This might be a weird framing but it's been bugging me for a few days. Many fields have a concept of classical training -- this is most common in music but applies in the humanities and many other areas. For example I do a lot of CAD work for my job, but I received what I would consider a "classical education" in design...I learned to draft by hand and physically model before I was ever allowed to work digitally. I got a lot of value out of this approach and it still informs the way I work today.

A lot of people view computers and technology as modern and almost anti-classical, but as the tech industry matures and the internet moves from something shiny and new to something foundational to our society, what will the new classicism look like?

Thanks for reading my question.

I saw another Tildes thread that was discussing radio stations, and it threw me back to when I was very young and not totally digitized - the tactile feel of the dial as you click-click-click your way to your desired radio station, or the kind-of-subconcious-but-not-really memory you have of which buttons to press to jump to a saved frequency.

What do you miss about analog controls and devices? What do you think we're missing out on in the digital age? If we're missing out, did we still make a leap forward into the digital age?

That's something that concerns me a lot. A lot of what we know about our history came from analog media that was preserved throughout history. Will future generations (100, 200, 1000 years from now...) be able to access our digital documents to understand how we lived?

Edit: the scenario I proposed in the title was just a way to express my concerns more concisely. I don't think it will actually happen but answering it is equivalent to addressing my concerns..