TORONTO—Over the holidays I went home and stayed with the family. While there, I went downstairs to pay tribute to the audio gods, bowing my head to one of the most beautiful pieces of machinery ever manufactured: a Rega Plannar 3 turntable.

The Rega has a simple beauty that the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey could well appreciate. Its one purpose — to play vinyl audio records very, very well. It is an instrument. It literally takes the image of a sound wave and converts it back to sound. No compression. No zeroes and ones . It is the closest thing to a fingerprint of Bjork’s voice or Jimi Hendrix’s guitar I will ever hear.

Of late, I’ve been excited that vinyl records sales have been trending upwards. Many in the music industry believe that packaging has been pushing sales: with more surface area, covers can be displayed like art and become collectors items. Nonsense. Something much deeper is at the root of this, something bred into all of us: the analog soul.

iPods, MP3, gmail, blogs, oh my…

email, multimedia, multitasking, oh my…

USB, social networking, e-vites, oh my…

The multimedia grumblers may be right: we are becoming disconnected. The measurable dirt and grit of analog life has been washed away and we’ve been left with purposeless “things” that can become “anything” we want, simply through programming. The computer is the greatest Swiss army knife ever devised. (Or the second greatest, after this one.) From news reader, to music mixer, to account balancer, to telephone, to art canvas, the computer does it all. As a result of this lack of singular physical identity or purpose for our belongings, the romance of things has disappeared.

The reason why, for good or for bad, we cherish seemingly worthless items — like a favourite pen or your grandfather’s watch — is part of this romance. This act of cherishing things “just because” is becoming lost in the digital age. A few months ago, Jon Evans wrote in The Walrus about the death of the book: “The enormous and lasting success of ink on paper is almost entirely due to one thing: contrast.” The impending revolution is always near: there is always this gadget or the next one or the next one that is going to kill the book.

But books are unique unto themselves — they hold an archetypal status that a digital reader or computer will never have. The Inuit believe all objects have an individual soul: a rock has a soul. A pencil has a soul. Even a pair of corduroy trousers can have a soul. Holding a book in your hands, getting buried in its pages, this belief is easy to grasp. The true value in something can sometimes only be measured in the emotions invoked in its destruction. Many weep at the sight of burning books. The act represents something more than just the destruction of property. In contrast, I doubt anyone would weep at the destruction of a pile of notebook computers.

Even if a book-killing digital reader came along tomorrow offering the libraries of the world to all, recycling boxes would not be lining the streets piled with discarded books. I wager the bond between reader and book would only become stronger. There might even be a boom in the used book trade as prices rise as paper books become scarce. (Mental note: start stockpiling used books.)

As we inch further into the realm of digital gadgetry I do foresee a backlash, a revisiting of our analog souls, either on the surface in the form of steampunking or in its extremes, in a movement to the beat of the analog drummer perhaps.

Perhaps I might go watch Stevie J’s keynote speech for the fifth time.

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Posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 11:00 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.