Something I've been thinking about lately:

A couple years ago, I started reading about how some true "audiophiles" were abandoning compact disks in favor of going back to vinyl records. Their argument being that analog sound is distinctly different and more "real" than digital sound. Also, they say, the sound coming off a record is "warmer" than the sound coming off a CD*

(*I cannot comment on the truth of that; I guess my hearing isn't good enough - or the stereo systems I've worked with are not optimized enough - for me to tell a difference.)

I can say that I vastly prefer using - and speaking to someone on - a landline phone over a cell phone. Typically, at least around where I live, cell phone connections are tinny or echoey at times. And it's very frustrating to have someone call on a cell phone, leave a message, and have the phone cut out as they're telling you what number to call them at (I've had that happen several times, with students, and it's never a situation where I have the number written down somewhere - so I can't call them).

Now, I've read on a couple people's blogs that they've gone back to, or they miss, film photography. (I don't remember which blogs. Tuesday afternoon, when I was thinking I was going to have to reconstruct analyses, I did a lot of random blog-surfing, because all the analyses I was trying took fifteen minutes each to run and I didn't have anything to do while they were running). One person commented on their blog that they liked film photography because they thought the colors came out better, that it was richer, and that in most cases, unless you spend a lot of money on a digital SLR, you're not able to manipulate a whole lot (like f-stop and exposure) using a digital camera.

(And yeah, I understand that last point. I took Photography in high school and I loved all the photo-geekery: playing with the f-stop, messing with exposure, "bracketing" shots you took and choosing the best ones. Of course, we were also developing our own black-and-white film, and printing our own photos (which was also incredibly fun and fulfilling; at one point in my life I thought I'd plan on having a house with a darkroom until I thought about all of the issues with disposing of the spent chemicals). And I found the little "instant" cameras sort of stultifying - you couldn't really set the focus (endlessly annoying to someone who is trying to take closeup photos of plants) or change the exposure, or anything.)

Another person remarked that they liked having negatives - as long as they protected them, they'd have the negatives forever. But, they said, they kept losing digital files, and sometimes file formats change, and you can't open old files. And I understand that, too. I have photographs of family members who died before I was born, because someone hung onto negatives (in some cases, for almost 100 years) and it was possible to print new photos off of the old negatives. And yet - I cannot open computer files of some papers I wrote back in the early 1990s.

It's just interesting to me, in a sort of connecting-the-dots way, that a lot of older technologies that were considered "outdated" are coming back (well, not so much with the cell phones - I seem to be the only one complaining that cell phones are sometimes unpleasant to listen to conversations over). And it just makes me wonder - is this perhaps why e-books never took off? That people look at the physical object, "book," and realize it is such a good technology - you can take books hundreds of years old, and provided you can read the language they are written in, you can still read them. Books work in the absence of electricity. Books are hard to "hack" and alter - oh, you could censor or change the newer printings of a book but it would be hard to call in all the older copies and change them. And electronic files on a computer are none of those. (And also - except the cheap-paper-using WWII era paperbacks, books can't be programmed to self-destruct. Ebooks could. You could write a killfile somewhere in the program that specifies the person could only access the file a given number of times).

I don't know. I suppose it's because of my own fascination with older technologies (like knitting, like making things by hand, my interest in the whole "steampunk" idea of making new things look Victorian) and the fact that I'm anything BUT an "early adopter" makes me notice that. But I wonder if there's getting to be a little backlash about technology - the whole "this will be outdated in six months" thing (which is another reason I'm not an early adopter - I hate the idea of spending several hundred dollars on something just to find it's obsolete in a year). And also if people are beginning to realize that stuff that's stood the test of time has done so for a reason.