The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter

by David Sax

Once music was divorced from any physical object, its supply so vastly exceeded demand that people simply refused to pay for it. 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. Music became data, one more set of 1’s and 0’s lurking in your hard drive, invisible to see and impossible to touch. Nothing is less cool than data.

New vinyl buyers, in contrast, aren’t as price sensitive. They are happy to pay $20 or more for a copy of Taylor Swift’s 1989, or twice that for a Record Store Day special release, because they get something substantial in return: an asset they can hold in their hands. “You could sell a lot less vinyl to a lot fewer people and make higher profits,” said Crupnick. Compare that to digital downloads, where he estimates a label needs to sell over 127,000 singles to break even on the production of an album. “The average price of that CD is six dollars wholesale, and you maybe get sixty cents [wholesale] on iTunes,” Crupnick said. “But suddenly on vinyl, you can bump up to ten or twelve dollars wholesale… that’s significantly more profitable than other models.”

White has said that there is no romance in a mouse click; that physical, analog recording technology preserves music and sound far better over the course of history than quickly obsolete hard drives. He has recorded one of the top-selling records of the entire vinyl boom, Lazaretto, an album so packed with wild quirks and design features—a hidden hologram, a secret track on the label, an A side that plays from the inside out (which I didn’t figure out for a full six months)—it serves as analog’s battle cry. If White is the industry’s Willy Wonka, then Third Man Records is his chocolate factory. In 2008, White converted a former auto repair shop into a psychedelic, analog wonderland that looks as if it was designed by Tim Burton. Each surface is painted either glossy black or in shocks of primary yellow, red, and blue. Everyone working there wears the company’s signature black and canary yellow colors. Third Man has a vintage pharmacy soda fountain, a stuffed giraffe’s head, old quirky cars, and motel signs. There is a concert venue where artists have performed live to the cutting lathe, or recorded with White as producer, ranging from local independent bands and Aziz Ansari to such legends as Beck, Loretta Lynn, Wanda Jackson, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Willie Nelson.

Then Promised Land Sound started to play. The band immediately let loose a torrent of wah-wah–heavy, psychedelic country garage rock. There were tastes of the Band, the Byrds, and the Allman Brothers in there, but it was clearly its own thing, a pure Nashville sound. Halfway through that first song I took my eyes off the drummer and noticed heads bobbing, feet tapping, and smiles breaking out all around the bar. All the smartphones had disappeared into bags and pockets, chased away by the sheer energy of the band’s music. It commanded your attention so fully, so mercilessly, that you either had to submit or flee. This was what drew in teenagers who had grown up with iPods and never touched an LP to rush out and buy their first turntable. This was why vinyl records and analog music had their revenge. Because, to paraphrase Mark Twain, a great live band is a bolt of lightning, and an iPod is a lightning bug.

In his book The Organized Mind, cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin talks about the tremendous harm inflicted on us by information overload, which he claims is worse for your brain than exhaustion and smoking marijuana (he calls multitasking “empty-calories brain candy”). Numerous studies have shown that handwriting notes is simply better for engagement, information retention, and mental health than is writing on digital devices. “Writing something down conserves the mental energy of worrying that you might forget something and in trying not to forget it,” Levitin wrote, presumably on paper.

One day in London, I spoke with Jane Wolfson and Steve Hare, who work for the media-planning agency Initiative, which coordinates advertising purchases for such brands as Coca-Cola and Amazon. Hare said that the trend away from print had decreased its share of media spends from 30 percent in 2005 to just 7 percent in 2015, with that lost share going to digital (TV, billboards, and other media have remained steady). “But I think that’s a symptom of headlines,” Wolfson said, noting that clients were reluctant to invest in something they were repeatedly told was dying, even though print’s strengths to advertisers had not actually diminished. “Print has always performed well on pure ROI [return on investment],” she said. Print ads have a higher engagement than digital ads. They are seen for longer periods of time, and both the brand and publication have far greater control about where and how an advertisement is presented, compared with algorithmically placed ads in digital publications (which might display an ad for a fake Kate Middleton sex video on the website of the New York Times, to cite a recent example that graced my computer screen). While digital advertisements are often seen as intrusive nuisances and obstacles, begging to be clicked away or prevented altogether with ad-blocker software, paper ads fit into the editorial landscape. In the case of a publication such as Vogue, they are as much a reason to buy the magazine as its editorial content.

“I would say a print reader is worth more than a digital reader,” Wolfson said. “They have a higher affinity and loyalty to that product [the magazine or newspaper], that transfers to brand advertising.” According to a recent survey by Magnetic, the marketing agency of the British magazine publishing industry, 90 percent of magazine readers look at advertisements (far higher than any other media), and 70 percent of participants bought something or visited a business after seeing an ad in a magazine. Online that number is significantly lower. “It is very difficult to build a brand online,” Hare said, “because you click in, click out, and it’s very difficult to build a relationship with someone in that.”

