Space baby monitor. Natalie Meilinger’s baby monitor is acting strangely. Instead of monitoring her children, the baby monitor is picking up live video from inside NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis. The mother of two is fascinated with the video feed. “I’ve been addicted to it and keep waiting to see what’s next,” Meilinger said.

World wide web. More than 1.1 billion of the world’s estimated 6.6 billion people are now online. Nearly 300 million people, almost a third of those online, access the internet on high-speed lines. The US has the most broadband users with more than 60 million subscribers. China is in second place with with more than 56 million and quickly closing the gap. South Korea has the world’s greatest percentage of broadband users with nearly 90% of households online. Internet usage in developing countries, especially in Africa, lags behind the rest of the world. Many of these emerging economies lack basic telephone service, never mind access to the internet.

Mark Roberts reflects on his blog about how easy it is today to find and purchase music from the comfort of your own home, as opposed to the “old way” of going out and buying it in a store. He has some good thoughts on the convenience of technology as well as some of the dangers of instant gratification.

His post reminded me of the Herculean lengths I used to go to find music when I was younger. I spent hours browsing the secondhand record stores, searching for out-of-print treasures like People’s “I Love You” and Larry Norman’s “So Long Ago the Garden.” When my mother went to England to visit relatives, I pleaded with her to try and find the European version of Mark Heard’s “Fingerprint.”

When I was in college, I started listening to Canadian guitarist/songwriter Bruce Cockburn. His most recent material could be tracked down in the states, but you could only find his earlier records in Canada. So, while on a family vacation in northern New Hampshire one summer, I took an all day trek into Canada, stopping at every record store I could find buying up Bruce’s back catalogue. I remember coming back to our cabin in New Hampshire with my arms full of record albums I could not play because we had no record player in the cabin. All week long I studied the album jackets, reading the lyrics and the liner notes, wondering what the music was like. When I got home and put the records on the stereo, I was not disappointed.

I still have all of these treasures on vinyl LP. I eventually ended up re-buying them on CD. The vinyl records are sitting in a cardboard box in the storage closet down in the basement, while their CD counterparts sit proudly upstairs in the living room next to the entertaiment center. And now I could find any of these items online within minutes for either purchase or download.

I like and appreciate the convenience of the internet. I wouldn’t want to go back to the old way of purchasing music anymore than I would want to listen to records on vinyl instead of CD or MP3. But, I have to admit, it was a lot of fun hunting them down the old way. Those are good memories. I wouldn’t trade the internet for the old way, but I wouldn’t trade my memories for the internet either. I just might have to break open that box of vinyl in the basement later today and browse some more liner notes.

Related post: Media Access for the Next Generation