Thankfully, the analog world is still here, and not only is it surviving but, in many cases, it is thriving. Sales of old-fashioned print books are up for the third year in a row, according to the Association of American Publishers, while ebook sales have been declining. Independent bookstores have been steadily expanding for several years. Vinyl records have witnessed a decade-long boom in popularity (more than 200,000 newly pressed records are sold each week in the United States), while sales of instant-film cameras, paper notebooks, board games and Broadway tickets are all growing again.I expect this dynamic to continue. The omnipresence of the internet and the tawdriness of so much online junk mean that the digital world is no longer cool just for being digital. These days hot fads are just as likely to be old-fashioned stuff like vinyl records and Polaroid-style cameras as new web sites. Among some, weariness with the internet has spurred a taste for more "authentic" experiences; live music is booming like never before, and live theater is hanging in there. Not that I expect internet use to decline, at least not by much; it is thoroughly woven into how we live. But its one-sided march to dominance will yield to a dynamic of push and pull, the number of people getting into online life about balanced by the people cutting back.
Scanning in the farther future, I wonder if we will see whole movements of people who cut themselves off from digital technology altogether. Sci-fi authors have been all over this, imagining futures in which some people become wired-in cyborgs (like Alastair Reynolds' Conjoiners) and others try to avoid computers in any shape or form. Could that divided world be our future?
Not entirely on topic but . . .
ReplyDeleteThere are many SF stories (more so in 50s and 60s) about generation ships taking likeminded people to colonize uninhabited planets so that they can create their own utopias. Some of the stories are quite adventurous and entertaining, but the premise, I think, has always been a bit naive, if not silly. Succeeding generations have their own thoughts about how to live and what to believe, so pretty soon you've traveled half way across the galaxy (or the ocean) only to end up right back where you started. Such colonizing is best done to alleviate crowding (like the Greeks did).