In a few years, it will seem almost quaint that anyone ever worked in a video rental store, a record store or even a bookshop. Now that we can transmit movies, songs and books at megabytes per second, getting paid to stand in a room and sell physical storage media suddenly looks as strange and inefficient as sending a text message by bike courier.

At the same time, though, something is lost in this transition. When I lived in Louisville, Ky., I used to love visiting stores like Wild and Woolly Video and Ear X-tacy Records. Last fall, Ear X-tacy shuttered its doors and, though Wild and Woolly remains open, most other video stores have been crowded out by grocery store dispensers and web-based distributors.

With the closure of these businesses, there’s no longer such a thing as a fortuitous find. When virtually anything you might want is available for download, or for a modest shipping fee, it’s difficult to recover the thrill of discovery. Online, if I look for Master of the Flying Guillotine or the new Xiu Xiu album, that’s exactly what I will get.

Digitized, the aura of distance and rarity disappears — along with advice from the expert clerk and the fellow browser. It was always a gamble to get whatever staff or friends might recommend, but at least you would have the small enjoyment of imagining what led them to suggest it in the first place. Now, Amazon algorithms just repeat back to us what we already want but don’t know yet. Instead of risking disappointment and broadening our horizons, we follow a computerized projection of our past behavior.

Even the notion of wasting time at an entertainment store goes the way of the cobbler. Buying or renting things used to involve all sorts of indecisive faffing about, and that was part of the fun. With the internet, media gratification can be nearly instantaneous, annihilating all anticipation.

Of course, the analog shopping experience was sometimes an enormous hassle. Outside of cities, inane chain stores like Borders and Blockbuster dominated the entertainment landscape. Meanwhile, the mom and pops often carried meager selections, and more than a few were staffed by judgy curmudgeons.

So, why mourn them at all? Part of what’s depressing about the extinction of places like video rentals and the record store is the unsettling feeling that the world of one’s youth is moldering away.

We can be sure, too, that our ancestors before had quite similar complaints. But then, as Peter de Vries once observed, “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.” Instead of Walter Benjamin’s book collector unpacking the library to find the dwelling places of his past inside, we now have an effectively limitless capacity for collection, a nostalgia machine of prodigious dimensions — the Web.

In cyberspace, every childhood jingle can be replayed and remixed ad nauseam. Even as their social context disintegrates, our media memories become infinitely reproducible, losing sentimental value through inflation. We no longer have even the grace of forgetting in our own way.

At the same time, online data does not have the same visual and tactile permanence as its obsolete counterpart. Unlike the spines on my bookshelf, my Kindle files do not provide a daily reminder of novels read, nor does a screen of MP3s have the same historical heft as a CD collection. Despite a computer’s seeming ability to recall everything, a full hard drive does not offer the same fixity and reassurance as older media collections.

Why, though, does the collector even need his souvenirs? Here we might consult the wisdom of A&E’s “Hoarders.” Through its cheesy television psychiatry, we learn that compulsive hoarding compensates for some past trauma or insecurity. It is a way of storing up for a disaster that one can never fully prepare for.

Nostalgia, then, is the compulsive hording of the past and the trauma it fends off is the foreknowledge of death, the end of one’s time. We invent ever-sophisticated devices for recording the ghosts of previous moments, but quickly the institutions we’ve built around these specters change and break down, too. Even if the archives don’t perish to fire or the worm, the archivists soon will.

But now, even as rental DVDs join the ranks of laserdiscs and coin-operated gramophones, my own memento mori will be transmitted online and stored by automated web-crawlers, perhaps unread but, nevertheless, collected and saved by inhuman manifestations of an insatiable desire to preserve, a desire those machines will outlast.

JORDAN S. CARROLL is a Ph.D. student in English who can be reached at jscarroll@ucdavis.edu.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who spent more than three minutes with me this weekend, but “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen may just be the crowning achievement of the human race.

Because I could write 8,000 words on the violin composition alone I think it’ll be best to break this down in an organized way.

So first, there’s the Justin Bieber/Selena Gomez music video of Bieber and his crew lip syncing the song. The tween power couple invited over some friends and made a terrible video, but I guess people liked it enough and the song blew up. I’ve been told Biebs signed Carly Rae Jepsen to his label or something.

Next, the Harvard Baseball team did their own homage to the song with a lip sync plus some dance in a van on a road trip.  Although well-executed, the moves were boring and I still can’t believe I watched the whole thing.

Now, fast forward to this weekend. For whatever reason, I woke up on Friday with the song in my head, yet I only knew a few lyrics. You know how that goes. I downloaded the song before going out with plans to drop the song when the moment was right.

At a friend’s house, I manned the auxiliary cable. When I sensed the moment was right, I cued up my girl to play next. Before I could even get to the second verse of my favorite Robyn song, I was approached by two such people who were looking to hear “Call Me Maybe.”

I told them that believe it or not, Carly Rae was coming up next, but they weren’t having it. They needed it now. I sensed the urgency and cut off Robyn. The violins kicked in and soon the party was swinging its hips to the verse, building up to the crescendo that is the chorus.

