The girls are bringing back physical media and you should too.

by Sydney Preston

@Sydney_17

The other week, I was talking to a friend about how much we miss bloopers at the end of movies. Almost every DVD had a bonus feature that had behind-the-scenes clips or a poster or something that made it feel special.

She was astonished to hear that I not only still have my DVD player but also regularly use it. It made me pause, made me think about physical media. What does it truly mean to own, to collect, to have tangible media in your hands?

In the digital age, we have begun to neglect our senses. Feeling the grooves of your favorite album on vinyl, the smell of a book when flipping through pages, the sound of the DVD player winding up. It is the little things that can help someone feel even more connected to what they are consuming.

The reliance on streaming services to provide media has become absurd. Media is taken away constantly, making users have to pay for every subscription available in order to have a shot at being able to get access to what they want. It is a dependence that is obsolete in the world of physical media, you know exactly what you have and where it is at all times.

Since we don’t own anything anymore, we have given up all control. I don’t have access to some of my favorite songs on streaming services because artists have removed them. I watch my favorite childhood movies on streaming, knowing that the extended edition on DVD had deleted scenes that made the movie (I’m looking at you, High School Musical 2). Streaming killed the video star.

I know that here at The Diaries, we are a group of people who adore physical media and are committed to bringing it back. What I didn’t realize is that more and more people outside our beautiful circle have joined our cause.

Analog living is coming back, and it feels like a piece of humanity is coming along with it.

Our generation has finally come to the point where we have realized how bad phone addictions have become. Looking at the generation of kids who are already addicted to screens is an upsetting wake-up call. They’re consuming brain-rot content and constant stimulation, and we are just now seeing the impacts of this in behavior and social interactions. As a result, we look back at our own childhoods. Think of the scrapbooks, the old family albums, the burned CDs that you listened to so much that you knew where every skip was. A slower time where it was okay to be bored, and it was easier to see simple pleasures in life.

“Analog living is coming back and it feels like a piece of humanity is coming along with it”.

I don’t think that it is a coincidence at all that the rise in living an analog life has coincided with the rise of A.I. This new wave of technology feels like an infestation; all of a sudden, it is everywhere, from social media, commercials, to search engines that now show A.I. before any credited source. The seemingly overnight explosion has everything on our screens starting to feel, well, artificial.

We are craving the tactical, the human element.

A creator on TikTok, Siece Campbell, saw all of this and created the idea of an analog bag that has swept the internet. In the analog bag are all things that promote living an analog life: crossword puzzles, knitting material, traveling paint kit, books, journals, etc. The entire idea is to have something full of non-screen hobbies that can be as easily accessible as reaching for your phone. Kicking an addiction is never easy and it helps to have things in reach to keep your hands from unlocking your phone.

Yes, this may seem like another trend that is well-intentioned but ends up snowballing into overconsumption and another aesthetic to post about. I see those concerns, but even if people do this as a trend, there is a beautiful chance that it sticks in their souls. The feeling of walking down the aisles of a second-hand store perusing through the stacks of CD’s, wearing a knitted sweater that you made yourself, scouring the magazine rack to find an old copy of your favorite issue. It is a start to getting back to figuring out what you like and what you don’t.

When everything is no longer at your fingertips, you have to become selective about what you allow to enter your mind. I think you’ll be surprised by what captures your attention when you go past the “recommended for you” feature on your streaming. You may unlock a new depth to yourself that you wouldn’t have found in your digital life.