The Smell of Media

My husband was telling me about how his younger office friend was asking if he'd seen The Sandlot.  He didn't remember it.  I said I remembered it coming out, but that I didn't see it....because it's a kid's film and I was graduating from high school the year it came out.

Yeah, a little bit of age discrepancy.

I tried to make him feel a bit better by making a quip about how his friend probably didn't remember record players...or the little 33 1/3 adapters....or how to properly drop the needle on the record, because they never really show the proper way to drop the needle in movies.  I guess it's just more dramatic to have someone drop the needle from their hand instead of positioning it and then using the little lever..and then the smell of the vinyl records in the yellowing paper sleeves...

...and then I got to thinking.

I KNOW.

I was thinking about how the new CDs and media- well, they don't have any smell.  They don't have anything memorable.  You'd never hear someone say, "Oh, I remember that first CD I ever got- opening up the case and the smell of plastic hitting me in the face while I nervously pushed a button to open the carousel..."

There's nothing poetic about it.  Nothing particularly memorable there.  CDs don't have a smell. The ink on the printed inserts has a smell, but not the CDs.

I started thinking about how smell is such an important part of memory.  And then I expanded on that and started thinking about how most of our world is now plastic and digital- few people have books (Kindles are removing books from homes at exponential rates)...Where's the sensory experience?  And with smell being such a large part of memory, are we really setting ourselves up for failure just because we can't remember what it smelled like when we Googled the location of Botswana?

Think about the last time you had a meaningful memory with a piece of technology....and then think about how easy it is to recall the first record you ever bought.

I'm really surprised that more studies haven't been done on this.  Smell-o-laptops and sites could be the wave of the future.