Package Deal

Beneath my Television, in the cabinet of the entertainment center, are stacked just about every Clamshell and gem case I've ever bought. And their former contents? In the storage devices mentioned in the title.

I own 69 DVD titles at current count, with the total number of disks way over a hundred. It is about four cubic feet of packaging. I store the actual disks in a space about a third of a cubic foot, and I can carry these thing without the risk of scattering packages all around if I move wrong. I do the same with all the CDs and PC gamegame discs I get. There's a similar disparity.

I recall a time in which your average game package usually measured about the size of a thick textbook. Now, such games come in packages about the size of a thick trade paperback, if they don't come in gemboxes.

But the disks themselves? 4.75 inches apiece, typically. But size is a deceptive measure with Digital media. A regular DVD measures around 9 GBs on average. The latest RAID hard drive storage can put the information of about 277 DVDs in a machine that could fit inside my monitor.

Even that proportion fails to get to the scale of things if you realize that all the data we're talking about is imprinted or encoded on extraordinarily thin surfaces, that much of the machinery is purposed towards supporting. Your CD or DVD is merely a stable plastic surface on which is glued the actual material carrying the information, whether that's some polymer or the ultra-thin aluminum of a professionally pressed digital media disc. Hard Drives take it even further. The information is encoded on thin layers of a special material that stores information in incredibly small spaces. New internal harddrives carry 500 GBs of information apiece.

That's if you don't compress. Compress with something like the DiVX codec, and the storage of thousands of DVDs worth of visual information, tens of thousands of CDs, is available in that space (or more appropriately, that surface)

And surface is right. New technologies may take information storage for consumers into the third dimension, adding the advantages of cubic space to a field where information density is measure in squared units.

More and more, physical packaging becomes irrelevant to getting what we're looking for in the midst of all that: the meaning.

People tend to throw away packaging They see a bunch of it all over the place, and anybody who's seen disks stacked on one another directly (a great sin in my book), or laying around (don't even go there) knows that people can't always be bothered to put it back. The packaging after purchase is at most a convenient place to put things before and after they've been used.

Oh, but it's to be expected. This is an artistic business, and there are standards to be maintained, of course. I think it helps to understand how much the balance has changed. With film, then and now, the film occupies much physical space. Place all the canisters necessary to show 69 movies in a row- well you need a library. that many tapes would occupy a shelf. that many disks, I carry around in two thick wallets. I could toss them in a backpack and easily carry them. I guess, in a time where what contains the media is bigger and bulkier than the media itself, the packaging's got to have something nice to do.