I am really getting tired of reading stories like this one from Salon, where the author laments the passing of the old brick and mortar order and eulogizes (and romanticizes) the shop clerk. Woe to that lost class of gatekeepers, who recommended so many books and records and videos to the ignorant masses. Farewell, to those fabled institutions of culture which provided so much for so many.

Seriously, get a grip.

The art house video store and independent book shop might have been bastions of culture for people in the big metropolitan areas of the country, but to me, as a kid growing up in rural Maryland, I didn’t have access to any of that. Independent video stores, which is all we had for many years, stocked the hits, but they also stocked scores of low-rent b-horror movies and pornography. If you were looking for art house films, or a lesson in the French New Wave, you wouldn’t have bothered to ask Cletus behind the counter — he wouldn’t have known what the hell you were talking about.

Similarly, we had two book stores in town — Waldenbooks and Coles. Essentially mirror images of each other, they sat at opposite ends of the mall, and stocked best sellers, romance novels, a smattering of science fiction, magazines and a spinner rack of superhero comics. These were not stores that stocked Pulitzer prize winners, much less Brett Easton Ellis. And if you ventured downtown to the used book store located across the street from the public library, you would find a place full of aging best sellers (mostly of the supermarket variety) and romance novels, which it conveniently sold by the pound.

And if you loved music, then you had several choices around town — Waxie Maxies, Camelot (both at the mall), and Kix, an indpendent store. Each sold a wide variety of top forty records, although Camelot did have a respectable “Alternative” section which carried bands like the Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, The Circle Jerks, the Misfits and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Ironically, the independent Kix was the least likely to stock indies, whereas Camelot had a respectable selection (for western Maryland).

And this is the way it was for many years until Borders came to town and brought a wider selection of books and music. By then, though, I had moved out to Washington, D.C., where a much more eclectic group of stores was at my fingertips. However, I think it bears noting that after the closing of Go! Compact Discs in Arlington, VA in the mid-1990′s, most indie records had to be procured through mail order services and catalogs, or by sending carefully concealed cash to record labels advertising in ‘zines like Punk Planet and Maximum Rock’n Roll. Going to the beloved Silver Spring store Vinyl Ink often resulted in disappointment — they rarely stocked the records I was looking for, whereas the late lamented Go! had everything I wanted. Of course, Go! went out of business.

Which brings me to my point here — the old order saw much of the country cut off from the flow of interesting art being produced in metropolitan centers. The only available music and books were produced for the lowest common denominator. “Cool” wasn’t just out of reach and inaccessible — it was completely unknowable. And Borders, for all its former greatness, had been run into the ground by people outside the book trade, a shadow of what it used to be.

Digital distribution is killing brick and mortar stores — not just devices like iPod, the iPad and Kindle, but also big online retailers like Amazon that carry just about everything. And this is a sad thing for the people worked for those stores and the business people who ran them, but is it a sad thing for consumers? Culture — art, music, books, film — is now available to everyone, regardless of where they reside in the country. It is no longer the sole domain of the coastal elites, but is available to everyone. Would a band like Arcade Fire have hit number one on Billboard before the advent of digital sales? Not a chance — no mall record store would have ever stocked them. But now everyone has as much access to Arcade Fire as they do to Lady Gaga. And that is a good thing.

With my iPad, or a low-cost Kindle, I can begin reading any book I want right now. It doesn’t require me going to a book store and hoping they have it in stock, hoping I stumble onto something, or hoping that a clerk will give me a good recommendation. I can research what people are thinking about it, and I can also contribute to the conversation. I think back to how I struggled to find contemporary literary fiction or obscure scifi titles at Waldenbooks — it’s all accessible. The same for film, television and music.

So instead of whining about how a few smug over-educated service workers have lost their jobs, we should really be talking about how technology has made access to culture a lot more egalitarian than it used to be. Good riddance to the old order, I say. Information and art for everyone.