A decade into the digital utopia, and its dark side is finally showing. Every day we learn another way our devices are making us miserable. Enter David Sax. He’s a sophisticated observer of consumer behaviour and author of one of the New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year, The Revenge of Analog. In his NYT op-ed this week, he explains how we should (and why we must) champion the artifacts of analog.
Completely disengaging from the digital world isn’t realistic for many. “What we can do though,” concedes Sax, “is restore some sense of balance over our relationship with digital technology, and the best way to do that is with analog: the ying to digital’s yang.”
How do we do this? By walking into the brick and mortar stores that give our neighbourhood shape; by buying a book which gives us an unparalleled tactile experience; by interacting with other human beings: “analog excels particularly well at encouraging human interaction, which is crucial to our physical and mental well-being … we do not face a simple choice of digital or analog. That is the false logic of the binary code that computers are programmed with, which ignores the complexity of life in the real world.”
To book David Sax for your next speaking event, contact The Lavin Agency, his exclusive speakers bureau.
