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Something Old, Something New (And Nothing at All That’s Blue)

 Here’s something most of us never talk much about: all the stuff that’s quietly going away.

It might be dirt roads in your neighborhood or the grass downtown. It might be wristwatches or monocles (although that latter bit of eyewear is said to be, amazingly, catching on again among the hipsters these days). It might be hard-copy newspapers and magazines. Someday, it might even be Facebook and Twitter.

And while there are occasional news stories about the things that are disappearing, more often than not, you simply wake up one day and realize that you really haven’t used your Walkman cassette player for, oh, about two or three decades. It’s still in your drawer underneath a stack of bills, but you don’t even know if you bothered to take the batteries out so they won’t explode and leak all over the place. Oh yeah, I guess even those stacks of bills are now being replaced with online reminders and calendar items in Quicken, aren’t they?

Here’s why I was thinking about these sorts of things this week: I was sorting through a whole bunch of possible stories for our weekly Culture Clips column and ran across a story about the continued fading of what used to be one of pop culture’s biggest things.

Blizzard, the company behind the online game World of Warcraft, admitted that it’s lost another 800,000 subscribers since March—the latest evidence of steady erosion of the once wildly popular game. There are now 6.8 million subscribers for World of Warcraft, down from 12 million the game had at its peak.

I rather quickly (and almost thoughtlessly) discarded it as a possibility for the column, thinking, Everybody cares about things as they’re growing, when they’re new and rosy-cheeked. Nobody really needs to know that WoW has lost yet another million users. Nobody really wants to know. What good does it do anyone, anyway? Well, maybe not much, at least not directly. But I’ve realized that I do think it’s important to note the changes happening around us, and not just decades later. We should make note of how technology is changing our daily habits. How more lenient movie ratings are changing what we watch. How increasingly lax language standards on TV are changing the way we talk.

There’s always something new that comes along to replace the old. Something growing that replaces what’s dying. Which means we should be constantly evaluating what’s better and what’s worse about those transitions.