Few things are more traditional in the run-up to Christmas than the shopping for and purchase of gifts. These days, however, instead of traipsing around the high street shoppers are increasingly surfing the web for presents. Surveys suggest that e-commerce accounts for more than a quarter of the £80bn spent by British shoppers in the holiday season. The world seems to move ever more online – human life appears often an appendage to a dimly lit screen, with only the bobbing of a head attached wirelessly to a tiny phone to denote conscious thought.
But a backlash has begun. Earlier this month more money was spent on vinyl records than on downloaded albums, the first reversal of fortune for such technology. In America the biggest-selling purely audio device is now the humble turntable. This year in the UK, sales of printed books grew for the first time in four years – while ebooks suffered their first ever decline. Paper notebooks and wipeable whiteboards are favoured by Silicon Valley types. Thanks to Edward Snowden, perhaps, typewriters are enjoying a renaissance.
Some of this is simply nostalgia or a form of hipster advertising. One poll revealed that almost half of people who bought a vinyl album last month have yet to listen to it. In other cases the attraction is that the promise of technology – its claim of efficiently delivered inexhaustible plenty – is never quite realised. Sitting rooms become littered with remote controls for televisions, set-top boxes and stereos that are all meant to talk to each other but rarely converse more than to tell you they can’t. When your broadband breaks down, so does your music streaming service.
Compare such experiences with the sensuous act of consuming art old-style. The satisfying ping of a typewriter; the drop of a needle on a black spinning disc of vinyl; the rustle of pages in a much-loved book. In an increasingly digital world, where physical objects and experiences are being replaced by virtual ones, it seems the analogue world is the one wreathed in the joy of creating and possessing the tangible.
These real-world, direct, lived pleasures are essential to the sense of being human – allowing the mind to connect to hand via the eye and ear in a creative pursuit. This has wider ramifications for a society that buzzes to the sound of an algorithmic whirr. As the American philosopher Eric Hoffer noted: “Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.” Hoffer, perspicaciously perhaps, noted that the decline of the “creative flow within” made the individual frustrated and increasingly susceptible to mass movements.
The best of technology recognises that humans gain greatly from learning from the corporeal in a less efficient, less perfect, less speedy manner than machines are designed to do. For typical youngsters, modern computers have become too complicated to learn anything from. Yet teenagers love Raspberry Pi, a piece of cheap, programmable hardware, which allows them to hone their skills. The more time we spend in the digital world of swipes, the more we hanker for face-to-face opportunities. When technology is in sync with human imperfections, it creates a tactile interface to the world. It is this phenomenon perhaps that best explains the perceptible return of the real.
