AI, digital oversaturation driving kids’ return to analog — experts

If the future is here — artificial intelligence (AI), social media, electric cars, digital revolution — what else is in store for our children’s future?

The answer, based on experts’ observations, has been here, too — long before today’s generations Alpha and Beta have been born. According to these experts, thanks in part to over digital saturation and partly due to curiosity, today’s younger generations are going back to the technologies of their forefathers.

Time to rewind

From targeting 10,000 steps per day to tracking one’s phone, smartwatches offer many functionalities that no ordinary mechanical clock can provide, making these rechargeable arm pieces all the rage nowadays.

But for 145-year-old Japanese watch brand Seiko, the emerging collectors of its traditional watches are not veteran gentlemen’s club members, but Gen-Zs.

“I’m sure, a lot of people wear smartwatches for its health functions, etc. But wearing a traditional watch still gives a different feeling… traditional time keeping is still special and dear,” Darlene Perez, brand manager for Seiko Philippines, told DAILY TRIBUNE in an exclusive interview, implying that since analog nostalgic pieces are rare, they have become more special than the more common high-tech ones.

According to her, Seiko Japan granted the Philippines six country-exclusive collections limited to 1,000 pieces per variant because every collection gets sold-out in a week among watch groups or fan clubs. She noted that these clubs include young members with a “growing hobby” of buying the brand’s entry-level watches as “a piece of their heritage” and “fit for their active lifestyle” because of features not present among digital timepieces like automatic winding, water resistance and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or extra hand for different time zones.

As Perez observed, “In the watch community, there’s no old or young. It’s all about love for watches.”

Sound trip playback

In this day and age of iTunes and Spotify, vinyl records have still found their way to the youth, particularly Gen-Zs, who are now into collecting vinyl records more than the previous generations, a representative for vinyl records store Satchmi told DAILY TRIBUNE.

Thus, from stand-alone stores, Satchmi has extended to kiosks and booths and had been joining bazaars such as the recent Kultura Fest in SM Mall of Asia, Pasay City, to reach more of its vinyl records’ market — the Gen-Zs, who apparently find it thrilling to scour for rare vinyl record finds just like “treasure-hunting” in an ukay-ukay (thrift shop). Listening to records over coffee or beer has also become community gatherings among this age group.

As the store representative explained, even if every vinyl record’s price starts at P3,000 per piece, young professionals are eager to take home such large disks since the listening experience when the song plays from a vinyl record player or turntables is more powerful and immersive, as opposed to just piping in music through a Bluetooth speaker and mobile device.

Besides vinyl records, the store has also started selling films, cameras and “charmeras” or charm-sized analog cameras and other accessories for traditional photography like Lomography since, as the representative pointed out, the youth nowadays are into collecting nostalgia items that challenge their wit and creativity more than gadgets that are so user-friendly, anyone can use them without stretching out their brains.

In their film era

For over 20 years, Nice Print Photo founder Charisse Tinio has observed how Filipinos’ preferences for photography have evolved, from celebrity-inspired to back to analog photography among Gen-Zs, especially for their wedding photos and videos.

“The Gen-Zs, my brides now who are born in the 1990s, they’re the ones now getting married, and I really cannot push them to book packages from 20 years ago, 10 years ago. It’s a totally different market,” Tinio shared at a recent Women’s Month talk in Opulence Design Concept, Greenbelt 5, Makati City.

“So we hear them, we listen to them. And now, you know how funny, we saw the shift back to analog… The Gen-Zs now, they want film. They want the handicam touch; the authenticity and all these that we saw from 20 years ago, that’s what they want.”

From a franchisee of then popular photography company Konica, Nice Print Photo now has teams all over the world and has serviced thousands in over 100 countries.

As nuggets for success, Tinio’s advice to younger generations is, “You can never go wrong with hard work.”

“You can never underestimate the training for the trade because it really starts there. Number two is to adapt to change. In this world, change is inevitable. You would have to always move forward and pivot if needed. Just open your mind all the time,” she asserted. “Number three is consistency. Be consistent with the goal that you have, the passion, waking up each day knowing what it is that really drives you in this business and lastly, it’s consistency in creating relationships with people.”