Nicholas Higgins 19/05/2020

Analogue, Not Digital

‘Analogue is more beautiful than digital, really, but we go for comfort’, Anton Corbijn

What aspect of modern life has not been touched by the ‘digital revolution’? We read emails, stream music and videos, surf web pages, consume social media as if it was manna from heaven itself. We even talk to the all hearing Alexa as if she were our only stoic companion. In what’s been termed the ‘third industrial revolution’, the dawn of the digital has remade our world. In so doing, the ‘analogue’- that is to say the processes and products which do not require computers or digital technology - has been made completely and utterly redundant.

There is, however, a counter narrative to this techno-utopian belief that we will all live in an ever improving, all digital world. Vinyl records and film photography have both seen startling comebacks (Kanye West, Taylor Swift and Kings of Leon all have their latest releases on LP). Paper books are officially more popular than e-books, and print magazines still line WHSmith shelves. As David Sax has observed, ‘every creative worker and aspiring start-up titan working in a coffee shop can usually be found toting a journal next to their laptop or phone’. Analogue has ridden the wave of growing dissatisfaction with virtual reality; now we’re encouraged more than ever to ‘digital detox’, and prioritise human, face to face interactions.

For the 20 something millennial generation who are driving analogues resurgence, this is surprising. Analogue dinosaurs are far slower, more expensive, and way less convenient than their digital equivalents. LP’s are famously prone to scratches, require unwieldy record players, and only hold a few songs. Film cameras are useless in low light, and you can’t even see the shot after you’ve taken it. Writing in a notepad is messy, you can’t delete, rephrase sentences or rely on autocorrect. Modern audio systems, digital photography and Microsoft Word, by contrast, are all phenomenally functional tools. Precision perfect sounds, pictures and words. In technical terms, they cream analogue in pretty much every way.

The virtues of analogue however, fit hand in glove with the desire to put the ‘real’ back into reality. In my own mind, analogue reflects far more truthfully the world than the digital universe. The latter is a place of zeroes and ones; on and off; yes and no; right and wrong; Samsung and Apple. But this is not the nature of things; this imperfect world is not clear cut or precise in the way digital thinks it is. It’s multicoloured, wonderfully varied, emotionally rich. The deficiencies in vinyl, film or paper are testament to this fact. Unlike their ‘perfect’ polished digital cousins, they’re raw, flawed, organic. Literature, pictures and music are about soul. When a good book can inspire us, image move us or music uplift us, limiting them to a cold sequence of numbers doesn’t seem fitting.

Nor is the analogue coldly abstract. Tangibility is deeply imprinted in our biological and psychological makeup, and is how me make sense of our world. Looking back at early childhood development, it’s through touch that we perceive and make sense of the world around us. The physical, material nature of objects, their colour, texture, shape, size, weight and smell all enlist the use of our senses.

Vinyl, film and paper engage our senses in spadefulls. Playing a record involves a whole ritual of thumbing through LP’s, setting up the turntable, lifting the arm and waiting in silence for the music to play. You hear the pickup rolling along the grooves, the distortion, and all the lifelike studio sounds that are lost when they get ‘compressed’ into mp3 files. On a notepad you can feel the texture of the paper, and stare at words that have poured forth from the mind, to the hand, to ink in a pen. In film photography you load the film yourself, physically touching the medium that will hold your pictures. When you open the shutter light is not converted to an illsuory ‘signal’, but to real chemical components. Once they’re developed you hold in your own hands the pictures you’ve made, you hold your negatives and pass round your prints.

Tangibility also means analogue objects are also fantastic showcases of design. Lots of people cherish their decades old plastic LP’s, but no one attaches the same importance to disposable MP3 files. Museums have paper documents that are thousands of years old, no one has the first email of phone conversation. These concrete things appeal not only to our noses, hands and ears, but to our eyes. They’re aesthetically pleasing in the way digital things can’t be. Even where digital objects assume tangible form, a sleek new laptop or phone for example, they are designed to be obsolete. While I can still listen to my 60 year old record today, my new Mac will be Oxfam ready in three or four years.  

It’s also telling that digital designers still care about how a thing looks. The way a phone feels in your hand, how the keyboard touch on a laptop feels as you type, all still matter. Advancements in virtual/augmented reality will become highly dependent on some type of tactile, touch based feedback to improve the ‘reality’ of the experience. Digital cannot rid itself of analogue’s human touch..

Analogue devices also foster a more mindful approach to life. In film photography having only 36 exposures (which each cost you) as opposed to a limitless memory card, you’re forced to make every shot count. Instead of mindless snapping, you must stop and think. On Microsoft Word you can’t freely, physically, scribble the sort of notes that spark the imagination. Playing a record, instead of flitting through songs, you’re forced to sit down and listen to the whole album. In each case the product allows for minimum distraction and interference - no instagram checking, no emails, no wretched pinging sounds to interrupt the process. The imagination is left to think freely and creatively.

Celebrating analogue is much more than misplaced nostalgia, hipsterism, or any perverse counter cultural posturing. In analogue we find a deeper level of engagement beyond the often superficial shimmer of digital gloss. It forces you to pause the digital world of clicks, taps and swipes, and instead interact with the real one. Going analogue is to take back the great joy of creating and possessing real, tangible things.