Loss of Analog, Loss of Soul

We live in a technological wonderland. The incredible leaps and advances within the last 30 years alone can boggle the average mind when viewed from the perspective of beginning and end products.

The average American owns a cell phone. 95% of Americans have an email address. Rapidly, paper mail and paper money become more and more obsolete. Eventually, everything will be handled through transactions of information rather than through tangibility.

But one has to wonder if this is a good change.

To begin my argument on the matter, I shall use a recent addition to the technological market: the digital book. I'm not certain that I could list all of the products on the market right now that are specifically designed to or are capable of being utilized as a digital book. The Nook, the Kindle, the iPad...all of these allow it. And, I do admit, that it is an interesting and much-sought-after idea to have the contents of an entire library inside something the size of only ONE book.

However, despite the practicality and innovation of such devices, something seems to be lost in the transition from analog to digital, from tangible to intangible. Holding an actual book, an object made of paper and ink, being able to smell the pages and feel the texture of the cover, these things create within a person a certain sense of...comfort. Maybe not comfort, but the word eludes me, partially because the feeling itself is difficult to describe and partially because my brain won't bring the word to surface. However, there is a certain sensory pleasure that coincides with handling an actual, paper-and-ink piece of literature.

When one handles a digial book device, one loses that sensory pleasure. When you get right down to it, you're essentially handling a watered-down laptop with very specific functions. There's nothing charming about it. You're not flipping a page, you're flicking the touch screen. You aren't closing the book to put it away, you're closing the file. Granted, one gets all the same content of War and Peace digitally as they would with a paperback, but there is something fundamentally MISSING.

I'll cite music as another example, though I fear I'll end up sounding like one of those purists that people often joke about. Anyone I can think of off the top of my head owns an MP3 player or iPod. With online download sites like iTunes and Amazon (not to mention the illegal ones like Limewire, Kazaa, and Napster), digital versions of essentially any song desired are at anyone's fingertips. 30 years ago, it was oftentimes difficult to find a whole album, let alone a specific song (seeing as how a consumer would have to scour music stores to find the one they sought). Now, you not only don't have to purchase an entire album for that one song you wanted, you don't even have to pay for that one song if you choose to be dishonest.

The point I'm making is that, back in the 60s-80s, having that record or that cassette or whatever the medium was for the time, it meant something to the owner. They couldn't just pick and choose what songs they wanted, accumulating a library of mismatching music to mold to their tastes. Their tastes were MOLDED by the albums they bought, not the other way around. Additionally, in an age of digital enhancement and audio alteration, most songs are "pitch perfect" with many of the older songs having their audio tracks "cleaned up". I personally don't view this as an improvement seeing as I view a lot of these imperfections as providing deeper levels of character to the songs they accompany.

But I guess that's just me.

And this brings me to the point of this article. Many people talk about the degenerative nature of society in the past several decades; each generation being worst than the last, as many say.

However, I implore you readers to view it like this: the degradation of society over the past several decades seems directly associated with our cultures shift toward digital mediums. I'm not saying our slow shift into a completely digital paradigm is the cause for our societal problems but the realization that, since the 50s, there has been a slow decline in respect and values while an incline in techlogical advance begs the question if there is truly a "loss of soul" with our loss of analog.

Are we, in our pursuit of faster and smaller gadgets with greater and greater capacity, slowly destroying that which makes us decent humans? Is our insistence on making anything and everything desired a few keystrokes from our grasp destoying our concept of a hard day's work?

I cannot count the number of times that I have walked into my work's breakroom to find coworkers and other employees sitting at the tables, not conversing with each other, but rather playing on their phones, their ears plugged with earbuds. It pains me to see the days of legitimate social interaction dying at the hands of digital networking. I honestly am not trying to say that these advances in networking and technology and communications are a BAD thing, but I AM saying that they're a bad thing if it means the loss of our ability to act like normal human beings.

I can imagine a world, maybe a century from now, where we won't even speak to each other anymore. All communication will be done either telepathically or with little LCD monitors with our thoughts scrolling across for all to see. No longer would we use our voices for such primitive means of communication when everything can be much more easily exchanged with technology.

Just wait and see.