When it hit, it was clear what was happening. We party-goers looked into each others’ eyes without shame or inhibition. Strangers moments ago, now passengers together on a journey to the unknown, we sang loud and without fear, never more aware of our own mortality or sobriety of our future-selves. And that was before we even put it on loop.

After the third play, I realized that there was nothing else left to do but to text everyone in my phonebook with “Call me maybe.” I received a multitude of responses, some comical, some excited and some shocked that I would endorse such a “mainstream song.”

But this wasn’t about what is mainstream or what is cool. In an hour or so, the song had transcended pop, music and mainstream culture. The line “call me maybe” is so multi-dimensional and telling of our generation that it’s almost shocking it took until 2012 for someone to come up with it. The advent of cellphones has made concrete plans non-existent. You can call me, or not call me; no biggie.

But the juicier meaning is probably that of the balance between insecurity and confidence in our modern dating scene. “Maybe” acts as a sort of barrier or shield as we’re hesitant to go “all in” in today’s “hook-up” generation. The line speaks to the power balance of courtship, maintaining a nonchalance that’s undoubtedly attractive, especially in a casual sense.

As I made my way to the bars, telling everyone I passed to “call me, maybe” was as much a proclamation of youthful empowerment as it was an invitation to actually give me a ring on my telephone, maybe.

The next morning I was directed to the official music video which changed my life forever. In obvious opposition to Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory, Carly, who is 25 but looks 16, creeps on a good-looking guy from her bedroom window. The guy takes his shirt off to reveal a number of tattoos because I guess having “the sky is the limit” tatted across your collarbone is what it takes to be a male model these days.

Carly sings in a garage with her band who looks like they just finished opening for Yellowcard and the video cuts to images of Carly trying to get the guy’s attention.  When she finally does, we are hit with the greatest plot twist in music video history since “Trapped in the Closet.” Carly’s crush is gay. BOOM.

I’m just shocked. Carly’s flipped this whole song on its head. The video that seemed to be the definition of male objectification, turned into a statement on heteronormativity. What can’t you do, Carly Rae?

If you want to use a different gender theorist to dissect the video, you can e-mail ANDY VERDEROSA, maybe at asverderosa@ucdavis.edu.

On the afternoon of Nov. 18 last year, my friend and I had been sitting in the CoHo making travel plans for Christmas break. Afterwards I decided to go to the library to work on a paper. It was grey outside and I was worried that it might start raining soon. But then something much more important was happening just 300 feet away on the Quad.

Lots of people, police cars, chaos, firefighters pouring water over red-eyed students, all in a one-minute bike ride. What on Earth had happened there?! I found out soon enough. Over Twitter, of course!

My initial reaction to the events on the Quad was mixed. Police actions were despicable and totally inappropriate. But was building some tents really the best way to express your dissatisfaction with increase in tuition fees? And to call that “Occupation”? I’ll use my “My home country was occupied by Soviets for half of the 20th century” card to make my point clearer — the whole tent village thing was just childish.

It’s really not my place to have an opinion about the matter, though. As an exchange student, I am using the University’s services and facilities without paying any tuition. But having experienced this rise in fees firsthand in three countries, I feel strongly about what’s happening with our education systems.

University fees went up in Lithuania just before I finished high school, affecting my classmates and fellow seniors. Last year, I witnessed the heated (literally!) student protests in London and followed discussions in Scotland over implementing tuition for students from other European Union countries. And now, it’s the University of California’s turn.

While I’m not a fan of occupation, I fully support the backlash against rising tuition fees. Education should be accessible and it shouldn’t be a debt sentence! Although I believe that paying for education is the best investment in life, the proposed fees are too high and unjustified.

Another thing I don’t understand is why the current students are being affected by the raise. In the UK, the new tripled rates only apply to first-year students; those already studying will continue to pay the same amount as they did when they started. But here, while freshmen know what they’re getting themselves into, older students are feeling tricked — they didn’t sign up for this.

I’m sad to see that there’s so much disagreement on such an important matter. Worse yet, increases in fees don’t automatically mean better-quality studies, newer facilities, higher-rated teachers and so on. I understand that it’s a long process, but not enough is done to ensure that it will be students who benefit the most.

So nothing’s left but to protest. The events that followed the pepper spray incident were incredibly moving and empowering of the whole community. The international coverage provided an amazing opportunity to show the world what UC Davis students are capable of — a civilized, well-planned movement with clearly formulated, smart goals. I was so proud to be an Aggie.

As for the Davis Dozen, that’s a whole other story. As a U.S. Bank customer, I was affected directly by their “occupation” of the branch. Not being able to use bank services because of someone blocking the door was annoying. But university administration response – the black tape and some signs – was just as ridiculous.

My selfish reasons aside, I don’t think what protesters were doing was smart or achieved anything other than driving U.S. Bank off of campus. The sit-in was not an appropriate method for the protesters’ goal, and their reasons did not find support on campus — that’s why it’s only a Dozen, and not a Thousand.

Nonetheless, we need to speak up against these unwelcome changes. The response of the campus community and public in general to the pepper spray incident was fantastic. I think that’s what we need to actually start changing things for the better. So, peacefully and intelligently, let’s protest.

You can reach KRISTINA SIMONAITYTE at ksimonaityte@ucdavis.edu.