Saturday 8 October 2011

Perspectives on boxes and bags

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


9 October

A carrier-bag can give rise to some strange, if related, thoughts. The one in question was given to me when I bought some books from Amnesty yesterday, which I later saw declared itself to have been made from a potato (I think).

From there, a short hop (which ignored the feeling that it was sturdier than whatever the ones from the shop that hardly ever helps are made from) to attempts to make CD boxes with little (a moulded tray glued to a fold-up card cover) or no plastic (the same thing, but with a slot into which the CD can be pushed home).

Which, because of the way that DVD boxes look, would be difficult to replicate with them – but is there any reason, other than convention, why they should be any other shape or size than a CD box? CDs and DVDs are visually indistinguishable, and many players will also work with the former, so are we really so incapable of knowing which we are looking at or buying that the box has to have (such) a different format?

Its only – slight – justification is that it bears a resemblance to a VHS box (the video being the predecessor of the DVD), but, of course, it does not contain something of those proportions to warrant it, but, rather, what could be, and needs as little packaging as, a CD. (And those proportions are largely observed by the boxes for BluRay® discs.)

Perhaps someone knows the answer… Perhaps the same person can, then, explain what appears to be the redundancy in the term ‘carrier-bag’.


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