The Revival of Analogue Media

On a shelf in my bedroom sits a three-inch stone statue of a giggling Buddha. He is perhaps my favourite piece of decor. Yet, if I had bought him online, I would like him a little less. That is to say, the fact that I bought him in a market in Chongqing, rather than by clicking a button, increases my enjoyment of the item. Having bought him where, when, from whom, and with whom I did ties him to an experience that gives the item meaning. The same goes for whatever you buy, consume, make, or do — it matters the context in which you buy, consume, make, or do it. Often, the greater the friction involved, the greater the meaning created. 

This may sound counterintuitive. After all, it seems obvious that a more convenient life is a better one. A dishwasher frees up time otherwise spent washing dishes, a radiator frees up time spent chopping wood, and a car frees up time spent walking. This, everyone must agree, is a positive consequence of convenience technologies. Why, then, are so many people returning to cumbersome, difficult-to-use, costly, and altogether inconvenient technologies like record players and analogue cameras, when streaming services play crisper sound and phones take higher resolution photos?

The obvious reason is a desire to disconnect from the digital. When you use a phone camera, you do not merely use the camera; you use the phone, with all its associations, its baggage, and the urge to click the notification that just appeared at the top of your screen. When a piece of technology does everything, you can never be present in a single activity.

Yet it goes beyond that. The joy of analogue media extends to the friction itself – the very fact that it is cumbersome, difficult to use, costly, and inconvenient. Just as my going to China and searching through dozens of stalls to find my Buddha created a unique experience, so too investing in a vinyl record, labouring to set up the player, and restricting oneself to a single location creates an experience that feels altogether more personal than the instant gratification of listening to whatever you want, whenever and wherever you want it. 

The problem with convenience technologies is that they treat every process as a means to an end, seeking only to accelerate and perfect the end. Yet in art, as in many other things, the process is the purpose. By condensing it, one makes it quicker to create and consume (hooray, more art!), but the creation and consumption become shallower, more fleeting. You can watch a thousand films on Netflix and never connect with one, yet had you watched a small fraction of those films in a cinema, having invested the time and money into a communal experience, you may have found that you engaged with each more deeply. “Work, effort, meaning — these ideas are all interconnected for the users and consumers of analogue technology,” says BBC Future.

It is undeniable, however, that modern technologies produce art of superior audiovisual quality. Films shot on digital are crisper, their colours more vibrant, while new music technologies allow artists to artificially eliminate the imperfections of physical instruments and their own voices. 

This misses the point. Art is supposed to be imperfect because it reflects the fallibility of the humans who make it. That is why sheet music allows for variation. Two pianists can play the same song, and it will sound completely different, because each infuses it with their own unique style. In comparison, an AI rendition, which hits each note perfectly, would sound flat and lifeless.

Many artists have resisted this. For example, while AI-generated art seeks to eliminate humans from a field whose entire purpose is to connect with other humans, Rosalía’s Lux album seeks to remind us of this purpose through the use of classical instruments and stunning vocals in songs like ‘Berghain’. Her goal, she says, is to create “the sense, the feeling that there’s a human in there. There’s humans in there.”

In this way, analogue art becomes an act of resistance — resistance against the instant gratification and manufactured perfection that characterise our modern world, from short-form content to airbrushed models to the slew of job applications both written and reviewed by AI. It embodies a desire to slow down, a re-embracing of effort, a cultivation of unique and meaningful experience — a yearning for human connection in a disconnected world.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons