We were the first in our street to own a VCR. It was 1981 and the All Whites looked like they had a shot at getting into the World Cup.

The technology was freakishly expensive. I don’t remember what our 3-ton toploading beast cost, but I remember that the blank tapes ran to $25 each, and the first movie we rented (from long-lost giant Group Rentals) cost $12 overnight, with a $50 bond paid to ensure its safe return. The film was Dirty Harry. I was too young – but I sure as hell watched it.

It wasn’t long, of course, before our next door neighbours bought a Betamax machine – by far the better format, as far as I was concerned – and theirs had that holy grail of technology: a remote control. It was a single pause/unpause button on a stick, attached to the video recorder by a long wire. We were well impressed.

But the birth of the video was the beginning of the end of the Shared Media Experience: that street-emptying effect when the entire nation is glued to a single programme, whether Billy T or the All Whites vs Brazil (lost 4-0).

That was the last childhood generation to collectively be able to quote Molly Whuppie (“…and he ran, and she ran….”) and whose favourite breakfast announcer commanded a staggering 50% share of the market (before he threw it all in to play with train sets).

You could rely upon the fact that everyone else in the playground (or in the staffroom) had watched the same telly last night, and listened to the same radio that morning – and you could construct conversations on that basis.

Under conditions of media shift, things began to change in both societal terms – and personally. As I became a teen, my relationship with the family VCR began to reflect developing interests.

I have, or rather had, a videotape of a South Bank Show on The Smiths that was broadcast as a programme-within-a-programme on Radio With Pictures in the Dick Driver era. The tape is currently in perfectly playable (albeit grainy) condition, at a friend’s place back in Auckland. It documents the rise and fall of the band, and was put together just as they broke up

It survives, along with my now redundant collection of the Live Aid broadcast, from an era of tapes the size of Neal Stephenson novels. I have one or two friends who have enthusiastically borrowed and watched what seems to be the only collection of RWP tapes that haven’t succumbed to mold and damp while stored in cardboard boxes under Grey Lynn houses throughout the 1990s. That said, the tapes themselves – rather than just the content – seem to be remnants from another age.

Folowing the death of John Peel, there was a large number of television programmes of varying qualities devoted to the man, his life and his Catholic taste in music. I recorded several of these, and posted them to a friend in New Zealand, with whom I’d met Peel. The package was received with gratitude, but with the admission that he didn’t actually own a VCR – sorry.

And that’s the way things seem to be going. Dixons, a large electronics chain here in the UK, has announced that they will no longer stock VCRs.

Today’s Guardian has an obituary for the consumer electronics device that revolutionised copyright law, gave us the terms ‘time-shifting’ and ‘freeze frame’ and changed both the film and the television industries.

I have only this morning been accused of being an essentialist for insisting that Internet radio is something fundamentally different from over-the-air radio (more on which soon), but I can’t help feeling that the break between technologies of a digital nature and their electric predecessors (say, digital video after a period of VHS) is a significant phenomenon.

Radio under digital conditions is different from AM/FM radio. Digital video is different to VHS. They are not just different storage or transmission platforms – they are experientially different – and we can’t understand what we mean when we talk about radio or video unless we admit that. These are not continuations of structures, but breaks from them.

The love of a hamburger or an icecream is not the same love as the love of a pet or the love of a spouse. We need to be clear about what we mean when we talk about these things. If that’s essentialism, then so be it.

Call me a McLuhanist, I suppose – though I prefer the term ‘Media Ecologist‘.

Whatever. At the very least, the death of the videotape it means you’ll never again have to teach your parents how to set the clock on the damn thing ever again.

RIP VCR