Thoughts on The Future is Analog

I took the middle of November off social media--a detox, if you will--for lots of reasons, starting with the overwhelming panic and hysteria going on. I needed a break to settle my own heart and nerves, plus to try to sort out my own thoughts post-election. 

The couple of weeks leading up to the election were tough in our neighborhood because, due to yard signs and group events, we discovered just how conservative our neighbors are. So I was already grieving the lack of camaraderie with our neighbors. But "neighborliness" is also something I've been thinking about for 8+ years, how at least in the places we've lived, "knowing" our neighbors is basically waving as we go by, if anyone happens to be roadside. Even before 2020, the individual family had moved life into the house or backyard, removing the happenstance meetings that led to developing helpful relationships with your neighbors. 

Fast forward to Nov 6: my problem-solving thinking goes to why are we all so afraid? Book quotes ("Fear is the mind-killer") and New Thought affirmations ("Energy goes where Attention shows") are front-and-center in my mind. Eventually, my ruminations settled into three parts. 

1. people are afraid of what or who they don't know or have direct experience with. 
2. we have constructed such a world that we can go through our days without having kind human conversation with individuals who are different in some way from ourselves. we can go days without having in-person, real-time, face-to-face conversation with anyone. Our digital devices make it possible to work, learn, shop, and entertain ourselves and we don't ever have to really step foot outside of our houses. 
3. and that's the antidote right? we have to be in a position to talk to people, to have real time face-to-face conversations so that we learn about other people so that we build empathy.

The Saturday following the election, I go to my safe happy place: the public library. I go in looking for the new classic book Bowling Alone,  only to find all of the copies are already checked out, to my surprise and delight. So I find the Dewey decimal number to see what else is on the shelf around where the book should be and that's how I stumble upon The Future Is Analog by David Sax. 

(side note, you can't stumble upon other books on 'zon the way you can in the library. Algorithms are not the same as serendipity.) 

To my extreme fortune, during the first part of November I was actively working on a theater show about how we can be better neighbors to those in our community by witnessing and treating everyone as the sacred human they are regardless of the differences that we may perceive. Every night I was in an actual room with live human beings, witnessing a play, all of us feeling real emotions together in real time.

Sax discusses theater, and most other cultural content, in Chapter 5: Friday: Culture. I appreciate the week day chapter divisions, how he looked at the digital help/interference in most aspects of life: Work, School, Commerce, The City, Culture (my fave, natch), Conversation, and Soul, appropriately for Sunday. 

Sax saw what happened during 2020 and the first part of 2021 and then wrote the book at the latter part of '21 and it was published in '22. He observed when we were all thrown into this "future digital world" that it didn't work. The things that make us human are analog. The events that build empathy--going to spiritual services, being in a theater (yes even a movie theater), going to school with others, going to work in an office--yes, they can be helped by digital technology but they cannot be replaced by digital technology.

(another side note: and that doesn't even get into how AI is transforming life-as-we-know-it.)

I found myself fist-pumping "yes!!" to much of the book. Sax isn't a Luddite, as he often says, so there is a lot of "digital can be good at" examples throughout. But the premise holds: it is the analog conversations we have in school, at work, on the streets/shops, at spiritual centers, that build social trust and empathy. 

"Conversations naturally create empathy between individuals. Empathy has become a bit of a buzzword over the past decades,... but at its heart, empathy is the crucial human ability to perceive another human being as having equal worth. It is the building block of understanding, but empathy is almost impossible to build online. When you speak with someone face-to-face, and you hear about their own challenges, their loves, perspectives, and history, you actually gain a sense of who they are. And when empathy declines in a society, that is when you get divisions, conflict, and violence." (212)

While I wish I had Alexander's sword to cut through the Gordian Knot of distress we find ourselves in (globally: this isn't just an American problem), I instead turn to the small steps I and my family can take: 

• stop shopping online as a first choice. shopping in a locally-owned store, yes, can be more expensive, but I remember the good that not only comes from interacting with another human being in real space/time and also the economic benefits that come from spending locally. is there vast choice and cheaper prices online? yes. no denying. And every downtown chamber of commerce economic development team member leader will implore people to come shop local because that is part of what makes our towns vibrant places to live.
• consume our content in a more analog way. read paper books, magazines, and newspapers (as much as possible). go to the theater and cinema. don't binge watch things. timer on social media usage. 
• find ways to be in real time/space with other people often. theater is an easy one for me, of course, but looking for ways/time to say yes more to church involvement, outings with the former work friends, nature hikes, and kid playdates (or the mall for the teenager).

(yet another side note: I still need to research and write another piece about Third Places, Teenagers, and the rise of Consumerism-focused Social Media. The loss of the Mall as a gathering place is profound.)

I placed a hold for Bowling Alone and it has come in so I'm excited to dig into that next. Putnam wrote that book in 2000, before the 9/11 attacks and so it's interesting just how much what he talks about in that book has also been exacerbated over the ensuing almost 25 years and why we find ourselves in such a fractured society today. Clearly, any dive into history of wars will show how the internet/social media is merely the latest tool to distract and divide people. None of this started with DARPA or The Well or Friendster. Our mammalian brains look for difference and use whatever it finds to separate. So it's even more critical to-- as humans, as neighbors, as people who want and need to be in community--we still have to do the analog work of building relationships, talking to people who are different, learning about the other, so that we can overcome that mammal tendency to fear and instead embrace the human capacity to understand and love.