Analogue tales
I was standing behind two teenagers waiting for a bus the other day, and one was telling the other about a get-together planned for that evening with some old school friends. ‘Wow’, said the other, ‘that’s so analogue Facebook’. I chuckled at the expression. But right now we can still laugh because even the two teenagers still had some point of reference to distinguish between a real life meeting and social media interaction. They also understood that many things digital have or had an analogue antecedent.
But is the analogue world slipping away from us? Or is it more resilient than we sometimes thing? After all, vinyl records are apparently making a comeback. And I have set my Apple Watch (and yes, of course I have one) to show an analogue clock on its home screen. I still have (and use) a telephone on which I can really dial numbers.
And in between reading stuff on my iPad, I still buy hard copy books.
It’s not all gone.
PS. However, all the above photos were taken with the iPhone 6 camera and edited with Photoshop. Hm.
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University Blog 
July 6, 2015 at 1:40 am
So I’m curious: do you also still have a typewriter? I seem to recall an old – practically antique even for the 1980s – one…
July 6, 2015 at 8:24 am
Yes indeed, I still have it, and every so often I take it out and have a good look. I’ve no idea where I’d get a ribbon for it now, though, so it’s not usable. But it looks nice.
July 6, 2015 at 8:37 am
One of the most interesting cultural trends is retro-tech and the analogue/digital hybrid, this typewriter is a perfect example http://www.forbes.com/sites/mzhang/2015/06/29/retro-tech-the-timelessness-of-typewriters/
Like the phone pic an the shadow effect on the numbers..
One might dwell of course on the reasons why we long for these past technologies, but that is for an academic paper to explore…
July 6, 2015 at 8:51 am
Yes, analogue/digital hybrids are seen all over the place now. My record player has a USB port, so I can digitise the track.
July 12, 2015 at 7:11 pm
For all our digital technology, the one thing that hasn’t changed is us – we’re still analogue.
The last step in any of our technology will be to convert digital information into something our senses recognise. So analogue still has a future thanks to our ancient so-last-epoch brains.
July 14, 2015 at 1:25 pm
Sorry to disappoint you James, but to say that our brain hasn’t changed is incorrect, as the phenomenon of neuroplasticity confirms:
http://mashable.com/2014/03/14/tech-brains-neuroplasticity/