analog
No question, one can use a smart phone as an aid to memory, and I do use one myself for that purpose. But I don’t find them a congenial repository for anything more complicated than reminding myself to pick up a pair of pants from the cleaners or make an appointment with the cat doctor. If one has the urge to write down a complete thought, a handsome notebook gives it more class. Even a scrap of paper and a stub of a pencil are more preferable for philosophizing than typing the same words down, since writing a word out, letter by letter, is a more self-conscious process and one more likely to inspire further revisions and elaborations of that thought.
Charles Simic, “Take Care of Your Little Notebook,” New York Review of Books Blog, October 12, 2011.
Is anything more pleasurable to the mind than unsullied paper? The studious comparisons and selection of “stock” in textures and colors of cards and paper?
Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 2005), 36.
I started to distrust telephones the instant they stopped working. I can’t pinpoint when that was—the first time I “dropped” a call, or someone said, “I’m losing you”—and I don’t know why the telephone, the analog landline telephone, was never formally mourned.
“Funeral for a Friend,” The New York Times Magazine, October 29, 2010.