Among the purge will include at least a couple hundred audio cassettes and near 150 VHS tapes that I will never listen to or watch again. Yet I remember when the aggregation of such media used to be one of the cornerstones of my life. I would spend painstaking hours dubbing my vinyl onto cassette or copying from friends. I got into the habit of trying to faithfully reproduce artwork from original albums onto my home recorded cassettes, some of which had the most divergent sides A & B imaginable.
I have fond memories of plowing through the used movie bins at video rental stores to scoop up tapes for less than the cost of a rental. And, admittedly, more often than not, purchasing films that I still have never watched, but purchased just because the low cost seemed to really make sense at the time.
I spent most of my high school years scouring the vinyl bins for used vinyl and obscure live bootlegs of my favorite bands that I haven't listened to in years. There was, at one time, a sense of this rare, collector status that these bootlegs had. I paid WAY too much money on poorly recorded vinyl from early 70's performances at Earl's Court or The Fillmore, which were like manna from the heavens on my dad's turntable and eventually recorded onto sides A & B of a Maxell XLII-S.
And beyond the music and movie media, I find it somehow harder to divorce myself from paper. I've got shelves of novels I will never read again. I've got boxes of sports cards that I haven't looked at in years and will never look at again. I've also got boxes of comic books painstakingly wrapped in plastic with cardboard backing that sit abandoned in the back corner of my +1 basement bedroom. The paper is harder to get rid of than the vinyl or tapes because they really haven't found an adequate way to reproduce the experience of reading long-form in a comfortable way. I know all of you Kindle acolytes will sneer in disdain, but at the back of your minds, you know I'm right.
I just got a flyer in my mailbox that my neighborhood is planning a "street/garage sale" this October. Maybe I can become the de facto pop culture/media seller on the street. Of course most of the kids that live around here will have to ask their parents what VHS tapes are and why the comic books don't appear as flash animations on their desktops.
Of course the biggest heart-wrenching terror is the day I decide to dump all of my burned CDRs which number somewhere close to a thousand... but once the cloud is properly seeded, and the world archive of music is at my disposal from a mobile device, I suppose I will be able to abandon everything... I wonder how many years it will take for us to purge thumbdrives and SD cards?