep blue nail polish, is a concrete reminder of who she was.

But the cassettes also seem to tap into our current nostalgia for 80s tchotchkes, from the big clunky computers and TV sets in the world of The Americans to the glorious video game consoles and old-school card catalogues in Stranger Things. As someone who grew up thinking knowing! that CD technology was superior to cassettes, its fascinating to see a technology that was once maligned as schlocky and unsophisticated upheld now as a rich source of intimacy between creator and listener.

And that evolution is constant. Today we are constantly and rapidly ushered into using new modes of communication, which unlike the clunky VHS tapes and video rental stores of the past can also disappear without leaving a trace. When Google makes the decision to dissolve the classic messaging system Gchat in favor of Google Hangouts, for example, most users simply accept the adoption of the new technology as a natural and necessary step.

This passive trust in companies to enable us to communicate better can end up minimizing the diverse and creative ways that people actually use technology. Shortly after Twitter dissolved the short-form social video platform Vine, for example, numerous articles came out highlighting the ways Vines disappearance is a kind of cultural loss, especially for young black artists. Vine was easily accessible and inexpensive, something that young people with a phone could easily use to craft narratives with art and humor.

The question of who gets to continue using a kind of technology is a question of power who gets to claim that a communication tool is meaningful or who gets to cast it off as pointless is more and more a decision that is made by corporations rather than people. Were not supposed to mourn the death of Vine, just as we werent supposed to mourn the death of MySpace when Facebook went into wide use. Were supposed to see all texting as the same, even though texting from my Nokia was an entirely different experience than texting on my iPhone. We diminish the emotional nature of these near constant correspondences, pretending that daily messaging does not also inspire a potent kind of intimacy, one that isnt exactly the same as letter writing and one that isnt exactly the same as sharing a phone call.

Appreciating these daily forms of communication is also about more than preservation. In 30 years well probably have a slew of TV shows that highlight the unique ways in which the primitive technologies we use today inspired real connection. But in a world full of interchangeable and disposable things, there is value not only in unplugging from an overly connected world but from actually valuing the specific ways that we are plugged in to one another, too. This means recognizing that Facebook stickers and Snapchat posts actually do mean something to the person on the other end of a screen.

In the final scenes of 13 Reasons Why, Hannahs parents are given Hannahs tapes as 13 digital audio files with the instructions to listen to them in order. By the time Hannahs parents hear their daughters voice, we in the audience have heard the first line of Hannahs tapes many, many times, and can tell how, even though the files allow the Bakers a glimpse at their daughters story, the full impact seems a bit gentler and more muted from the experience her peers had of opening the box and pulling out those cassettes her hands had touched.

Of course, this difference is imperceptible to Hannahs parents, even though her mother has been searching for a physical and emotional connection to her daughter from the very beginning of the series. In one of the most moving scenes, we see Mrs. Baker paint a blue stripe on one of her fingernails using her daughters favorite blue nail polish the same one Hannah used to write numbers on her tapes.

In the final scene of 13 Reasons Why that features Hannahs parents, we see her mother and father prepare to listen to their daughters last words together. They hold hands as they click on the first of many nondescript wav files on their nondescript Dell computer, frightened of what they may be about to hear, but also eager to connect in any way they can.

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The human cost of a forced upgrade: What we lose when technology platforms fade away - Salon