DIGITAL LIFE

Why are young people "resurrecting" old technologies?

Teenagers and 20-somethings may have grown up with cell phones in hand, ordering food in just a few clicks and using ride-hailing services, but some have grown tired of it. Driven by a desire to escape the constant use of screens, they're bringing back digital cameras, flip phones, CDs, and even records. This information is from The Wall Street Journal.

And even artists are adapting to this. Popular musicians among younger people—including Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Alex Warren, and Chappell Roan—sell various formats of nostalgic physical media on their websites: CDs, vinyl records, and cassette tapes. Some, like Carpenter and Troye Sivan, even sell CD singles—a format practically forgotten since the early 2000s. Even TikTok is full of videos about Bluetooth CD players, flip phones, and digital cameras. "People, especially Gen Z, are tired of not owning anything," Hunter White, a 25-year-old data engineer and self-proclaimed member of the "internet music nerds," told the Wall Street Journal. White said he collects CDs to escape the dominance of streaming services, which he says pay artists little and have inconsistent catalogs. He finds records at garage sales, thrift stores, record stores, and flea markets, and listens to them all on a device released by Sony in 2002.

But that doesn't mean he doesn't use technology. To share his love of CDs, White launched an app called Dissonant late last year. The platform boasts a library of 800 records and about 350 members, most of whom are White's age. They pay to receive a CD in the mail, along with a handwritten note about the album. They can keep the CD or return it for a free one.

Another person who decided to distance herself from new technologies was Lucy Jackson, 17, a college student who uses a cell phone that does little more than make calls and send text messages. For her, who uses paper maps and calls the taxi station when she needs to get around, the challenges of a low-tech life are a small price to pay for what she gains in return.

“I’ve come to value things I can’t easily access with a touch, like any kind of media,” said Lucy, who serves on the board of the Luddite Club, a nonprofit that encourages smartphone breaks.

Jackson remembers getting her first iPhone in elementary school. According to the student, social media made her feel like she was living a double life. “There was the 3D version, in real life, where I was happy—and there was this 2D world where I was showing an image of myself,” she said. “It was all so fake.”

In her freshman year of high school, she met people with the same idea of ​​ditching their smartphones and bought her first flip phone. "The way I listened to music changed drastically," she said. "Navigation became a real problem. For school, I had to be really organized," she told The Wall Street Journal.

The digital camera was also one of the "rediscovered" technologies. There's even a recurring joke on TikTok that in every group of friends, there's "the digital camera friend"—the one who gets everyone together to take photos and takes care of SD cards and adapters. Kendall Jenner recently appeared with a Canon PowerShot in an Instagram post.

Tumasi Agyapong, 26, said she became interested in digital cameras about two years ago, driven by nostalgia and the quality of the images. She loves that they serve a single purpose—without the distractions of a smartphone. "It really comes from this desire to detox from my phone being everything," she said. According to a 2023 survey by The Harris Poll, 80% of Gen Z respondents said they believe young people are overly dependent on technology, and 60% said they wish they could "go back to a time when nobody was connected."

"They're doing this curious balancing act," said Clay Routledge, whose team at the Human Flourishing Lab conducted the survey in partnership with The Harris Poll. "They like technology, but they feel like they're missing out and want more control over how they use it."

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