By chance today I came upon Gracy Olmstead's review of The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax (PublicAffairs, 2016. Hardcover, 304 pages, $25).
The following paragraphs resonated with me:
“Every day we turn around and something else has been enhanced, altered, or shaken up by digital technology: our car, our house, our job, our sex life,” Sax writes. “In the clean, orderly narrative of technological progress, the newest technology always renders the old one obsolete.… Up until very recently, if something could be digitized, its fate was a foregone conclusion.”
But then something extraordinary happened. People began seeking out old stuff, and buying it—even making new stuff in the pattern of the old. “Surrounded by the digital, we now crave experiences that are more tactile and human-centric,” says Sax. “We want to interact with goods and services with all our senses, and many of us are willing to pay a premium to do so, even if it is more cumbersome and costly than its digital equivalent.”
Sax spends the next couple hundred pages of his book revealing the burgeoning popularity of analog items. He focuses on a few companies that have sold analog items with resounding success, and considers each medium of analog commerce at a time. . .
Gracy Olmstead writes about religion and worship:
Three years ago, I wrote a piece on millennials’ increasing return to the high church. Many young people I knew were seeking out a church experience that was in many ways “analog”: full of the scent of incense, resonant with the chant of the liturgy, amplified by the manifold beauty of the cathedral. Their childhood churches had been iconoclastic. They sat on plastic chairs and read music lyrics from a digital slide. They listened to electric drum sets and read Scriptures on their iPhone. Now, they were looking for something “real”—even if it meant more work or a longer service, greater religious or personal discomfort.
Read the whole article.