Going Analog: Trend or Movement?

Written by Sarah Sadler

I am 48 years old and last week I asked a chatbot whether you can freeze cooked rice. You can BTW.

I have been cooking rice since the Spice Girls were in the charts. At some point I knew the answer. Now it lives somewhere in California, along with the name of that actor from the thing and roughly half of what I walked into the kitchen for.

To be fair to my brain, it's 48, and it's been through a lot. But I've started to notice that I reach for my phone the way my nan reached for her cardigan, automatically and before I've even decided I'm cold. Somewhere along the way I stopped trying to remember things, because why would you, when the answer is in your pocket?

The one place I still remember properly is my journal. It's where I keep the day my youngest said something so funny I had to write it down on the back of a receipt and then copy it in. It's where I keep the bad weeks too.

And lately everyone seems to have found their own version of it. Film cameras, vinyl, flip phones, a canvas tote full of embroidery thread. My feed is full of people going offline, which, if you think about it for longer than a second, is very funny.

So I couldn't help but wonder…

Is going analog a trend, or a movement? And if you post about it, are you just performing?

Is it actually happening?

Before I get carried away, let's check this isn't just my algorithm having a moment. It isn't.

UK vinyl sales hit 6.7 million LPs in 2023, the 17th year of growth in a row, and it's 16 to 24-year-olds buying them, not men in their fifties guarding their Pink Floyd collections. Ryman says notebook sales are up 20% on the year before. Over in Chicago, one little stationery shop's sales went up 150% in a single year, and 1,700 tickets to a stationery fair, a stationery fair, sold out in 45 minutes.

Then there are the phones. Shopify's sales data for June this year showed feature phones, the old flip kind, up 99% on the month before, and corded landlines up 115%. The number of shops selling feature phones went up 303% in a year. Somebody, somewhere, is buying a phone with a curly wire on purpose.

The man who wrote the book on this, David Sax (it's called The Revenge of Analog), told the Guardian that “we desire more of the world than what's available on 20cm of glass.” I'd have that tattooed on my forearm if I could remember where I put the tattoo parlour's number.

Where did all my memories go?

There's a name for what's happening to my rice knowledge. Back in 2015, Kaspersky called it “digital amnesia.” Their research found that fewer than half of UK adults could recall the phone number they grew up with, and only 43% could remember their work number without looking it up. That was eleven years ago. I dread to think what the figure is now.

Psychologists have a fancier name: the Google effect. In 2011, researchers writing in Science found that people were less likely to remember something if they believed it was saved somewhere, and that they'd remember where it was stored rather than the thing itself. In fairness, I should tell you that the original study has had a rocky time since. A big 2018 project couldn't replicate it, although a 2024 review of 35 studies backed up the broader idea. So the science is a bit like me before coffee: right in spirit, shaky on the details.

And then AI arrived and made it all faster. Last year, researchers at MIT wired up 54 students to EEG machines while they wrote essays, some using ChatGPT, some using Google and some using nothing but their own heads. The ChatGPT group showed the least brain connectivity, and most of them struggled to quote from essays they had written themselves minutes earlier. It's a small study, not yet peer reviewed, and I wouldn't build a religion on it. But I recognised myself in it so hard it stung.

Because here's my problem with handing my memory over to a machine. My journal remembers for me, but I still have to do the remembering to get it in there. My phone remembers instead of me. One of those keeps the muscle working, and the other lets it waste away on the sofa.

The pen is mightier than the search bar

In 2024, Professor Audrey van der Meer and her team at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology put 256 sensors on the heads of 36 students and asked them to either write words by hand or type them. When they wrote by hand, all sorts of regions of the brain lit up and started talking to each other. When they typed, not so much.

“Such widespread brain connectivity is known to be crucial for memory formation,” she said. Which is a scientist's way of saying: if you want to remember it, write it down.

Again, I'll be honest with you. It was 36 students, writing on a touchscreen with a digital pen, so nobody actually tested a Pukka Pad and a biro. But anyone who's ever written a shopping list, left it on the kitchen table and still remembered everything on it already knows this in their bones.

This is why I'll never journal on an app. It's the slowness I'm there for. My hand can't keep up with my head, so my head has to wait, and while it's waiting it decides what actually mattered about the day.

Meet the Analog Influencer

She declared 2026 “The Age of Analog” in a video. She has an “analog bag,” which is a canvas tote full of craft supplies she takes out instead of her phone, and she'll show you exactly what's in it, in a reel, with a trending sound. Her journal has a $150 cover and has been photographed in golden hour more times than I've had hot dinners. Hobonichi, the Japanese planner brand, has been mentioned more than 1.5 million times on Instagram.

She's selling something, too, even when she isn't. That Chicago stationery shop with the 45-minute sell-out has a 40-person staff that includes a social media content team, and its co-owner calls social media “by far the most important driver” of customers through the door. One creator in the same story only started journaling because she saw a Hobonichi on TikTok.

So yes, there's a performance going on. Of course there is. You can't announce to your followers that you're spending less time online without spotting the joke.

But here's where I land, and you're welcome to fight me on it. Posting about something doesn't make it fake. I post my journal pages. I'm a photographer. If something's beautiful I'm going to point a camera at it, and I'll probably tell you about it afterwards.

The test for me is whether you'd still do it if the post got four likes and one of them was your mum. The Analog Influencer's bag only exists if it's filmed. My journal is mostly lists, crossings-out and handwriting I can't read the next morning, and nobody will ever see 95% of it. I'd still write in it on a desert island. I'd photograph it too, if I could find one bit of decent light.

So, trend or movement?

The cynic in me points out that we've been here before. Mintel was writing about a “switching off” trend back in 2010, and here we all are, sixteen years later, reading this on our phones. Most of the people in that Guardian piece still use WhatsApp. Even David Sax says most people going analog still use digital stuff whenever it's useful.

But I don't think that makes it a fad. Over a third of UK teenagers in one survey said social media should be banned for under-16s, which is a bit like turkeys voting for Christmas and then asking for extra stuffing. A whole generation that has never known life without a screen is paying good money for a phone with buttons and a record player. They aren't nostalgic for anything. They've just tried the other way and they're knackered.

Here's my take. The aesthetic is a trend. The craft totes and the golden-hour Hobonichis will be gone by the time my daughters are my age, replaced by whatever looks cute next. Underneath the aesthetic there's something that looks a lot more like a movement to me. People are fed up with handing their attention and their memory over to a slab of glass, and they're trying, a bit clumsily and often on camera, to take some of it back.

As for me, I'm keeping the phone. I'll still ask a chatbot about the rice. But I'm writing down the funny thing my daughter said before I look anything up, because I'd quite like to still know it when I'm 80.

Sources

Sarah Sadler

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Sarah is a social media manager and content creator

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