According to David Sax author of the Revenge of the Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter, analog, that is, the very tactile world of things outside the computer, is experiencing a bracing revival. All sorts of technologies routinely considered to be passé or quaint are being widely embraced, especially by millennials raised on digital.

Sally Schneider
Sally Schneider

He writes: “Analog gives us the joy of creating and possessing real, tangible things”, like the unique sound of vinyl records played on a turntable… big ideas, dreams and designs written in a paper notebook with just the right pen…magazines and books to open at random while enjoying the very different way their words and images hit us… instant polaroid-like film that develops in front of our very eyes and become tangible keepsakes.

Sally Schneider
Sally Schneider

The choice we face isn’t between digital and analog. That simplistic duality is actually the language that digital has conditioned us to: a false binary choice between 1 and 0, black and white, Samsung and Apple. The real world isn’t black or white. It is not even gray. Reality is multicolored, infinitely textured, and emotionally layered.” 

YES!

We love the richness of digital AND analog.

Sally Schneider
Sally Schneider

We think of the very close friends we’ve made via Improvised Life whom we’ve never actually met, and the vast range of ideas that it brings into our field of vision daily: all via a digital medium.

And we are reminded of the many analog things we love:

books especially…

Sally Schneider
Sally Schneider

…art…

Sally Schneider
Sally Schneider

chess, cards and board games…

playing-checkers-tour-de-france

…clouds…

Clouds By Lirik Lozenets, Bulgaria

typewriters (manual and electric, make us write in a completely different way)…The vintage Olivetti Valentine designed by Ettore Sottsass is a joy to drive…

Ebay/elgraneroonline
Ebay/elgraneroonline

graffiti…

graffiti-reverse-graffiti

...small batch makers and sellers of things and services

…the weather..

Sally Schneider
Sally Schneider

…cooking dinner with friends…

blog.williams-sonoma.com
blog.williams-sonoma.com

…talking…

…handwritten letters…

Sally Schneider
Sally Schneider

…poems read out loud…

….PLUMS!!!

…as Mary Oliver reminds, and the sublime realm of the senses and ALL it affords

Such richness flowing
through the branches of summer and into

the body, carried inward on the five
rivers! Disorder and astonishment

rattle your thoughts and your heart
cries for rest but don’t

succumb, there’s nothing
so sensible as sensual inundation. Joy

is a taste before
it’s anything else, and the body

can lounge for hours devouring
the important moments. Listen,

the only way
to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it

into the body first, like small
wild plums.

plums-botanical-print

 

 

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4 replies on “The Fabulous Revenge of Analog

  1. Enjoy the thoughts,
    as usual.
    Thinking about it,
    for a while, actually,
    ..’anal-logically’,…;
    It’s the speed,
    that is threatening.
    The speed.

    “The fastests.”
    “The quickest.”
    “….the biggest, farthest, highest,,.”
    Human nature?
    Natural aethectics?
    ,…i’m still working on it,
    not sure.
    Social values?
    ,….not sure.

    Speed is somehow so ‘time-related’.
    Is ‘time’ our challenge?
    ,….not sure.
    Thanks for the push.

  2. It all serves its purpose, as you have hinted, there is room for several ideas to be enjoyed .. and take a different approach .
    There was already a mission to the moon when we still considered our world to be analogue .

    “All the modern things
    Like cars and such
    Have always existed

    They’ve just been waiting in a mountain
    For the right moment..”

    (Bjork, Modern Thngs )

    The more virtual things (can) become, the more we might realize that our world is such ….

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