Analog Amnesty

Why are we more obsessed than ever with lo-fi culture? What is it that makes the old and the analog so surprisingly cool? And why is it an aesthetic that is seemingly everywhere, from advertising, kitchen products, clothing, art...wherever you look there's some reminder that makes the aesthetic before digital irresistable?

A guy called Grant Mccracken has given this a bit of thought for us, and offers three possible explanations:

 His first comes down to a simple NOSTALGIA:

That 50s laboratory was a nightmare of inefficiency.  Indeed, in the 1950s nothing worked especially well.   The mechanical world was shot through with imperfection and accident.  Thanks to several factors, now it works pretty well.  And because human beings are in our very souls contrary, ungrateful creatures, we now hanker after the world we have lost. 

And then he goes into saying it's also a kind of GROUNDEDNESS:

The second is a wish for a kind of groundedness.  As the world got digitized, the grammar of everything was now beautiful organized and streaming 1s and 0s.  There almost no moving parts on my iPad.  It operates with silent precision.  So there is something kind of wonderful about tech with seams, levers, nice, big dials and moving parts. 

Digital products are silent and slightly accusatory.  They give nothing away about their internal operation, because frankly, they seem to say, you wouldn’t understand it anyhow.  Naturally, we love the Italian, nearly operatic, full disclosure of Lo-fidelity tech that discloses not just what it does but how it does it.  This is candor we can believe in.

But what is perhaps most interesting, is the SYMBOLISM that we connect Lo-Fi with:

We love the Lo-Fi aesthetic because it is a pretty good symbol of what the world is now.  The new tech world may be  rational, exact, dependable, reproducible.  But the cultural effects are entirely opposite. 

This aspect of the Lo-Fi aesthetic isn’t nostalgic or compensatory.  This aspect is tapped into what our culture is now. We have the feeling that at least metaphorically our future is going to look very like this past.  

 Pretty interesting paradox, huh? I'd also like to say it has something to do with fresh generations growing up having never experienced the low-fi, but visiting and experiencing it through the aesthetic rather than the practical use that an analog object once had..

You can read more of the article here at the CULTUREBY website.

via PSFK and CULTUREBY