The media can’t get enough of Gen Z’s obsession with analogue…
The media can’t get enough of Gen Z’s obsession with analogue. Dumbphones, cassette tapes, and even playlists of gloriously bad ’90s music are trending as if they hold the secret to a better life. It’s everywhere TikTok filters, magazine spreads, curated “Y2K vibes” nostalgia packaged as salvation to an age suffocated by social media.
But let’s not confuse iconography with essence. The 90s weren’t about clunky phones. They were about an attitude. And the most important ingredient? Fun.
We’ve forgotten how much fun mattered. The messy, unplanned, sometimes chaotic fun that came from working hard together. Building teams face-to-face. Culture forged not in Zoom grids or WhatsApp groups but in late nights, shared graft, and moments of daft camaraderie. Those imperfect, analogue connections weren’t just social, they were glue
Here’s the key: Gen Z don’t really want the tech, they want the feeling. The freedom of being unobserved. The thrill of building without an algorithm calculating every move. The joy of laughter that wasn’t disposable, of fun that didn’t need to be scheduled or branded.
The dewy-eyed look back isn’t 20/20 vision; it’s a yearning for what scrutiny and optimisation have bled out. A world not dictated by management accountants and half-men-half-desks, but by sparks of energy when people collided in real time.
Yes, people are fitter, healthier, more “aware” and that’s a good thing. But somewhere in the process, we’ve lost the buzz. We’ve traded daring-do and camaraderie for metrics and compliance. What once created culture now gets reduced to a spreadsheet.
That’s why nostalgia thrives. It’s not about retro toys. It’s about the aching sense that we’ve lost the art of connecting, of playing, of making work fun.
The PR lesson? When culture becomes disposable, nostalgia becomes priceless. Culture isn’t what you post on hashtagInstagram, it’s the stories and laughter people carry.
And here’s the thing: it isn’t about dropping the smartphone, binning the apps, or pretending the tech giants haven’t rewired our attention spans. That ship has sailed. The medium is here.
But culture doesn’t have to be disposable just because the tools are digital.
The lesson from the 90s is to recognise that connection, fun, and camaraderie are still possible if you use the tools to spark moments rather than just manage optics.
The 90s showed us that culture thrives when people collide, when ideas are tested in the friction of real conversation, when fun isn’t a distraction but the fuel for everything else. That can happen again. Even in a world of Slack, TikTok, and endless scrolls.
So to Gen Z: don’t let nostalgia convince you the magic is gone. It was never in the technology; it was in how we built something lasting out of what we had. The spark isn’t in fleeting attention, but in moments that still matter when the noise has died. That’s the real inheritance of the 90s.