Analog
It was the pre-Socratic Democritus (460-370 BCE) who first cogitated the qualities of technology and the position of the human in relation to it. He gave us the idea that "technology imitates nature." This is the notion that the very earliest humans looked to nature for ways to survive and thrive through technology. For Democritus, the skill of the spider in the action of "weaving and mending, or the swallow in house-building," are examples of the cues in nature that instructed humans to adapt and learn to control their environments.
It is an argument that Aristotle (384-322 BCE) agreed with. Moreover, he explicitly suggested that "imitation" implied a separation-human from technology-that posited an ontological division between natural things (humans, nature) and artifacts. Democritus and Aristotle were thus responsible for the very big claim, one that hung on through the centuries, at least at the commonsense level, that humans exist apart from nature and that their technologies are simply imitations of it. And so analog, in this foundational view, applied more to the general sense of equivalency instead of something more intimately human.
It is the medium that is most important. What the technology, always as an extension of ourselves, enables the individual or society to do is the key factor. This is where potential and therefore technological development lies in our species' interaction with analog technology. This insight, which will be an underlying feature of the rest of the book, is that the real message is the potential inherent in the interaction with technology that places the human dimension at the heart of the process.
Pirsig's awareness reflects something that began, really, with the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Goethe, or artists such as William Blake, or environmentalists like Thoreau, who all grasped that a terrible truth lived at the heart of industrial modernity. They perceived an out-of-control machine logic, a genie that was divorcing humankind from the "real things" of the natural world. Today digital automation and virtuality have taken this process to another dimension. The loss of nature that was a feature in the Romantic perspective has been joined more recently by digital-era ideas on what automation and black box complexity meanswhich is the loss or attenuation of the long accretion of human skills acquired through making things.
The WhatsApp icon, a Facebook service used by billions, is an analog telephone handset, a device that many WhatsApp users would never have used, or even physically but would still recognize what it does. With the app interface we know what we are supposed to do, because it was made easy by making the process look familiar, look culturally appropriate, look analog. The conceptual bridge from the real to the virtual world was made possible by the icon. Part of the icon's role was to make the transition easy, as just noted, but just as important was to give a virtual likeness of the "seductive," the "persuasive," and the "real" that Carol Wilder saw as the essential attractiveness of analog and is the psychological wellspring of retro culture.