Two decades ago I bought my first mobile phone: the Nokia 5110 (1998). This was a pretty cool phone because the front case was interchangeable enabling me to customize it anyway I liked.
Then if I can recall, I got one of the first smart phone called the DOPOD P860 (2004), it had a little 3″ touch screen operated with a stylus and mini track ball running Windows 98. Being one of the first smartphones on the market, it looked pretty cool, but slow (256mb storage, 128mb RAM with some sort of lowended CPU), clunky and just seemed like a gimmick at the time, however I still loved it. The best thing about it was playing Tetris (in colour) with its 240 x 320px screen resolution and I could also draw and write on it in colour (opposed to the PalmOS).
It was the world in my hands, and when I had to turn it off, I felt anxious and alone.
Like most relationships we plunge into with hearts aflutter, our love affair with digital technology promised us the world: more friends, money and freedom! Free music, news and same-day shipping of paper towels! Free to draw when you’re out without a sketchbook, and a constant entertainment at our fingertips.
Many of us bought into the fantasy that digital made everything better. We surrendered to this idea, and mistook our dependence for romance, until it was too late.
Today, when my phone is on, I feel anxious and count down the hours to when I am able to turn it off , turan away from Facebook, Instagram and truly relax. The love affair I once enjoyed with digital technology is almost over — and I know I’m not alone.
Ten years after the iPhone first swept us off our feet, the growing mistrust of computers in both our personal lives and the greater society we live in is inescapable. This publishing season is flush with books raising alarms about digital technology’s pernicious effects on our lives: what smartphones are doing to our children; how Facebook and Twitter are eroding our democratic institutions; and the economic effects of tech monopolies.
There are studies out there (trust me, I saw it on Facebook) that more than 70 percent of Americans were worried about automation’s impact on jobs, while just 21 percent of respondents to a survey said they trust Facebook with their personal information. Nearly half of millennials worry about the negative effects of social media on their mental and physical health, according to the American Psychiatric Association.
So what now?
As much as we might fantasize about it, we probably won’t delete our social media accounts and toss our phones in the nearest body of water. What we can do is to restore some sense of balance over our relationship with digital technology, and the best way to do that is with analog.
Thankfully, the analog world is still here, and not only is it surviving but, in many cases, it is thriving. Sales of old-fashioned print books are up for the third year in a row, even though I bought 2 Amazon Kindles- statistics have showed ebook sales have been declining. Independent bookstores have been steadily expanding for several years. Vinyl records have witnessed a decade-long boom in popularity, while sales of film, Polaroid instant-film cameras; paper notebooks, board games and Broadway tickets are all growing again.
Analog, although more cumbersome and costly than its digital equivalents, provides a richness of experience that is unparalleled with anything delivered through a screen. People are buying books because a book engages nearly all of their senses, from the smell of the paper and glue to the sight of the cover design and weight of the pages read, the sound of those sheets turning, and even the subtle taste of the ink on your fingertips. A book can be bought and sold, given and received, and displayed on a shelf for anyone to see. It can start conversations and cultivate romances. After many years of shooting with DSLR cameras, I have recently moved across to the Leica M6, film camera and the Leica M240 – a full manual camera where you are paired back to the basics and need to understand focusing, setting shutterspeed and ISO. I’ll write another blog about the processing experience of film negatives, and the compositing satisfaction you get at the end of the day shooting with Leica.
The limits of analog, which were once seen as a disadvantage, are increasingly one of the benefits people are turning to as a counterweight to the easy manipulation of digital. Though a page of paper is limited by its physical size and the permanence of the ink that marks it, there is a powerful efficiency in that simplicity. The person holding the pen above that notebook page is free to write, doodle or scribble her idea however she wishes between those borders, without the restrictions or distractions imposed by software.
In a world of endless email chains, group chats, pop-up messages or endlessly tweaked documents and images, the walled garden of analog saves both time and inspires creativity. Web designers at Google have been required to use pen and paper as a first step when brainstorming new projects for the past several years, because it leads to better ideas than those begun on a screen.
In contrast with the virtual “communities” we have built online, analog actually contributes to the real places where we live. Like the hardware store, Baqala stores and Laundromat on the same block, the brick and mortar presence of people adds to my neighborhood’s sense of place and gives me a feeling of belonging.
Analog excels particularly well at encouraging human interaction, which is crucial to our physical and mental well-being. The dynamic of a teacher working in a classroom full of students has not only proven resilient, but has outperformed digital learning experiments time and again. Digital may be extremely efficient in transferring pure information, but learning happens best when we build upon the relationships between students, teachers and their peers.
We do not face a simple choice of digital or analog. That is the false logic of the binary code that computers are programmed with, which ignores the complexity of life in the real world. Instead, we are faced with a decision of how to strike the right balance between the two. If we keep that in mind, we are taking the first step toward a healthy relationship with all technology, and, most important, one another.
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