“In an era of unscratchable touch screens and sleek, perpetually Internet-connected devices that seem to smoothen all the edges of the world, people suddenly find themselves yearning for the reassuring roughness of the imperfect.”
In a recent article in The China Post, the writer questioned if we may just be at the tip of a brand new era. Technology? Nope. Information? Not quite.
Instead, what this writer proposes is we may be at the beginning of the nostalgia era. People are looking for a way to revive the feelings they once had by things of the past before we morphed everything into a digital rendition of itself. We miss touching and feeling things that had meaning without the necessity of plugging it in or running an “app” for that.
And in fact this article may be on to something.
Think of the most recent sale within the photography industry. Instagram sold for $1 billion dollars; its an app designed to make photographs have an old-world look.
When you take a photograph, you simply use an app to turn it into something from another time. With a touch of a button, you capture an image and apply various techniques. Then shoot it out to your friends through your favorite site, whether its Facebook or simply placing it on your blog. You aren’t giving up the things you love about today – instantaneous capture and manipulation, and sharing with friends around the world. Yet you’re giving it a look you remember from your youth.
And this isn’t the only example. [Read more...]
