The Analog Turn: Reflections on Humanities Watch’s Tenth Anniversary

This is my annual letter to readers, a letter that, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, begins with a note of gratitude for your support, commentary, and criticism. The site has evolved with the times, even as it seeks to chart the changes in the conversation between the humanities and healthcare, business, and STEM.

One theme in this conversation over the past ten years has been AI. The term “artificial intelligence,” which traces its origin at least to the 1940s and 1950s, may not seem to need a history, since it bends our minds toward the future: future data centers, future robotics, and not least future price/earning ratios. Yet the humanities remind us, if we are listening, that past is prologue, and that history is a repository of creative and destructive future possibilities: its achievements may assuage our dystopian imagings, while its warnings may heighten them. History provides us with choices.

I would like to commemorate here features of our future. The phrase may sound quixotic, even illogical. How can we commemorate our future? By witnessing the coming return of the past. In this digital realm, with our words suspended in cyberspace, I would like us to consider the ‘analog turn’ that is occurring and will continue to occur. Consider this data:

sales of printed books are steady, even increasing
and that of notebooks are steadily improving
also of pens
and of LPs
and of record players
expanding number of letter-writing groups since 2019
and of book clubs.

We also read anecdotally that many people, especially younger people, who, having been born into the age of digital media, are now turning to write by hand, draw sketches, sculpt, cast pots, in other words embrace the physical and tactile means of expression. They tell us that we have become so extreme in our modernity as to forget who we were (and are) and only imagine a world in terms of virtual reality.

What if this imagining, in fact, reflects our partiality and our imbalance? The fragmentation we feel among us is actually within ourselves in our pursuit of increasingly narrow technological solutions to our problems, a pursuit, as David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti reminded us, that is bound to fail, since technology as we define it cannot address psychological problems or problems of the spirit.

The analog turn is a way to address this imbalance and fragmentation. The turn itself is not a solution but a reaction, moved by an impulse to restore a sense of wholeness.

Here the humanities, with all their analog richness, come into play. They can assist in this effort to find balance. Just as Cheng Man Ching brought the practice of tai chi chuan to mitigate the manic lives of Westerners, particularly in Manhatten, so the humanities may provide us a means of discovering other sides of ourselves hidden from our awareness, and so release the tension we hold that impedes our changing our points of view of ourselves, others, and the world.

So as a tenth anniversary reflection, try this exercise in the humanities and see if it works for you. It takes a few minutes.

First, find a sonnet of Shakespeare, or any poem for that matter. Here is one example.

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O, carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thy antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Step one: read it here, online
Now print it out and read it
Then write it out by hand — yes, very analog, I know.
Finally, read it out loud.

What have you discovered from this passage from digital to print, from print to writing, from writing to sound? Maryanne Wolf has studied the effect of digital reading on our brains, how our comprehension here diminishes in comparison to our reading in print — what have you now witnessed by taking the analog turn?

One thing I noticed was Shakespeare’s changing use of adjectives or epithets for Time: “Devouring” Time that brings down lions in their prime; “swift-footed” Time that will “make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st” (a beautiful rhythmic line that captures time’s movement); and at the close, “old” Time, with that impressively ambiguous “old.” Is Time old because ancient and established? Or because Time itself will be superannuated, or overcome, by eternal lines of poetry? Or both?

There are many other wonders in these lines: the “But” of line eight, interrupting the close of the second quattrain or set of four lines. This “But” is faced with a final “Yet”, another reversal. The poet commands Time to stop his march across the face of his beloved; and then regardless — for the command, spoken with the anger of the opening lines, cannot stop Time’s advance — he will, he says, remain triumphant over Time through his verse.

What is important — essential — from this small exercise is what you have discovered. What has the analog turn brought home to you? Has taken this time, these few steps, been worth the time? Are you now more attentive to what you read, and also to the sound of language (why does Shakespeare disrupt the meter in the final line, writing “ever live” and not “live ever”? Would not the meaning be the same….)?

This exercise is designed to bring us closer to the power of poetry, also by reading, writing, and hearing it as it was first practiced: as a physical, acoustic, analog encounter. Whatever discoveries AI and the digital domain may afford us — and they are many — it is my hope that they also lead us to find balance through heeding the humanities and so experiencing their past and future power in our present lives.

For other anniversary Observations, see here.