A new retro revolution?
Perhaps deeper immersion in the digital life is precisely what makes us appreciate certain qualities of analogue alternatives
In the course of a recent move I decided to “cut the cord” — that is, walk away from cable television and fully embrace the streamed-entertainment revolution. I felt very digital. Just a few weeks later, however, I discovered something that surprised me: Thousands of my fellow cord-cutters have taken to buying antennas to pick up the seemingly quaint format of over-the-air television signals.
I initially resisted joining those going out of their way to spend extra money on an object that was traditionally part of the default TV apparatus. But of course these are not your father’s antennas, as they say: The new iteration promises far better picture quality over greater range, without constant adjustment (or strategic tinfoil enhancement). Still, the return of the antenna struck me as not just retro, but counterrevolutionary. Could there be a more symbolic manifestation of the analogue life than buying a contemporary version of rabbit ears? Soon I got an answer: Amazon, a company practically synonymous with the triumph of bits-in-the-cloud over objects-in-physical-space, just opened a brickand-mortar bookstore.
Since then, I’ve been tuned in to evidence that our digital culture appears to have a case of analogue fever. The rising sales of vinyl records, for instance, have been widely chronicled. E-book sales dropped 10 per cent in the first five months of this year, but Amazon’s physical shop has plenty of company: The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712 member-stores in 2015, up from 1,410 in 2010. You can’t scroll through a lifestyle app without finding news of a precious new print journal’s launch party. The writer and artist David Rees hyped his TV show Going Deep by skipping Twitter and Facebook in favour of putting up old-school promotional fliers — an “analogue social media strategy”, as he called it. And so on.
The relationship between the analogue and the digital is more complicated than its usual portrayal. For starters, the pronouncement that some new technology X will “kill” some existing technology Y is usually just glib and easy hyperbole. This was memorably demonstrated a couple of years ago when the author Kevin Kelly asserted the opposite: “There is no species of technology that has ever gone globally extinct.” In short: X never kills Y.
Now take another look at, say, vinyl records, and it seems obvious that such a truly mass-consumed format would still be around. What’s less obvious is that it would somehow transform into a fetish object. New LPs today are routinely advertised as being pressed on “180-gram vinyl”, or some such. As someone who remembers vinyl’s mass market heyday, when even stores like Sears had a record department, I can assure you that nobody was agonising over the physical specs of REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity. But deposed as a mass good, the record has re-emerged as a de facto luxury good.
Realm of luxury
And yet, any argument that analogue fever is a purely rational matter — old stuff is just plain better! — seems fishy. There’s a murkier romance involved, a variation on the process that rebrands the dated as “vintage,” “traditional” or “artisanal”. The very marginalisation of the analogue has propelled it into the realm of luxury by making its admirers come up with an answer to the obvious question: Why squander extra money and/or time on a less efficient alternative to the digital?
Our evolving relationship to the physical and the digital reveals another answer. When there is a bits-only version of almost anything, opting for the analogue variation demonstrates what we really care about — to the world and to ourselves. To own or experience the analogue version of the latest from a favourite musician, author, filmmaker and so on, is an act both sensual and symbolic.
The fresh appreciation of the physical owes a great deal to the new age of bits. Also, of course, the new generation of TV antennas that put analogue fever on my radar provide better imagery because broadcasting itself is digital now. And when I decided to buy a physical antenna to bring the retro glories of the local news into my modern, cut-cord household, I did all my research online — poring over digital charts and maps matching my ZIP code to broadcast towers, and cross-referencing that data with product specs and reviews. I’m sure I could have bought the physical object that I settled on at a brick-and-mortar store near me. But who has time? I ordered it from Amazon instead.
Rob Walker is a writer on design and technology whose column, The Workologist, appears every other weekend in the Sunday Business section of the Times.