Every day we are introduced to a new piece of technology that brings some sort of convenience to our lives. Want to know where to go out to eat tonight? Check the reviews on Yelp. Missed your exit on the highway and are too directionally impaired to figure it out on your own? Turn on the GPS on your smartphone and follow the magic arrow. Trying to meet someone attractive in your area within five minutes? Log on to Tinder and hope you don’t get rejected virtually. The list goes on and on of how our society continues to progress and strive to find ways to make everyday tasks quicker and easier. So why are we seeing older items such as record players and typewriters being brought back? You can’t walk into an Urban Outfitters without passing a display table filled with record players. Even many young writers are beginning to choose typewriters instead of Word to type up a document. I’m all for a bit of nostalgia and soaking in the good ol’ days, but there has to be a fine line between drunkenly playing Nintendo 64 in your common room and crumpling up fully typed papers out of your typewriter since you can’t press “delete.” While there are some throwback items I’m happy are having a comeback such as Polaroid cameras, Super Smash Brothers and retro beach cruisers, there are definitely a few that I believe have been forgotten about or updated for a reason.
Analog Photography
Something I’m starting to see more and more of are young collegiates breaking out a disposable or Polaroid camera. While I appreciate Polaroid cameras for their easy functionality and their capability of printing a picture from the camera within a matter of seconds, I find the overall process of disposable cameras to be too long and mundane. Analog photography uses a progressively changing recording medium such as developing film and thus is slower than modern digital cameras. And yet, I see albums posted to Facebook with titles such as “No Filter” or “Disposables!” in which the guilty culprits go through all the trouble of buying a camera for $14, getting prints developed for $16, then painstakingly scanning each and every one onto their desktop. All of which could have been done with a digital camera or smartphone in a matter of minutes. A good digital camera does have a bigger ticket price than an analog camera, that’s for sure. But by the time you factor in the costs of buying a new analog camera and developing an album every month for a year, a digital camera or smartphone app definitely is far more affordable.
Record Players
Okay, I’ll admit it. Every time I’ve gone to a flea market I’ve slowed down to gaze at those beautiful boxes of antiquity. And yes, I have bought a couple of Sufjan Stevens albums from a record shop in Chicago. However, once I actually played the brand new albums in my parent’s record player, I immediately noticed the poor quality of sound. Furthermore, you frequently have to rearrange the needle when the record starts to skip. Though many record players serve as stylish decor to add to a room, they usually create more of a hassle than they’re worth. Many purists believe that vinyl have better quality than CDs and MP3s due to it being analog and not digital, but a lot of sound engineers refute this claim.
In 2012 NPR did an interview on the radio with two sound experts called, “Why Vinyl Sounds Better Than CD, Or Not.” Sean Olive, director of acoustic research at Harman International, explained that when he was testing audio loudspeakers at the National Research Council in Canada back in 1985, the company decided to stop using vinyl to test the speakers and used CDs instead. He said, “What we found was that vinyl was a limiting factor in our ability to do accurate and reliable listening tests on loudspeakers, and we had to find a more reliable and more accurate medium.” Today’s engineers continually come up with ways to make the sound of your music player cleaner and crisper to create the best listening experience. I find it to be almost an insult to all of the accomplishments of our generation to use record players. It’s like scoring floor seats to the NBA Finals and turning it down to sit up in the nosebleeds next to the garbage can that reeks of stale beer and greasy nachos.
Typewriters
I feel like a public service announcement should be made warning young, hipster writers that even though you may feel like you’re Ernest Hemingway while you type away on your early 1900s typewriter, your work will not turn out with the same quality as Hemingway’s. While the rattling of your keytop and crank of the carriage release lever may sound rather melodic to you, your roommate across the room probably wants to throw that thing out the window. For those who don’t view the typewriter in just a romantic way, they use functionality to defend why they prefer them. In a BBC article, typewriter collector Anthony Casillo said, “People still use typewriters because they still work. They offer a distraction-free alternative to the modern day methods for producing a document. They challenge the user to be more efficient and see their errors on paper.” I can see his point here, as I am constantly taking a Facebook break after I finish a paragraph of a paper for school. However, there are still advantages for having Internet access while writing a paper or story. Everyday, millions of journals, scholarly articles and books are being uploaded to the Internet for public use. We literally have the world at our fingertips, which is an extreme convenience to us when trying to support our paper with facts or have an insight to other ideas. In the case of straight storytelling, online research is usually not necessary and the Internet can definitely cause a distraction. However, if you’re truly committed to focusing on the task at hand, there are apps available online that can literally lock you out of the Internet. Freedom offers a downloadable app available for both Mac and PC users for $10 in which you can set a limit on the amount of time you would like to disable your Internet or certain social media sites.