The “analogue bag” feels like something invented for the sole purpose of driving legacy media commentators insane.
Devised by a Californian content creator (grr!) named Sierra Campbell, the project is aimed at offering portable alternatives to staring at your phone like a zombie every miserable hour of every miserable day. So, within your tote bag or backpack you might have a crossword puzzle, some needlepoint, a paperback book, a flick knife, some throwing stars ... I’m joking, of course. Nobody is suggesting you pack weapons. But all those other essential diversions for the Edwardian lady traveller are listed in Campbell’s TikTok (grr!).
What a crock. Why am I being insulted by this concept I hadn’t heard of until 10 minutes ago? “The rise of the analogue bag: fashion’s answer to doomscrolling,” the Guardian notes. “The Analog Bag [sic] Trend Is an Antidote to Algorithm Brain Rot,” Marie Claire follows up. “Users share the contents of their bags devoted exclusively to offline life,” Vogue explains. This is not a thing! Shut up, everybody! Grr!
Still the horses. If you have a glance at Campbell’s posts you will discover an efficient communicator with no obvious delusions of grandeur. Each month she presents new suggestions for stuff to distract the commuter from bickering about Emerald Fennell (or whatever) with some anonymous Alaskan X user. She has put research into the alternatives. She has considered the dangers of remaining glued to the screen.
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“In a female-dominated industry like social media it’s very easy for the culture to be like: ‘Oh, it’s fine. Everybody else can take this’,” she says of accusations she didn’t devise anything. “But when you invent an idea and it’s really great and catches on and is popular, there is nothing wrong with saying: ‘I put a lot of work into this’.”
That seems fair enough. Campbell hasn’t isolated a subatomic particle or confirmed the Riemann hypothesis, but she has come up with a compelling encouragement to get back in touch with the real. Does anyone truly believe that connecting ourselves to smartphones through every waking moment makes us happier? More often than not, rather than seeking useful information or making an important connection, we are merely finding something to do with our hands and eyes. The information flows past in a numbing stream while we fail to process 80 per cent of the text. Rather than providing stimulus, the phone offers an alternative to stimulus – a way of remaining semiconscious while nominally awake.
What fascinates about the analogue bag alternatives is how delightfully old fashioned they seem. In Victorian novels, when the conversation dies down, you will often read of ladies “getting on with some work”. Since neither Anthony Trollope nor Jane Austen bother much with the servants’ affairs, we can safely assume this means needlepoint, embroidery or whatever else Emma Thompson does within those circular frames in every second literary adaptation. These are all things recommended in Campbell’s posts.
The furious legacy media commentator can calm himself with the knowledge that Big Analogue Bag really does seem to be edging young women back towards activities popular with wealthy spinsters before the second World War.
In a recent post, Campbell recommended knitting, pressing flowers or painting with a portable watercolour kit (that last one probably wouldn’t work on the Luas). Why not butterfly collecting? Or darning socks for the poor soldiers in the Crimean War? Most of these activities seem designed to kill time until Colin Firth pulls himself out of the duckpond and carries you off to matrimony.
[ How AI and social media contribute to ‘brain rot’Opens in new window ]
The truth is, before the turn of the last century, though commuters – and others at a public loose end – still occasionally knitted or crocheted, no big thinking was required to fill in the idle hours. Almost everybody had something to read in a pocket or a bag. A significant portion also set about their own destruction by puffing on cigarettes. Any photo of a busy public interior in the mid-twentieth century is obscured by opened newspapers and carcinogenic fumes. Not an unqualified paradise.
It seems unlikely the analogue cult has any hope of bringing us back to Edwardian recreations or even to the less-distant days when so many defaulted to pulling a physical book or newspaper from a physical bag. The great irony of the current craze (if it has even reached that height) is that it remains an online phenomenon aimed at getting people offline.
A million enthusiasts are huddled around social media boasting about all the things they might do when someone prises the phone from their pre-arthritically clenched hands. They will get to the shell collecting when they have stopped posting about shell collecting. They will learn cribbage when they have stopped posting about cribbage.
Just one more Insta. Just one more TikTok ...
