The digital generation wants to go offline: the roots of an analogue revival

In March of 2020, the world went largely virtual. With no way to go out and live normal day-to-day lives in the physical sense, the digital world took over – from Zoom calls with family members to social storms around Netflix shows, replacing the workplace ‘watercooler moment’. 

Four and a half years later, eerily little has changed. Digital entertainment is still at the forefront of culture, and social platforms seem to have more impact than ever, with the commodification of online moments turning artists like Charli XCX from unknown Boiler Room DJs to H&M collaborators within a matter of months. 

Yet there is a tonal shift happening underneath. 15 years ago, you could judge popularity by how many Facebook friends someone had; now, many of the ‘cool kids’ have dumb phones. As outlined by Prospect, conspiracy theories about the ‘dead internet’ are coming to life as AI powers content creation and bot farms populate its engagement metrics at unprecedented scale. Vinyl is growing, and even CDs and DVDs are seeing increased interest among younger audiences.

Being online is a necessity no one finds it easy to walk away from. Be it talking to friends or being aware of breaking news, it is increasingly difficult to not doomscroll on a daily basis just to keep afloat in such a fast moving world. Yet consumer pushback is emerging, as the demands of this ‘always on’ behaviour start to become overwhelming and unenjoyable. “More” no longer means “better”; authenticity, curation, and meaningful moments are more valuable than ever. With the digital world becoming ever more cluttered, making those things harder to find, consumers are naturally turning back to the physical world for answers. 

Digital metrics are helpful, but they are, in a sense, too flat. They can quantify the ‘what’, but strings of numbers relating to likes, comments, shares, and listens cannot adequately convey the qualitative forces at play that result in some things taking off while others flop. Intrinsic human needs for novelty and connection — which build up into cultural momentum — take time, and often the most important parts of that process happen long before they trigger recognisable spikes in data. Metrics are reactive; they can only describe what has already happened, not what comes next. Entertainment industries have become so obsessed with measuring the former, incumbents are struggling to tap into the latter. The answer for them, as for consumers, may just lie in turning back the clock, and paying a little more attention to what happens offline. 

For more, check out our latest Social report, “Analogue revival: A cultural pendulum swing”.