Many tech options and apps may not suit you — just turn them Off

By David Winch

Local Journalism Initiative

Everything’s digital these days. Soon, you’ll be able to click Start on your car from the bedroom on a cold winter morning, then have it drive to the local grocery for a litre of milk.

Just kidding about the milk part, but the wonders of tech are proliferating.

While digital stuff is generally useful and labour-saving, it is sometimes a pain. I actively avoid some innovations, while letting others wither from neglect.

This is not some rebellion against tech or a fruitless call to turn back the (digital) clock. I am quite comfortable with desktop computers, laptops, smartphones and their various apps, and spend endless time online. I have run two websites (including, ahem, davidwinch.website) and I operated a governmental publishing unit that was 100 per cent online and paper-free.

So I am not incompetent. Just critical: there’s lots of digital stuff you don’t need.

Shift for yourself

In our household, we have one foot in the new world, one in the old. I write cheques regularly, read many paper publications, opt sometimes for counter service at banks, keep an emergency landline at home, pay for cable TV rather than streaming, and choose numerous non-digital services.

In our car, for example. We first bought a Volkswagen ten years ago straight off the boat from Wolfsburg. So we were able to get a European model with manual stick shift. Vroom.

We bought another VW in 2024, but now, no chance of a stick shift. No clutch, just a push-button start. Luckily, it still has handy manual controls for wipers and a radio dial.

During car repairs, however, we had to rent a vehicle. It included a super-proliferation of digital everything. A big screen dominated the dashboard, with many flashy options. We had trouble turning the radio off. It was a relief to return to our old car, with less digital clutter.

Resistance is futile! you say. No, it isn’t. There have been several successful pushbacks.

Let’s look at some choices:

Banking: Yes, everything can be done online. Cash transfers, bill payments, direct deposits. But I still use paper cheques often enough, ordering packs of 50. I find them handy to pay our many contractors and for small gifts and local transactions. It feels simpler.

Media: I love newspapers, always have — I sold them on street corners, delivered them by hand, then founded a couple of high-school newspapers before becoming a letters-to-the-editor regular then a writer. I call paper “the real thing”. Once it has been printed and is in your hands, nothing can be revised, retracted or touched up. There is no risk of losing a story in cyberspace.

Buying papers these days, I am a real outlier. While their outlets have definitely shrunk, we keep track of the supermarkets, dépanneurs and bookstores that stock daily newspapers. I head straight to MultiMags in NDG-Montreal for the Globe and Mail, or to Maxi in Lennoxville for Townships Weekend and the Journal de Montréal.

Retro trend albums

Music. The most striking retro trend is in musical recordings. Vinyl LPs have made a huge comeback in recent years. In the hippest parts of the trendiest neighbourhoods, they are everywhere.

 I always liked CDs, and amassed quite a collection — classical, rock, jazz, country, Christmas —from the 1990s through their decline in the 2010s. And we have a solid Bose stereo with CD tray in my office. All good.

But I am bombarded with online requests to sign on to Sirius for our car radio and to subscribe to Spotify at home. I guess creating your own playlists is convenient; it avoids storing physical CDs. But I don’t really want it. However, since our new car has no CD tray, my hand is being steadily forced.

Meanwhile, vinyl LPs keep surging:  The Conversation reported in 2023 that “over the past decade, vinyl records have made a major comeback. People purchased $1.2 billion U.S. of records in 2022, a 20 per cent jump from the previous year. Not only did sales rise, but they also surpassed CD sales for the first time since 1988, according to a report from the Recording Industry Association of America”.

In Vancouver’s trendy Gastown district last month, we came upon a huge music store entirely stocked with LPs. Every type of music (see photo). In Toronto’s hipster Ossington district, LPs seem just as popular, with young and youngish music-lovers.

Why this change?  The blog Freestyle Vinyl concludes: “This trend reflects a growing appreciation for the tangible, analog aspects of vinyl and its unique sound quality”.

Landline phones: As cell phones have surged, landlines have steeply declined.

Statistics Canada reports: “In 2021, 93.9 per cent of Canadian households reported having at least one cellphone …. Conversely, the share of households that reported having a landline has declined consistently, from nearly two-thirds (63.3 per cent) in 2017 to less than half (47.4 per cent) in 2021”.

In a recentarticle in The Atlantic monthly on “things we wish would come back”, one writer mused:

“My parents disconnected their landline, but the number is seared in my mind alongside the other home numbers of my childhood friends. I recently learned that my internet provider offers a free landline, and my apartment has a number of its own. All I have to do is plug a phone into the jack.

“It’s an idyllic thought: coming home, putting my cellphone—and all its distractions—away, but not being disconnected. I can still chat aimlessly with my sister while doing chores, or catch up with a long-distance friend. I’m all for bringing back the landline as a way to create a just-large-enough opening for the outside world to reach me.”

Go ahead: carve your own niche in this all-digital world.