For some reason I recently was remembering what it was like to wander around a Blockbuster Video, and I realized there’s more to the fondness for this than nostalgia alone, especially when you compare it to the modern equivalent of swiping through thumbnails on your smart TV.
One of the qualities Blockbuster (or your favorite local video shop) had was its spatiality, something we would almost by definition have taken for granted at the time. This affords some unexpected benefits.
Passing your eyes over chest-high or sometimes floor-to-ceiling shelves of VHS boxes allowed you to scan movies at a much faster rate. You could (and often would) split up with a friend to take different sides of the shop, both of you meeting back up holding a tape or two to compare. This was more efficient (and more fun) than swiping through a view that shows you four or five thumbnails at a time. Holding a plastic box is easier than keeping the names of those movies six pagination screens to the left in your working memory.
Moreover, the physical zoning of genres helped to home in on what it was you were in the mood to watch. Standing in the suspense aisle was a very different feeling from standing in the comedy aisle, and the distance or proximity between movies would facilitate both the divergent thinking required to conjure a selection from memory, and the convergent thinking required to find the right pick within a specific genre.
A movie may strike your interest, and you may not remember its name, even as you remember where it was in the store you saw it.
Weird, scary, or otherwise intriguing box covers would taunt you from the same remembered corners of the shop every time you visited, until you gave into your curiosity and rented them. (For me it was “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings.”)
I’m sure there’s more! As limiting as the physical world can be compared to streaming, digitized content in the cloud, spatiality and materiality have a lot going for them that was invisible to us when it was all we had.