I am trying a slightly different type of post this year I said and one of the posts I want to do is more a discussion piece arpound a subject or topic that has caught my attention now this can be book or slightly book related this I fell is slightly related but on the whole is about a whole thing that has been growing in the last year or two. That is the Analogue moment, whether it is a bag of stuff to stop people doomscrolling, taking photos with a film camera or buying vinyl and CDs. I think this is a big moment this year: from small coffee roasters to small bookshops and record shops, there has been a move away from large chains and online shopping. Now, for me, I lived before computers and smartphones. In fact, I was in my twenties when I first got online, around the time Twitter started. I loved those early years, but in recent years, I have noticeably moved back from being online as much. But I do doomscroll, I watch way too much YouTube for my liking. I never got TikTok, and I find Instagram just full of people trying to take pretty pictures of books and trying to sell their book clubs, which people have to pay for. aI llo hold off as i am heading to a topic for another post here. Anyway. Analogue, I’m sure you have seen it crop up in your feed at some point. For me, it is a younger generation that has only known the likes of Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, infinite scroll, and Your Every Move, and thought that adding to a growing algorithm was the norm. A situation of too many choices, but then that choice is being dictated by an algorithm that feeds people addiction to infinite scrolling, their music, taste in films, news, in fact, everything online. We for a few year Amanda and I online food shop until I said one day we decided to order virtually the same shop as last month as the shop gives you previous buys first we had got so used to clicking oin them we had lost that scaning the super market aisles for the last producto or offer or just that ingrident you hadn’t brought for a while. Now we could look harder online, but we haven’t had an online shop for about seven or eight years. It is the same for me in a lot of ways I have a huge cd and viynl collection I have spotify but as for what decides my taste, I still listen to a few radio shows, buy a couple of monthly music magazines, and have done this for the last 30 years my only ever algorthim was maybe John Peel when I was younger for music. Now I read only paper books. I have a Kindle, but I just have never got used to using an ereader. I love the feel of books. I love the discovery of second-hand books. As for being on an algorithm, I do buy a few books online. I would very rarely be the target of a bookstore’s online recommendations. I do lament the loss of newspaper book coverage and its steady shrinkage over the years. I remember the first time I came across Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson in the papers in the mid-90s. I still buy two papers every Saturday and Sunday, a habit that harks back to my dad, who had three or four papers most weekends. I stopped buying so much in the week, but this is another thing that I have avoided: the news hole people fall into these days online. I rarely get my news from any sources other than newspaper sites, BBC News online, or Radio 4. I get the analogy: people want the world we once had, which is sadly gone.  The world we most small towns had a couple of good newsagents for magazines, a stationery shop for pens, paper, etc., an art shop for art supplies, and even a toy shop for things like board games. These are gone, or just chain shops in most town centres these days. A world where the discovery of music books happens every time you visit a new bookshop, record shop, or listen to the radio in small, bite-sized pieces. The world wasn’t all there to overwhelm us or an algorithm, a simple time when we got bored, but then found things to do, and that wasn’t scrolling. I hold my hand up in writing this post. I have thought about how much YouTube I have watched over the last few years, and maybe I need to step back from it. I think the younger genrartion just want a bit of what I had when I was younger I grew up taking pictures doing little art bits writing list discovering records and books in the wild taking chances not worrying if a book or record was cool but I have never want to be cool part of a scene or thought of as cutting edge i have always followed my own path as many of you will know from my taste in music my books of the year i am maybe still mostly analogue in my life..not sure wha thte point of this was other than I keep seeing the word Analogue here and there and just to say I get it and welcome to life before big tech toook over. What are your thoughts? I thought the pic of my macbook with my vistorian wriitng slope was the perfect mix of digital and analogue worlds