Walkmans, wired earphones, dumb telephones: Gen Zs wish to convey again the low-tech Nineties, Life-style Information

SINGAPORE – “Technology never should have advanced past this.” On TikTook, this caption accompanies many a flickering slideshow of 2000s devices: a jumble of flip telephones, camcorders, iPods and blocky computer systems.

Usually set to the tune of 2009 hit Fireflies by American digital music undertaking Owl City, new iterations of the submit appear to be spun out each week. A Gameboy right here, a Blackberry there, a stack of DVDs.

Over the strains of nostalgic pop, younger individuals are pining for a latest low-tech previous.

“When you see someone in headphones with wires, it just looks cool,” says 24-year-old native pupil Cody Tong. “You wonder: ‘What are they listening to?’

“It’s different from the usual AirPods. It brings back that retro look and elevates the outfit.”

Walkmans, wired earphones and even the seemingly fashionable iPhone 5 have turn into fashionable objects, tugged out of obsolescence by a technology fed up with all-use smartphones.

The sentiment has been bouncing round for some time now, prepared to connect itself to vastly totally different poles. Most lately, that was the frenzy for the yr 2016, now distant sufficient to be reappraised as harmless within the glut of grainy throwback footage posted to social media in February.

Most persistently, its goal has been the gritty Nineties. Infatuation with the vaunted no-cellphone period of low-slung denims and crop tops dominating Gen Z trend has lastly spilt over into tech, inducing a vogue for kitschy single-use devices.

E-commerce large Amazon Singapore informed The Straits Times that buyer curiosity in old-school electronics has been on the rise within the final two years, with the surge most pronounced in Kodak merchandise, Sony Walkmans, MP3 gamers and vinyls from English rock band Radiohead.

But if these units double as equipment, telegraphing the footloose air of a pre-smartphone time, is their pull merely visible? Or may a deeper disenchantment be at work?

ST meets three younger “old tech” proponents to seek out out extra.

Student has a group of 180 CDs and 170 information

Sitting by his large residence sound set-up, floppy-haired pupil Cody Tong is raring to speak audio.

The 24-year-old’s music shrine contains a girthy shelf for his 180 CDs and 170 information, turntable, CD participant with in-built digital-to-analogue conversion, amplifier, two standing audio system and a collage of album ephemera taped to the wall.

Dropping the needle on English rock band Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall, he singles out the gnawing bass: “On a record, you can hear things more clearly. You can hear the instruments and vocals better, it’s less compressed than listening to music on streaming.

“It just sounds more warm.”

CDs, then again, ring brilliant. Tong, who sells CDs on Instagramunder the title Radiocore, is conscious the interest is a fussy one. He should be cautious to not drop or scratch the information, and to wipe them down for mud. CDs can develop mould.

But he likes the difficulty, discovering within the friction a welcome break from the too-smooth workings of app-based streaming. “It really makes me sit down in front of my system and just enjoy the music. I don’t use my phone and I can see the record spinning. It’s quite hypnotic.”

How telephones have whittled away on the pleasure of a factor is a recurrent theme in Tong’s asides.

“You can’t get the same experience with streaming, because Spotify is like background noise. You don’t fully enjoy the music.” Of the one- to two-hour stretches he devotes each few days to critical listening, he provides: “My screen time has been going down.”

Which is to not say cellphone fatigue is the only real purpose. Tong is a music lover who speaks like a buff. A CD’s plastic case he calls the “jewel case”, the stickers on its entrance are “hype stickers”, the interior booklet is the “sleeve notes”.

It is jargon even one sufficiently old to have grown up with the shiny discs can not fairly be anticipated to know. But then the music lover can also be within the enterprise.

Most of his Radiocore clientele are of his cohort, with about 60 per cent aged between 16 and 25, he says, citing the determine as proof of a CD pattern.

“They do see the point of getting a CD, beyond just the aesthetic. From what I see, they enjoy the art and printed lyrics that come with it, and it’s a way to support bands.”

In an period the place artistes are liable to tug their discography from “controversial” streaming platforms similar to Spotify, possession of the music is a giant purpose bodily media is regaining its shine, he provides.

Then, there may be the interesting “retro look” of its accoutrements. Quaint, spherical CD Walkmans with dangling wires that finish within the ear are licensed trend equipment now, coveted for his or her novelty in a sea of discreet units.

Just having a retro merchandise is a sign of non-conformity and a refusal of Bluetooth-enabled sameness, Tong provides.

More than that, it’s one thing from the previous, and the previous is self-evidently “interesting”.

He speaks for his technology when, pausing to placed on Alison (1993) by English shoegaze band Slowdive – the gloomy millennial favorite resurrected as a viral TikTook sound – he says: “All the things from the past, we’re making viral.”

Reddit behavior pushed her to change to a tiny cellphone

It was a go to to her grandmother’s residence in Penang, Malaysia, three years in the past that made 28-year-old Jamie Lee really feel the necessity to reassess her relationship together with her cellphone.

Her hope of “living in the moment” together with her household had been derailed by a smothering Reddit behavior, the web discussion board she would lurk on for as much as seven hours a day.

“I was looking at Reddit in her house. Even in the office, I’d go to the toilet every hour and sit in the cubicle to read,” she says.

“It felt like a drug in the sense that when I use it, I don’t think about anything else. It numbs me to existential dread, but once I get off it, I have to confront that.”

