Two, eight-hour videotapes – both of unimaginable poor quality – were my windows to the universe.
You can have your dog-eared copy of a favourite paperback. I had my tapes. A clunky video cassette recorder, as big as a microwave, was the first extravagance I remember my family purchasing. And for me, it was a godsend from Sony. On that device, I captured so many early pop culture influences on my youth – or at least the number of pop culture influences I could find on three and a half television channels.
Late-night monster movies. Carson and Letterman. Baseball games.
To the recording of each, I brought a Scorsese-like hand – hitting the pause button at just the right moment to eliminate commercials, hitting it again as the show returned. In the early 1980s, those videotapes were my YouTube.
I saw the movie Airplane at least 50 times one summer because I had it on videotape. To my parents, this explains a lot about their son today.
Then came the night I recorded Cosmos.
To be honest, I missed the first episode, but school banter among friends about the show over the next week had me searching out the next episode. (Needless to say, thanks to the previous sentence, you are now aware I was among the ‘cool kids’ at school. Odds are also even one of us was wearing a Tom Baker-inspired Dr. Who scarf during those conversations.)
In the end, I crammed 12 episodes of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage onto two videotapes, probably recording over a handful of treasured baseball games whose tapes I was convinced would be ‘worth something some day.’ You don’t realize that now, but that was a big decision.
I watched those shows continuously during Christmas break, and then on into the next year. I was amazed at what I saw – a world, a universe, far bigger than Mattoon, Ill. And I was hooked.
Keep in mind, my generation was educated with Baby Boomer leftovers. We had little-to-no technology that wasn’t disintegrating. VCRs were out of the question. (My grade school desks still had unused ink wells.) It was education by lecture and memorization – sit down, eyes forward, repeat after me.
On those two videotapes, however, I saw a new way of learning I had never experienced. And that has stuck with me since.
I flashed back to those days last weekend as I watch the revived Cosmos series starring celebrity-scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson as host. It was a noble effort, although, I do have fears of watching science presented on a Fox network (“Are the Laws of Thermodynamics overburdening the universe with regulation?”).
Surely, there are no more 8-year-olds as naive of the world as I was. Nevertheless, I hope some are inspired by what they see.
Knowledge changes lives. Such a simple statement, but I often forget it. Caught up in the day-to-day, I forget about what new knowledge can do for me. Wide-eyed wonder is harder to come by in my middle age, but I still seek it out.
As a university, we tend to worry so much. The politics inherent in any organization seems to dominate so many conversations. But I hope we pause to remember our power. We worry so much about the process behind communicating the knowledge we possess, we often forget about the power of that knowledge we are communicating.
The knowledge we possess will always be new to someone – just as it was to that 8-year-old kid in the middle of cornfields 35 years ago. We are someone’s discovery moment.
As one of the lucky ones, who gets to spend time in a classroom as a student, I still have them – provided to me by the wonderful men and women who have taught me these last few years. I treasure that knowledge just as so many like me do.
I just won’t be carrying them around on videotape anymore.