Something that may be under-appreciated about new media, at least in the present time, is its capacity to serve as a digital record of a person's lifespan content.
In 1984, I was a student at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) and working as sports editor of The Daily Helmsman, the four-day-per-week campus newspaper. At the time, Memphis State's men's basketball team was a top 25 powerhouse, reaching the NCAA Final Four in 1985 before losing to eventual national champion Villanova.
That meant I got to cover a lot of home games that were also being nationally televised. It was a rather exciting scene for a 19-year-old journalist, but I was more focused on my work for the campus newspaper during each game and didn't think much about games once they were completed, unless it was to review statistics or consider an angle for an upcoming article. As time passed and I moved on to other places and people to write about, I gave little, if any, thought about my basketball beat at Memphis State.
But that was before this occurred last weekend:
While on YouTube after looking at a college basketball-related link, I unexpectedly discovered that someone had uploaded several full game broadcasts of Memphis State basketball from 1984 and 1985. Although you can't make out the faces in the background (this was well before HD broadcasting), I am one of the people sitting at the media table between both team benches in these videos. As I began watching the game and the TV camera panned across the court, I became acutely aware of what I was experiencing -- here I was in Austin, Texas, in 2013, watching a college basketball game that I was also watching in Memphis, Tennessee, nearly 30 years earlier. Not only that, but my present self was watching my past self watch the game, and my past self was sitting there on press row with no idea that his future self would one day be watching the same game through technology that didn't exist yet and a concept called "new media."
Granted, it's not exactly the same game; one is a live event, the other is an electronic recording of the event. However, it does provide a strange type of parallax effect, psychologically and sensorially. The content is the same and so is much of the stimuli - things like the sounds of the pep band playing, the sight of players running back and forth on the court, and the feelings of drama and excitement as the game continues. All of this triggers memory, which produces its own stimuli and it isn't long before I start to re-experience other details of that point in time and space, like chowing down on hot dogs and chips in the media hospitality room before the game, or patiently awaiting a sports information department assistant to bring paper copies of the game stats at halftime.
Until this particular Saturday evening, two journalists, actually the same person, were blissfully unaware of such a peculiar connection across the time-space continuum.
One of us still doesn't know.
