Bring Back The Classics Pt. 1: The Zombie Train-Car and The Fall of Public Intellectualism

I find myself and my millennial (gag!) generation at this interesting intersection of having experienced the tail-end the analog world and having been very active participants in the digital revolution. I’ve heard others highlight this predicament as growing up with the internet but being old enough to remember a time before it existed. I will investigate this phenomenon in this series called “Bring Back The Classics” (Alternatively, What You Know Bout This Youngblood?!)

One of my main concerns with new digital technology is we are eliminating highly valuable features of analog devices that at first glance seem hidden or unnecessary but upon inspection are often quite important. This leads to the movement of people towards “hipster” trends such as record collections or walkmans for the nostalgia (gag). 

My hope is that we are able to grasp the subtle, soft-benefits of older products and bring them along to the newer iterations where appropriate.

One of the most pertinent examples of this for me is the use of ebooks. While there are many great features of ebooks above traditional physical books (such as instant look-up of words, hyperlinked indexes, and extreme portability) there are some major drawbacks that have become immensely apparent to me. People often mention missing the physical sensations of reading a book. Things like turning a page, feeling the aged paper on your fingers, even the smell of an old cherished book all bring back fond memories. These are valid features exclusive to physical books but I’d like to focus on a different idea that i believe has more cultural impact. 

[might start with a more vivid train example to paint the picture]

One of my favorite things about books is the social nature of them. Reading a book itself is a kind of social signifier. Books lets others know, in sort of a vain way, that you are interested in educating yourself (aka the nerdy flex). It can also serve the purpose of signaling your interests to potential friends or future partners for conversation. One of my favorite songs of my time deep in the SoundCloud era is called “Airport Bar”. In it the singer sees “a blonde” with their head “buried in some Faulkner.” The singer then laments his lack of knowledge of literature and how it negatively affects his dating prospects. This highlights a meta issue that arises with the popularization of ebooks. I fear that the hiding away of books into ambiguous phones and mobile devices reduces the visible intellectual culture of our society. When you walk into a train car and see newspapers, novels, picture books, and magazines all being engaged by passengers, it feels like the car is intellectually alive and well. These days when I walk into a train car all i see is people glued to their phone screens. While I’m not naive and technologically inept as many elders who decry the fall of modern society (because you be on that phone) to think that everyone is mindlessly scrolling on social media platforms (though many probably are), and I realize that many riders, like myself, prefer to read their news, novels, and articles in the devices that are already in their palm, the mere sight of so many individuals zoned in on their separate devices does drain the train (bars! nigga) of the rich culture that dotted the car in the past from the various media being consumed on the ride. What kind of media you intake says something about you. Are you a fashion bae, reading Vogue to keep up on the latest commandments of fashion as determined by Ms. Wintour? Or are you poet bae, deep brevity of the poetic stylings of Nayyirah Waheed? Or maybe you’re intellectual bae catching up on the musings of the universe from the mind of Richard Feynman. Or maybe you’re all 3 cuz we ain’t boxing niggas in no more in 2019! In aggregate, this also says something more important about our culture. Without these signals, we appear to be increasingly more isolated yet hyper-connected individuals living on the internet and less in the physical world around us. In large part the idea that perception is reality seems to be affirming itself and I fear that we are spiraling evermore quickly into the kind of world where human interaction is obsolete. Some people don’t see this to be a bad thing and would happily upload their consciousness into the cloud or whatever other sci-fi fantasy is the flavor of the day. I, for one, am more for the progression into a future where technology enhances our humanity and allows us to be more fully human. Time will tell but I suspect that anything that is fundamentally inhuman will be countered, rejected and corrected on the macro scale. Basically, if things continue to progress deeper into the isolationist abyss, we’ll see more and more phone diets, more social media breaks, and quaint (read: annoying as hell) signs at hipster coffee shops urging us to “pretend it’s 1990 and just talk to people”, as the proper balanced and inevitable reaction to our techie deep-dive. Wouldn’t it be better to find a more healthy, middle road solution rather than engaging this tumultuous binge-and-purge cycle we’re establishing with the junk food of our devices? I think so. Let me know what you think!