Alongside the comeback of Y2K fashion, Gen Z’s current fixation is retro technology – our beloved Spotify, social media, and iPhone cameras are being swapped out for vinyl record players, Polaroid or digital cameras, and flip phones.
We can already ascertain some potential reasons that Gen Z has to chuck their iPhones out the window — being super plugged in all the time can lead to a myriad of negative effects, and Gen Z has had enough.
For many, adopting retro technology is a way to escape the pressures of social media. Nobody can judge what you’re listening to on Spotify if you switch to a music disc. Capturing a fun moment with your friends on a Polaroid camera lets you keep a physical photo rather than a post to get likes on. Using a flip phone limits you to mainly texting and calling, saving hours and hours of doom scrolling.
Why, then, do we see using retro technology aestheticized on social media?
On Instagram, #flipphone has over 96.8K posts. It’s also trendy to post pictures of record players, and even iPhone-captured photos of hard-copy Polaroids. There’s nothing wrong with infusing social media with photos of retro technology, but it does raise the question: What does our obsession with the “retro,” paired with the refusal to abnegate the modern, say about us as a generation?
The Paradox of Nostalgia
Nostalgia is a bittersweet paradox: it’s the cozy and safe feeling you had watching Spongebob at your grandma’s house, and it’s the realization that you can only experience that specific moment through memory. It’s a longing for the past, the sentiment of if only things were the way they used to be. However, how can we explain a collective nostalgia we have over something that was never quite ours?
Gen Z is defined as anyone born between 1997 and 2012. The first iPhone came out in 2007, which means that if you’re Gen Z, it’s likely that you don’t have as many memories of using a flip phone as a Millennial would. Gen Z grew up alongside the true emergence of the ubiquity of the internet: while we can remember a time before everything was digitized, most of us used smartphones during our formative years. Flip phones were not glamorous compared to the new, shiny device that had Temple Run installed. The retro media that’s trending now was never really Gen Z’s to begin with.
Perhaps that’s why retro media is so trendy. If all you’ve ever known is an influx of notifications, the absence of pocket beeping is something that is yearned for. Even though flip phones receive texts and calls, they are a physical representation of the “simpler times” that nostalgia calls us to remember.
That’s what makes the combination of iPhone usage and retro technology so interesting –- by accessorizing and promoting flip phones and cameras, Gen Z is using social media as an outlet to express disdain for social media. It’s so hard to fathom a world offline, and so the next best thing is to “downgrade” technology.
Whether or not you too decide to throw your iPhone in the trash, it’s clear that Gen Z’s focus on retro technology says less about the phone model in your hand and more about the collective desire for face-to-face connection in an ever-changing digital sphere.
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