Obsolete?

In many respects P and I are dinosaurs, with a home full of thirty and forty year old objects many of which might have been included in a time capsule long ago. For today's Mono Monday theme of things we could preserve now to be viewed in twenty years time, I turned to our walls crowded with shelves of books, DVDs, VHS video cassettes, CDs. cassette tapes and vinyl records (from the 1970s, not trendy new ones). Already, all these items could be replaced with digital files on hard drives, e-readers, and music and film streaming platforms. I hope we may still be here to enjoy our books in twenty years, as I prefer a volume in my hands to words on a screen, but I don't know if we will still be able to play the music and movies or whether the formats will be obsolete. We bought our first VHS video player in 1991, after J was born, partly to compensate for the curtailment of our cinema trips and partly because learning that she was profoundly deaf made us realise that after more than a decade without a televsion, visual media would need to play a greater part in our lives. Later, we upgraded to a Panasonic model with an integrated closed caption reader, and her early exposure to subtitles undoubtedly supported her developing literacy. It finally failed last year, and as we still have quite a lot of video cassettes, we were pleased to find an inexpensive near-identical model on Ebay. I still like to have CDs to play on our 1980s hi-fi system rather than digital downloads which I can only play through the tinny speaker on my laptop, enjoy the nostalgia of my teenage and student cassette tapes, and may have more DVDs than I will ever find time to watch. J, on the other hand, has abandoned her Disney videos and Pixar DVDs for the convenience of Disney+, where she still enjoys the old films, and because she is unable to hold a book independently, she was enthusiastic to use an e-book reader from the day she first saw them on Tomorrow's World; so I confidently expect that in future she will be part of the shelf-free generation whose media consumption will be entirely digital. I hope the power supply is reliable.   

Thank you Apollo Fly for hosting Mono Monday and for the interesting January themes.