I’m a little bit too old to be a digital native, the media sphere of my youth was comprised of an electric meshnet of cable TV, the VCR, and a camcorder. With these now primitive tools I cobbled together my analog worldview.

One of my earliest memories, around the age of 3, is an obsession with the rewind button on the VCR. I had a VHS recording of the Looney Tunes short film “Duck Amuck” that I would obsessively watch over and over again. In the cartoon Daffy Duck gets into an argument with his animator, which escalates into a surreal metafictional hullabaloo. As soon as the story reached it’s epic conclusion, with a long press of a button, I’d return again to the beginning. An interactive, non-linear, medium aware, story circle, repeating again and again and again, until! I broke the RWD button. One of the first times I remember ever really getting into trouble as a kid.

Broken RWD buttons were epidemic in early 80’s VCRs, resulting in the proliferation of a separate device made just for rewinding VHS cassettes. Ours looked like a red sports car. It’s little engine roared as it rewound tapes back to their beginnings at incredible speed. VHS tape rewinding etiquette may eventually come to the attention of future anthropologists, wondering about the cultural significance of the ancient aphorism “Be Kind, Rewind.”