10 Book Review March/April 2017 V I D E O A G E By Leah Hochbaum Rosner We live in a digital world surrounded by digital gadgets. We all have them. Lots of them. Items we never knew we needed, but now cannot fathom living without. Smartphones. Tablets. E-Readers. Laptop computers. We watch our favorite shows on four-inch screens that we hold mere inches from our faces instead of viewing them on full-sized television sets that are mere feet away. We check our e-mail every hour. Or every five-minutes. Or all the time. We spend hours choosing the right vacation pictures to post on Facebook instead of actually enjoying our holidays. We spend hours choosing the right Instagram filters for our pics instead of reveling in actual experiences. We read books on Nooks and Kindles and have forgotten how to turn real pages in even the most entertaining of page-turners. Indeed, we’re a digital people living in an increasingly digital world. But journalist David Sax is here to show us how and why all things analog haven’t gone gently into that good night. In his new book, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (PublicAffairs, 2016, 282 pgs., $25.99), Sax delves deeply intomany of the items that shouldprobably have become obsolete or gone out of vogue since the advent of the technology that has taken over our homes — most notably, vinyl records and actual paper books — and tried to discern how it is that they have weathered the digital storm and (shockingly) thrived. Are they anomalies? Are they the new new normal? Are they just lucky to be living a (possibly short) second life, yet are still eventually (and obviously) doomed? “The core idea is that digital technology is a transformative force that can deliver vastly more efficient products and services to consumers at a lower cost, and with greater ease, across time and space, in ways that traditional analog industries cannot compete with,” writes Sax. The advent of digital technology “ranks up there with the invention of steam power, electricity, and telecommunications. But it also creates an inherent assumption: that analog economic activity, and its associated work, will gradually be replaced or simply disappear.” This simply isn’t true, Sax asserts, as he valiantly tries to demonstrate that despite a multitude of recent digital innovations, we still reside in a predominantly analog world — one in which human experiences and interactions mean more thanwhatever drivel is currently unspooling on the ever-growing, ever-glowing screen in your hand. That people still crave interpersonal relationships even as they spend more and more time alone with their devices — even amongst friends. That not every job can (or should) be automated. That people might want (and need) to disconnect for a bit each and every day, even if only for a little while. And astonishingly—and happily, I might add—he does manage to prove it. Sax did a heck of a lot of legwork for this book, visiting schools, shops and factories in multiple countries to find the things that he contends are getting their revenge on digital by simply refusing to die. He checked in at the Shinola watch factory in Detroit, Michigan, where watches are (mostly) manufactured in-house and tended to by real humans—not just machines. He stopped by Book Culture, a successful bookstore on New York’s Upper West Side, where people seemed to happily pay full price for books they could get at a discount — with free shipping — on Amazon.com. A place where people purchased real paper books — not something to be read on their Nooks or their Kindles. Why? Sax calls reading a paper book “a vastly superior experience…I couldn’t annotate to the cloud as I read in print, but I could underline, write notes, fold down corners, and never get lost by accidentally tapping the page with my finger.” He called in at the Milan, Italy-based headquarters of Moleskine, a luxury line of notebooks that seem to be all the rage these days — especially amongst hipsters. “For a thoroughly analog object, the Moleskine is one of the iconic tools of our digitally focused century,” Sax writes, noting that he sees them “everywhere.” He popped in on Snakes & Lattes, a board game café in Toronto, Canada that he says is constantly packed despite the fact that “the tables are wobbly, the chairs uncomfortable; there is no Wi-Fi, and the food...well, let’s just say it’s not a draw.” Why then are people so attracted to it? Sax calls it a “mecca of analog fun,” a place where you sit with your friends and enjoy their company. Sure, you can play a game with your pals on your iPhone, but half the fun of tabletop games and card games is actually getting to watch your fellow players bluff poorly, sweat profusely and be the sore losers you always knew they’d be. You simply cannot replicate the experience with any kind of hand-held device—no matter how immersive it might seem. He dropped in onUnitedRecord Pressing, a vinyl pressing plant in Nashville, Tennessee, where 40,000 actual old-school records are produced every single day. Although the advent of the eighttrack, then the cassette tape, then the CD, then MP3 downloads, then iPods should have killed the record industry, it is alive and well and being discovered anew by younger people each day. And the reasons are riveting. “Once music was divorced from any physical object, its supply so vastly exceeded demand that people simply refused to pay for it,” Sax writes. “Suddenly, an album was no longer a desirable object worthy of consumption. All digital music listeners are equal. Acquisition is painless. Taste is irrelevant. It is pointless to boast about your iTunes collection or the quality of your playlists on a streaming service…Meanwhile, the previous disadvantages of vinyl records now became attractive. Records are large and heavy; require money, effort and taste to create and buy and play; and cry out to be thumbed over and examined. Because consumers spend money to acquire them, they gain a genuine sense of ownership over the music, which translates into pride.” While all of these various businesses and their ability to cling to analog are interesting, the most fascinating thing in Revenge is Sax’s assertion that “the digital world values analog more than anyone.” The author visited a slew of digital companies, where one might assume that all things analog were anathema, only to learn that the exact opposite was true. The engineering floor at Yelp, which publishes crowd-sourced reviews of local businesses, is packed to the gillswithwhiteboards — not smartboards — where folks can manually write down their ideas as they come to them. Percolate, a New York-based software company, has banned all digital devices from company meetings because people were pretending to listen to a speaker while instead sitting and texting their friends, and found that meetings have since become shorter and more productive. And scores of workers at Adobe’s San Francisco office stop whatever it is that they’re doing to meditate for 15 minutes a day — every day — in order to stay centered and think just a little more clearly about what it is that’s important in life. “Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids play with the very iPads he created,” writes Sax. And “Evan Williams, who co-created the digital publishing platforms Twitter,Blogger, andMedium, livedina technologyfree house, with a huge library of books.” This, to me, is the real essence of the book. The fact that the very creators of the technology we worship shun it in their own lives. That they knew that unplugging (at least on occasion) is the best way to be. That they understood that the analog world cannot and should not be discounted. Because it’s the world that we live in. However, one thing Sax’s analog mind forgot to retrieve: The fact that, paper, an element of analog storage, has lasted for 22 centuries, while the best digital data storage system or device reportedly has a lifespan estimated at just 100 years. Analog’s Revenge: Companies In The Digital World Still Rely On Low-Tech Devices
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