The ever changing face of how we entertain ourselves

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THE very first time I was ever in a cinema was in the year 1957 when I was in primary one when my school St Thomas’s Primary, had arranged for a group concession for all its  students to watch The Ten Commandments which had been released months earlier in October 1956 in the United States. It was a life changing moment – and when the scene of the parting of the Red Sea was one the greatest ‘miracle’ of the modern era to a young boy of seven at that time.

Now let’s fast forward to more than sixty years later to the present day.

You can choose to watch that same movie, The Ten Commandments on your hand held device – a smart phone which is roughly 5 inches long diagonally, or on your i-Pad of around 10 inches across or on your flat widescreen television screen which averages 60 inches across.

You are free to watch it on streaming, on a subscribed network like Netflix, or downloaded for free on torrents, or by way of a blu-ray DVD player; at your own chosen time, at your own leisure. You can adjust the sound, the colour contrast and choose your preferred subtitles and of course you can also pause for a break to grab a snack or drink, or go to the toilet as you may wish. You can return to watch the same movie over and over again; slow it down to scrutinize frame by frame, scene by scene and even ‘screenshot’ any favourite scene if you’re viewing it on your smart phone! You can also send the link of it to your friend, by email, WhatsApp or any text or social media forum.

Similarly you can do the same thing with music and books – be it an entirely recorded album or just a single track; a book, a magazine or anything else that you so wish.

At this moment in time, at this particular point in human history, we still have not yet exhausted the ways and means and the methods by which mankind will further develop and progress in its ingenuity to continue to advance in the ways that we are seeking to entertain ourselves.

Right now the future is in creating the ultimate virtual reality (VR) which will have a global impact on the future of entertainment as we know it. This segment of the industry has yet to explode having only shown glimpses of what it is capable of. Just refer to a 1995 film of Kathryn Bigelow’s called Strange Days with Ralph Fiennes and you’d know precisely what I mean. In that futuristic sci-fi movie, Fiennes played a black marketer who sells the recorded memories of other people for profit and viewers can virtually view by VR on a specially created device those same memories. Both the sheer concept and the unlimited range of such futuristic ‘entertainment’ is thus limitless!

But is it ethical? Is it legal and lawful? How will our future law makers deal with such creativity and dangerous pursuits? Only time will tell.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s we were happy with the way we were being entertained. After all we had our radio sets transmitting us the news and talk shows and episodic stories of Sherlock Holmes relayed from the BBC in London. Some had better transistors which can tune into the Voice of America from Washington DC or to Redifusion in Singapore. Most of us were anxiously waiting for the weekends when the record requests programmes came on the air, with the soothing and perfectly annunciated voices of such radio announcers like Anne Tan, Selina Kedit, Tan Seng Lim, Anthony Ramanair, Roch Kueh, Sylvia Lim and Mildred Bateman and many others. Our hearts skipped that extra beat whenever our requests were played and our names and dedications read out. The songs weren’t that important if truth be told!

Other forms of entertainment during those long ago days were writing to pen-pals from all over the world; we used to spend our pocket money on buying stamps to affix to our letters which had gone to way out places like the United Kingdom, Africa, India, Australia and even just to Malaya or to Sabah. I had a great many pen-pals, as I am sure you had as well. Going to the public libraries like the British Council Library at the Sarawak Museum grounds and later to the American Consul library at Aurora Chambers; and for those who could afford to buy comics, magazines and books to the popular bookstores like Rex, Mayfair, Mong Soon, Chiang Wah Onn, Abdul Majid and Toko Mustafa.

Probably the most exciting outings we had most looked forward to were the ones to cinemas like Rex, Cathay, Odeon, Capital, Lido, Roxy and Miramar and Swee Hua when they were screening such box-office hits like Spartacus, Ben Hur, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Davy Crockett, Tarzan  and so many others.

I also remember the cheap Saturday and Sunday morning shows, when tickets were going for either 30 cents or 50 cents and second run shows like Jailhouse Rock, Giant, popular westerns and pop musicals and pulp fiction and Disney films were being shown. One could even see single seats being occupied by 2 small kids, until the lights went down and one of them would hurriedly scramble for the nearest untaken seat, ensuring they had escaped the cinema usher’s roving sharp eyes and his searching torchlight beam.

Such were the fun days of being young and carefree – and the whoops and shouts when the cavalry had ridden in to chase away the red Indians who had surrounded the wagon trail of pilgrims venturing into the American wild west!  Be it the Lone Ranger or Zorro or Tarzan or Superman – they were all heroes of the young cinema-going kids in the 1950s and 1960s!

There was a period in the 1980s to the 2000s when great strides were being made in the discovery of new devices and in the ways we had entertained ourselves. From the phonograph record in the 1950s to cassette tapes in the 1970s, then to the videotapes in the 1980s, then to the VCRs of the 1990s and eventually ending with laserdiscs, blu-ray DVDs and to today’s flash drives and external hard drive storage disks and devices – we have come a long way in a matter of less than fifty years! Today, streaming and network television is king of all content.

We can now just relax and sit back to enjoy a movie, a recorded piece of music, to read a magazine or a book and to even write our own or produce our own, simply by flipping a switch, punching a few keys, inserting a small device; transferring  money on-line, and you have delivered right to you in your armchair – whatever your heart desires!

We have Netflix to watch movies on, the internet to scour and search for any title of film, book, magazine, what-have-you, and streaming on YouTube, Spotify and what-not, to listen to a piece of music – any music that’s ever been composed or known to man, any movie ever made, any book ever written and it’s all there, right at your fingertips.

The future is here, and we are being entertained.

Praise God for all this!