I’ve been having a lot of fun mooning over old technology, brought to me by Cabel’s post, DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs . There’s a lot going on in the soup of feelings that draws me to this sort of thing, but there are three key factors:
- anemoia, nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known, as coined by John Koenig in the brilliant The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. A lot of this stuff was already on the way out when I was coming up. My first Pokémon game was Red, if that gives you a ballpark.
- So many of my day-to-day technological needs are now handled nicely by my smart phone. I don’t need to buy that alarm clock with the beautiful aesthetic. I sure don’t need to fill half of my living room with stereo equipment. There is less beautiful product design in my home because it’s all crammed in to one (pretty) rectangle.
- What if I could listen to music on a machine that didn’t tell me the world was ending?
Anyway, it was a cool article.
