Coming out of the clouds

The modern world is a strange one. We have more and more and own less and less. That CD collection you used to have, the one which filled the spare room and your partner was constantly insisting you “at least chuck away the Matt Bianco”; now you have Spotify. The DVDs you used to own, carefully divided into the one's with explosions to watch with your mates, and the children's ones that you claimed to have got for the kids but which you secretly preferred; now you have Netflix. Slowly, all of our objects of desire have migrated to the cloud, or have become an app on your mobile phone. Cameras, sat-navs, address books, real books – even owning a car is threatened by Uber and the looming promise of self-driving taxis.

It's no surprise then, that spending patterns have shifted from tech gadgetry and ephemera back to something real. Vinyl sales are, appropriately, at a record high, while for those that prefer to stick with streaming music, the preference is for retro players with wooden panelling and chrome dials and big chunky headphones to listen over. Even in the tech world, the preference for the physical is being felt. Drones, Go-Pro, VR goggles. Websites and phone apps are no longer the gold mine – the next million-dollar start up with be selling something we can feel.

Entertainment has also been affected, in some very interesting ways. Traditional entertainment has always been very passive: you see a play, you go to a football match, you watch a film. You sit in your seat while culture is thrown at you and you hope some of it sticks. In the past few years, however, the rising theme has been interactivity. People don't want to be entertained, they want to have an experience. It starts with the traditional: go-karting, indoor skydiving, wine tasting, cheese tasting, Formula 1 track days. People are innovating, though. Interactive theatre has been popular recently. Sleep No More told the story of Macbeth, but in multiple rooms, meaning you have to follow the actors around, picking and choosing which part of the story you are most interested in. Secret Cinema invites you to watch a film in the traditional way but beforehand immerses you in the world of the film, so that when you sit down to be entertained you are rooting for the characters in a much more personal way. There are even Escape Games – physical versions of the popular escape the room games on the computer, meaning that the game is a simulation of a computer game which is itself a simulation of reality.

But is it any surprise? Despite numerous books and films predicting we would all be donning VR goggles and locking our front doors to anyone but the pizza delivery guy, it turns out we all want to live in the real world after all. We like the convenience of online shopping, the excitement of video games, and the choice available from video on demand but, in the end, it turns out we really do want to reach out and touch someone. Anyone. Just so long as they're real.