Since then, the audio-visual archivist on the National Archives of Singapore has switched to a Jelly Star from Chinese smartphone producer Unihertz, a smidge of a tool simply mistaken for a toy. The three-inch cellphone runs on the outmoded Android 13 system, three generations behind the present Android 16 – a part of the “dumb phone” market feeding a rising minority of smartphone deserters.

On the subreddit r/dumbphones, customers submit suggestions and testimonies of brick-like devices able to sending texts, making calls and little else. These embrace dumbed-down telephones from the likes of Unihertz and Nokia, whose 2720 Flip is styled as a “modern twist on the classic flip phone”.

Ideally, Lee would favor a cellphone with no web in any respect. But residing with out Singpass, banking apps and QR code scanners can be far too impractical, she says.

For the final yr, her display screen time has hovered at an hour a day, helped additionally by an app that locks different extra time-sucking ones. She now goes hours with out interested by her machine, as soon as lacking the window to reply on WhatsApp to a workforce readiness train at work as a result of she had not checked her cellphone, she says.

Better than liberation – “because being liberated means you are still talking about that thing” – hers is the realm of enviable indifference.

The irony is, like loads of low-tech renegades, Lee isn’t a Luddite. She is enthusiastic concerning the pc, on which she makes pixel artwork and video games, codes and reads up on software program growth.

“I don’t have the same animosity towards using the computer because that feels like I’m doing work. I have an intention and am using it as a tool,” she says. The cellphone, then again, is a senseless hamster wheel of content material.

“I don’t like how the online experience is directed by tech companies who most often don’t have any kind of humanist goal. They just want to make you addicted to their products so that you can make them as much money as possible.”

Lee’s work in archiving means she is unusually delicate to the methods during which an “unlimited and unfiltered” quantity of data on-line can stunt essential considering.

Her Reddit dependancy began as a truth-seeking undertaking, however the torrent of views aired had the alternative impact of “drowning out reality” and weakening her consideration span.

It is significantly better to wrestle by means of studying and considering on her personal, she says.

Drawing parallels to her work, she provides: “The archives are information, right? But to interpret it, to construct something out of it, you need to really sit there and do something very difficult by processing information that’s not presented to you in a black-and-white way.

“You come up with your own conclusions. That is the value of the archives. But because of the current state of information, no one wants to do this any more.”

Photographer drawn to tender look of Polaroids

Question: How do you inform if a photographer shoots Polaroids? Answer: Check the fridge.

In lieu of ham and cheese, packs of movie occupy the pull-out shelf of Chris Sim’s fridge. It is the most secure approach of storing the heat- and light-sensitive supplies, preserving their chemistry and color, he says.

The 31-year-old freelancer finest often known as @zalindrome on Instagram for his dreamy portraits of buddies hanging out and native bands has been capturing with the analogue digital camera for eight years, drawn to the tender look and shiny end of the moment movie.

He says: “Nobody wants to be photographed hanging out in clinical, sterile conditions. When you think about the good times you’ve had with your friends, you think about it with sweetness and fondness.”

This tendresse he recreates inside the 4 corners of the flour-white body, the place sharpness is subtle and a gauzy patina added.

Of late, the retro digital camera has made a comeback, instigated by the discharge of the vintage-looking Polaroid Flip Instant Camera in 2025 and the bodily media motion.

Sim says of the modest resurgence: “It’s that whole idea of wanting to show the human element in producing the work. Phone images can be made with very little thought and you have programmes that are able to generate images that look realistic.

“But if you have physical proof of the images you’ve created then it feels different, it’s not disposable.”

With Polaroids, time is one other agent. An image Sim took of Singaporean singer Celine Autumn, for a 2023 Polaroid marketing campaign with late musician David Bowie’s official archive, has turned from heat orange to a misty inexperienced.

Says Sim: “It’s interesting to see how the picture looks like years after. It does make me kind of sad when it changes, but that’s a feature of the medium. It shows time passing. Digital is always frozen.

But Sim resists romantic explanations of his work with Polaroids, which fill a large crate with at least 3,200 pictures. The decision is purely an artistic one, all about getting the dreamy Polaroid finish.

He sees his other vintage cameras the same way, chafing against the too-easy assumption of reflexive millennial nostalgia. “It’s about using specific cameras for a specific purpose,” he says.

Aside from his Polaroid I-2 on the spot digital camera, his rotation consists of the 1995 Sony DCR-VX1000 camcorder and the 2009 Leica M9 digital camera, each cult cameras.

The Sony he favours for its potential to duplicate the look of TV reveals from the early 2000s, and the Leica for its richly colored digital images that come out trying like movie.

It isn’t that previous is best than new, solely that new fashions lack a few of the features of previous ones, he says.

A workaround is to simulate the results of retro cameras in enhancing – out of the query for Sim. “You can’t actually tell the difference between post-production and something original. But even if nobody else can tell, I can. It feels dishonest.”

The essential value is lengthy waits for service repairs or having to do it himself. A sensor alternative for his Leica M9 needed to be despatched to the Leica manufacturing facility in Germany, which took six to 9 months. To repair one other digital camera from the Nineties, he purchased third-party components and adopted YouTube tutorials.

“I hesitate to use the word nostalgia to describe my work. I think it’s the intention of creating work that looks a certain way.” His tastes skew in the direction of the formative mid-budget Hollywood films of his childhood, shot on movement image movie.

The body fee, grain and color of American film-maker Richard Linklater’s comedy School Of Rock (2003) was notably influential, he provides.

The subtext is, issues simply regarded higher earlier than.

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This article was first printed in The Straits Times. Permission required for replica.