People need and want stable, well-paying employment, with the hope of improved wages and conditions. As the on-demand economy grows, increased competition from other freelancers will drive down wages for those driving Uber riders or delivering groceries for Instacart. One reporter, writing for the business blog Quartz, compared the new, on-demand jobs enabled by smartphones to menial jobs he saw growing up in Mumbai, India: doing laundry, delivering lunches, and driving cars for the wealthy. You didn’t need technology to make these jobs happen; you just needed a large pool of laborers willing to work for pennies, motivated chiefly by poverty and inequality.

To understand why education technology fails so frequently, it’s important to start at the beginning of our learning life, a period known in the field as early childhood education (ECE), which covers daycare, preschool, and kindergarten. While many activities during this time may seem like a lot of aimless playing, naps, colds, and diaper changes, it is actually the most crucial educational experience of our lives, because it provides the foundation for all our learning that follows. Young children learn about the world through physical senses: grabbing and touching, smelling and hearing, seeing, licking. The widely held recommendations by pediatricians the world over to avoid exposing children under age two to screens is not out of concern that the content on those screens will damage their brain, but for fear that they will replace more valuable, sensory activities, such as putting their hands through a box of sand, or eating a tub of Play-Doh.

Levin used my own daughter’s experience at daycare that day as an example. At the time, she was one and a half, and was finger painting in her class. That activity not only involved her ability to create an image on paper, Levin said, but the sensory feeling of the wet paint running down her arm, the visual learning of the colors mixing as she moved her fingers around the paint, the spatial learning when she moved her arm off the paper and the paint dripped onto the floor, and the social learning when she flung paint at another kid and they cried, and the teacher told her why that wasn’t cool and why she had to apologize. Finger painting was a full-body, full-mind experience. Compare that to numerous finger painting apps available for a tablet, and the sensory learning experience is reduced down to the tips of her fingers dragging across a small glass surface, without texture, smell, taste, or other physical and social consequences. “When you’re pushing buttons, it’s an abbreviation of all of that,” Levin said. “You’re just not getting it.”

A big component of early childhood education is play-based learning, which is the guided use of unstructured play. Children need to explore the limits of acceptable behavior through play, and the physical and social consequences of those actions.

When ed tech fails, the blame is often placed on the teachers who apparently didn’t adopt it correctly or with enough enthusiasm. This assumption is as arrogantly false as handing out laptops to poor children and expecting their lives to change. It ignores reality. The reality is that teachers know what works best in their classrooms, and they know what they need to improve the way they teach their students.

“I spent eight years of my life telling people you didn’t need a whiteboard in the classroom anymore,” Collins said. “Teachers rebelled against that. We thought it was a training issue, and that if they had the right training they wouldn’t use the whiteboard. But it wasn’t training… it was a use issue. Teachers just wanted to pick up a marker and write on a board, and you can’t do this with technology.” These teachers weren’t stubborn or resistant to technology. They were open to new tools and ideas. But they wanted a technology that worked for their needs.

Subsequent studies have demonstrated having lots of whiteboard space in a class helps students retain information through something called information persistence. If information is visible for days or weeks at a time, it soaks into the brain a lot more readily than something that appears on a screen for a few seconds.

“We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally,” Nicholas Carr wrote in The Glass Cage. “But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That’s the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges us or diminishes us, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another.”

As more research comes out about the effect of omnipresent digital technology, we are also choosing analog for our health. Screen time has been proven to sap concentration, increase stress and anxiety, wreak havoc with sleep patterns, and disturb a whole host of brain functions. This is especially true in young children, but we can see the effects for ourselves in our own lives: the stress that comes with checking our devices every few minutes, the feeling of sluggishness we get after hours staring at a screen, the ever-present sense that we are missing out on something, that we are a step behind the world. Analog allows us to step back from this, losing ourselves for an hour or afternoon in a spinning record or a Sunday newspaper, and reassert our sense of who we are.

“Look how much time these kids spend on computers, phones, and other devices,” people say. “It is what they know. It is how they communicate. It is what they love.” To deny them the digital technology at the core of their life, they say, is to ignore the reality of a world that has fundamentally changed. What I found over the course of writing this book, however, is the exact opposite. The younger someone was, the more digitally exposed their generation was, the less I found them enamored by digital technology, and the more they were wary of its effects. These were the teenagers and twentysomethings out buying new turntables, film cameras, and novels in paperback. They were the students who told me how they would rather be constrained by the borders of a page than the limits of word processors. These kids revered analog. They craved it. And they were more articulate about its benefits than was anyone else I spoke with.