A quick one-off post. I’m finishing up Robert Hassan’s “Analog” (from the MIT Essential Knowledge Series) and could not be more enthralled with this analysis of analog media and culture. I highly recommend reading this. As a Millennial (hatched in 1982), I have deep connections to both analog and digital media. I can remember being elated by my first record (Madonna’s “True Blue” — on a transparent blue record, BTW) and I also was deeply satisfied when I had the chance to download the same media and listen to it on my iPod.
A couple of key quotes:
The technologies we create also shape the ways that we think and act in the world, and this, in turn, influences the kinds of technology we further invent and use.
The path of “analog” in the Ngram plot tells us something. It tells us that as a word declines in frequency in our print culture, it declines also as a part of our language, written and spoken. It follows that its decline in language means the decline as a concept, as an idea, as a recognized component in the meaning-sharing that written and spoken communication sustains. The result is that as analog begins to disappear as a mode of knowledge, it therefore is even more difficult to comprehend.
[Interest in analog products]… might be better seen as a desire to plug that gap in our psyche through the gesture of consumption.
It’s just that digital technology has abruptly colonized modern life in so many spheres that we have never really asked ourselves properly what is the obvious question: what is it that has just been overtaken as the primary techno-logic that governs much of our collective and individual lives?
Authenticity has been an analog renaissance keyword that has attached itself in the popular mind to a widening range of cultural practices that connote the rediscovery of another, better, and more authentic way.
Likewise, the pervasive screen, the general interface, faces in one direction only: into the digital and virtual. But behind us lies a history, a lineage, and a relationship that stretches back for thousands of years.
And so, we hanker for the real when we intuit that the virtual doesn’t quite cut it in terms of satisfaction and authenticity–which can be often.
“Resonance” as we saw, is that anthropological affinity with one’s surroundings, that contact of confluence where nature finds its positive echo within our being. We can see this in our own time as as kind of well-being or harmony, a psychological place we can thrive in our physical environment that has the potential to sustain us.