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Now here's a question for you. 

Imagine you just wrote a novel about phone tapping and you wanted an image for the cover to illustrate the theme. What might you use? I suggest you might end up with a picture of good old reel to reel tape. 

I suppose an image of an audio cassette might work, but old fashioned tape seems to have entered the public consciousness as the tool of choice for evil back room boffins.

The truth is that audio is recorded direct to computer disk or memory chip these days. I imagine a picture of a memory stick hardly says Watergate to the public imagination. This is strange since more and more people have never actually seen an old style recorder.




I have a big box of old reel to reel tapes in the loft together with a 1970s unrepairable Tandberg recorder. All those years ago I would record a new LP directly to tape and then save the LP and play the tape. It was a long and imperfect process.

How times change.

Comments

  1. Jim Huckle25 November 2011 at 09:54

    My dad has one of those in his loft!

    Reminds me of another example of anachronistic imagery - when someone wants to visually communicate something to do with railways (e.g. "beware of trains" signs or whatever) they nearly always use an image of a steam train. Especially in kids' stuff - how many kids even know what a steam train is? And yet somehow it works, because as soon as they see it they think "trains"...

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