Vinyl appeals, but the analogue revolt may be going too far.
As the world becomes more analogue, we’d be fools to ignore the freedom going digital offers
Our industry is notorious for its love of buzzwords (think “agile”, or “responsive”, or “passionate”) but currently the most egregious one, the one that makes me reach for my imaginary Luger, is “creative”. It’s one of those words, like “love” or “cool”, that’s so unabusable, so self-evidently good and desirable, that it’s guaranteed it will be continually abused. I consider myself creative, like everyone else in the friggin’ world, but I’ve recently been prompted to examine more closely what that means. This reflection was provoked by a Bill McKibben review in the New York Review of Books of The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax.
Sax’s thesis is that we’re witnessing more and more islands of analogue refuge among the foaming waves of digital media and communications: places where we can relax and think, and where we touch physical objects instead of bitmaps. An example is the rediscovery of vinyl records by young people, in sufficient numbers to warrant the reopening of several pressing plants.
Another is the recent fashion for carrying a Moleskine notebook, even among folk who clutch the latest iPhone in their other hand. (This sent me off down a timewasting diversion about pronunciation: Brits call it “Mole-skin”, Europeans and ex-Europeans like me say “Mol-ess-kinay”.) The company recently went public, valued at a positively digital €490 million, for a quintessentially analogue product. Sax talked to architectural software firms who hand out the notebooks and forbid their designers to turn on their computer until they’ve brainstormed an initial design on paper. The electronic whiteboard utterly failed to displace paper pads and marker pens, as used by this very magazine in our own brainstorming sessions.
Sax continues to push this argument a step too far for me. Moleskine’s ads claim its notebooks helped Picasso and Hemingway to success: “Creativity and innovation are driven by imagination, and imagination withers when it is standardised, which is exactly what digital technology requires— codifying everything into 1s and 0s, within the accepted limits of software.”
Perhaps, but remember that paper was all they had. We can’t know whether Picasso would have taken to Procreate or Zen Brush on an iPad, but my guess is he’d have loved it. The 1s and 0s objection is “a 10ad 0f 01d b0110x” in the era of GUIs.
I’ve written about my quest for usability in pocketable devices, and this book review played right into my latest discovery, namely that Google Keep has just added a sketching facility. I can now knock out line and tone drawings with my finger on phone or tablet as fast as I could with a Moleskine and a pen, and they automatically appear on all my devices without scanning. If I need more features, Autodesk’s Sketchbook is installed on my tablet too, and Android’s ubiquitous Share menu shuttles pics between.
I’ve also written here about the thousandodd processed photographs that I keep on Flickr, and about my Python-based music composition system. In both these media, I respect Sax’s aversion to “standardisation”: for example, when I apply dozens of filters and blend-modes to a photo, I deliberately refrain from writing down the sequence so the image is unique and unrepeatable – although it’s easily copyable, which is a principal joy of digital versus analogue. I do the same when composing tunes: while I keep the Python source code for each family of tunes, I don’t record every parameter (for example, random ones) for each instance, so these tunes have the same uniqueness as my photos.
A deep attachment to matter is desirable, given that we’re all made of it, but it can also stray into the sentimental. It cuts two ways: while matter has a permanence and leaves a historical trace – we still have pottery and statues made thousands of years ago – most people believe that digital data is impermanent, volatile, easily lost (which can be true if you have a sloppy backup regime). But that volatility is also a strength of the digital realm. Art is all about essences, representations and images, and handling these digitally produces far less waste of both materials and time. Check the price of oil paint and canvas: it’s an expensive way to learn. Best overcome any aversion to 1s and 0s, design and edit your work in the digital domain and turn it into matter when it’s good enough. That’s what 3D printers and record-pressing plants are for.
We’re witnessing more and more islands of analogue refuge among the waves of digital media and communication