We still cling to the idea that time is either spent online or offline, that you are either disconnected and not absorbing information or drowning in a sea of it and completely missing out on your ‘real’ life. It follows that “the current obsession with the analogue, the vintage, and the retro has everything to do with this fetishization of the offline. The rise of the mp3 has been coupled with a resurgence in vinyl. Vintage cameras and typewriters dot the apartments of Millennials. Digital photos are cast with the soft glow, paper borders, and scratches of Instagram’s faux-vintage filters. The ease and speed of the digital photo resists itself, creating a new appreciation for slow film photography. “Decay porn” has become a thing.”
But the notion of ‘offline’ has expired, our digital and physical lives are enmeshed, they are not separate. “There was and is no offline; it is a lusted-after fetish object that some claim special ability to attain, and it has always been a phantom.” The digital world heavily depends on the physical one: what happens in the physical world is what gets posted about on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. “Disconnection from the smartphone and social media isn’t really disconnection at all: The logic of social media follows us long after we log out.”