Retro revival paperback hero
“The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter,” by David Sax (Public Affairs, $22.49 paperback, 282 pages)
David Sax is a Toronto journalist and author of “Save the Deli and The Tastemakers.” “The Revenge of Analog” came out a year ago and made the Best of 2016 lists with the Globe and Mail and the National Post. He looks at the revival of vinyl records, film photography, board games and paper books. In the second half, he examines the revenge of retail vs. online shopping, the role of meditation and paper in the workplace, the failure of digital devices to improve education, and the return to hand making watches in postindustrial Detroit.
It’s easy to assume that the revival of vinyl records and books as an exercise in nostalgia by aging boomers who grew up with both. But young millennials are buying turntables and LPs to play on them, even if at first they need to be shown how to “read” the blank tracks between songs.
Software engineers of all ages favour Moleskine journals (creamy white pages sewn into a leather-bound journal) for their note-keeping and idea sketches. Electronic books and their ereaders (Kindle, Kobo, Nook) have levelled off in sales. Their main advantage is storing multiple books to read on vacation; the rest of the time, most people prefer the feel and smell of paper, the solidity of a bound book, and the pride of showing what you’ve read on your bookshelf.
But now I’m indulging in what David Sax does: spouting opinions, in his case accompanied by interview anecdotes, but not scientifically analyzing how many people are using digital vs. analog and why. And surely digital vs. analog is a false dichotomy. Unless you’re living totally off-grid with no electronics, we all have some mix of digital and “real” objects in our daily lives. We all deal with bulging email inboxes, and the constant distractions of social media, and the buzz of our cellphones that track our movements, take our pictures and play our music.
“Revenge of Analog” is a snapshot taken in 2015-16. There has been a chorus of articles and books since then critical of how digital devices and the internet are shaping our lives from the personal (a friend lost his new girlfriend due to a misunderstood text) to the political (Russians manipulating the U.S. election with fake news and ads.): How Facebook ate the media and put democracy in peril (New Statesman, Oct 27), Our minds are being hijacked, a smartphone dystopia (Guardian, Oct 5), and, Do Social media threaten democracy? (Economist, Nov 2)
As a former bookseller I am heartened by Sax’s stories of new bookstores opening and of the publishers who survived the ebook revolution that was supposed to do to books what digital music had done to LPs, CDs and tapes. The survival of independent bookstores is about more than keeping books on shelves.
Sax quotes Antonin Baudry, France’s cultural counsellor in New York: “When small stores are replaced by chains and Amazon, what do we lose? We lose something specific. It’s called a city.”
A city, he says is a collection of businesses that pay taxes, allow citizens to meet and ultimately contribute to the cultural and physical landscape. When we shop online, we may get faster delivery at lower prices but we lose that cultural experience, the chance to talk to a human who reads, the chance to spot titles we’d never find among Amazon’s “algorithmized” suggestions.
The digital revolution is as big as the Gutenberg and Industrial Revolutions. We owe it to ourselves to proceed cautiously. Beware of being manipulated by our devices and their contents.