“The Digital Age is Fossilised,” says King’s Affair. In a promotional video for the upcoming event, they invite us to a future King’s College, where archaeologists several centuries from now seek to understand our digital world. A young excavator hears a “strange ringing tune” coming from the ground. It’s that famous melody from Ray Charles’ I’ve Got a Woman: “She gives me money, when I’m in need.” Future archaeologists have discovered a mobile phone, long buried beneath King’s College. For today’s viewer, the “ringing tune” is not strange at all. But of course, we are trapped in the past, on the other side of the YouTube screen. It’s a fun reminder that, despite what our parents warned us, the digital might not last forever. As King’s Affair quips on their website: “The home computer is but plastic, the iPhone but metal.” This choice of theme taps into a wider impulse within Cambridge’s student scene. In unique ways, Cambridge students, clubs, colleges and faculties are abandoning digital processes.

“While the digital offers convenience in some respects, perhaps it acts as a hindrance in more contexts than we care to admit”

Take HAPPENING zine, a Cambridge student-run publication which meets termly for an evening of communal creation. Works created during the HAPPENING session become the zine’s content, rather than submissions from an online portal. HAPPENING zine’s founder, Pembroke student Esther Keeley, shared that the creative magic comes from “bringing people together in a single location and capturing that particular moment of their working alongside one another […] work emerges organically and each event has its own feeling.” In a similar spirit, Wolfson College’s student association organises ‘Digital Detox Thursdays’, a weekly session where students leave their phones in a basket at the door and enter an “intentionally analogue space” for reading, journaling, drawing and other non-digital activities. With so many in the Cambridge community leaving digitalisation behind, it seems time to rethink our assumptions about technology. Why is analogue engagement having such a resurgence?

When the Digital Turn was proclaimed some time ago, excitement about what these technologies could do established myths about digitality that no longer reflect what they have done. Marshall McLuhan famously heralded “the Global Village,” a funky compression of time and space made possible through electrical wires. Digitality made everything into data, promising convenient “workflows” to students everywhere. And of course, the favourite warning of parents everywhere: ‘once it’s out there, it’s out there’. Mind your Instagram posts, young Netizen. Your future employers are watching. The Digital Turn promised, for better or worse, a future of connection, convenience and immortality.

Today, our relationship with the digital seems to be in a different place. Perhaps the means for constant connectivity are there, but do Cambridge students feel more connected? Wolfson student, Will Renouccie, explained that he left Instagram some years ago because: “My conversations with mates were so boring. We’d call; they’d ask if I saw their new post. I’d say ‘yeah’ and the conversation would be done. Since I deleted [Instagram], I actually talk to them, find out what they were up to.”

“There is something about the tangible quality of analogue media that beckons, demands a different form of engagement”

He added: “My mum taught me that to create a social plan, you call someone, you pick a date and time. Then you show up, end of story. Today, you can cancel at the eleventh hour. And supposedly, it’s fine. Just because you sent a text message.” Another student reprogrammed his iPhone to limit its functionality to reading, messaging and music. He’s a busy guy, and doesn’t have time for “the bits and bobs the Big Companies want me to use,” he told me. It’s better to catch him in person. Connection, the first myth of the digital.

While the digital offers convenience in some respects, perhaps it acts as a hindrance in more contexts than we care to admit. Several courses, including my own (Digital Humanities), have reverted to taking feedback on paper. Imagine that! The digital humanists prefer data collection on pen and paper. Dr. Hugo Leal, Director of Postgraduate Studies in Digital Humanities, stated that: “Using online forms to collect feedback was a solution to a non-existent problem. After confirming that traditional pen and paper feedback was working well for other programmes at the Faculty of English […] yes, the Digital Humanities went analogue.”

There is something about the tangible quality of analogue media that beckons, demands a different form of engagement that we’ve grown nostalgic for. As Wolfson student, Dillan Bartlett says: “I do lots on my laptop these days, which I don’t like very much at all. As soon as they [supervisors] let me into the lab, I’m chucking this thing [computer] out my window. I want to get dirty – with my hands.” Convenience, the second myth of the digital.

“Digital technologies, like any other, have their uses negotiated by the people who engage with them”

Nor does it seem that the digital lasts forever. How many essays have been written on a Word document that a poor fresher forgot to save? How many Lent recap posts were deleted, never to be seen again? During my Internet tenure, I’ve had no less than three Tumblr blogs, five Instagram pages, two Twitter (before it was X) profiles, three email addresses and two Snapchat accounts. I’ve produced no shortage of data for a digital footprint, but where are these accounts today? Lost to the digital abyss. Perhaps, the future archaeologists at King’s will have more luck finding them, but today, I remain dubious. Immortality, the third myth of the digital.

The unmasking of digital myths is changing Cambridge’s student culture. King’s College has bestowed upon our smartphones the status of relic. Cambridge artists, poets, writers, photographers and fashion enthusiasts are moving away from engagement with digital technologies in favour of tangible, community-based practices. The electrical engineers yearn to ditch their laptops, the music anthropologists are bidding social media adieu, the data scientists are turning their iPhones into Nokias. Even the digital humanists are reverting to pen and paper. Is the digital dead?

Perhaps not, but it seems high time that we killed the myths which surround it. Digital technologies, like any other, have their uses negotiated by the people who engage with them. It seemed logical that being able to connect would foster greater connection, that convenience would make digital media the preferred choice, that the Internet’s archival qualities would preserve information forevermore. Yet, these outcomes were never given. Rather, people have chosen how to engage with the digital, which has shaped cultural practices just as much as these technologies’ inherent affordances.