#3: Circling back to what we once loved
Of typewriter keyboards and loving the archaic
A very intense discussion recently went down on a Slack group I’m on, in the channel dedicated to water cooler conversations of the virtual office.
Surprisingly, it was about keyboards – although anyone who has worked in a design and engineering firm knows this is not a topic to be taken lightly. I checked out the links being bartered between members, and some of the keyboards had one thing in common: they looked like (there’s no other word for it) typewriters.
I thought that was an anomaly in the otherwise consistent culture of lauding all things modern and high-tech and vaguely inhuman. But boy, was I wrong. As the predatory ads on Instagram cared to show me, for every modern rendition of a must-have or nice-to-have gadget, there was an equally stubborn sub-discourse in favour of old-world objects and aesthetic put to work in an Industry 4.0 world.
In a lot of aspects, we tend to circle back to what we once loved. The easiest example that comes to mind is fashion and style trends. Nearly every new year brings with it an unravelling mummy of a style trend from the yesteryears. 2018 brought dungarees and embroidered clothing. 2019 had mom jeans and round glasses make a comeback. Skipping over the Year That Must Not Be Named to tell you that, in 2021, you can expect androgynous co-ords and midi heels to turn up in a Ford Mustang blasting Backstreet Boys. Coincidentally, they’ve also made a come back (or forward?) from the 90s. See what I mean?
I could paint the same picture for record players, film cameras, risographs, screen printing and furniture but then this newsletter would run into your Monday, and we can’t have that. So to jump to the question that begs asking – why do we circle back to what we once loved? Steering well clear, obviously, of past relationships that deserve an analysis of their own.
One argument is that older technology was stubbornly purpose-driven. Despite the temptations of owning a speaker that plays music, reads out recipes and snores to help you fall asleep, sometimes all you need is a record player that plays off the vinyl you put in, without ads, impertinent questions and being a general nosy parker.
Modern devices do too much, and people tend to want an experience they can actually connect with. Take the aforementioned typewriter keyboard – the tactile and auditory experience adds to its value much more than silent keys and touch keypads (which, coincidentally, also try to mimic that tactile sense through haptic feedback).
Nostalgia has been described as a self-soothing tool for adapting to discontinuity. When the world around us changes rapidly and beyond our control, nostalgia creates steadier mental narratives to avoid your being swept away by the current. Constant change isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be in the long run, so if it isn’t broken, why fix it?
There’s a growing disillusionment with perfection at our fingertips. Effort took effort, but it had meaning. In the absence of effort, we’ve gained speed, but we’ve lost meaning.
But there’s still something satisfyingly tangible in the chunky mechanisms of film cameras and Super-8s, the whirring of Polaroids and the clackety-clack of typewriter keyboards.
In an era that champions technology easily capable of mimicking the analogue approach (only better), intentionally picking out the old goods to work with is a subtle rejection of this time. Imperfection and effort are as human as sleek polished devices are not.
We’re all a little unpolished around the edges, after all.
"We’re all a little unpolished around the edges, after all."
Yes we all are