Today, we couldn't imagine a day without modern technology and social media as it plays a great role in our lives. Whether it be checking Twitter for the latest news, scrolling through Facebook to see what our friends are doing, getting inspired by looking at influencers on Instagram, or listening to the latest release of our favorite artists on Spotify.
Without these social media platforms, we would feel lost as we wouldn't be able to communicate, know what's currently happening in the world, or we simply wouldn't know what to do in awkward social situations when we usually just grab our phones. However, the more we are in need of modern technology and social media, the more we get nostalgic about the good old times when we didn't need all of this and only had a few now-retro gadgets (especially, those of us who are millennials).
Image credits: Sheng Lam
Manchester-based artist and illustrator Sheng Lam decided to bring those good old times back by reimagining some of 2019's biggest social media platforms and media sites as retro gadgets that were popular in the '90s. Drawn in Lam's signature '90s retro-anime style, these illustrations depict how Facebook or Netflix would have looked in the pre-Internet age which now sounds so distant to us.
Image credits: Sheng Lam
Spotify
Image credits: Sheng Lam
The artist focuses on the details of each device, depicting them with architectural precision, fine color, and geometric cues. Lam also came up with new retro names for each device! So, in his new series, Facebook becomes a floppy drive called "Phasebook" to keep those memories safe, Instagram becomes a vintage Polaroid camera called "Instogram" that preserves memories, Spotify changes its name to "Potify" that looks like a cassette player for music lovers, and YouTube, or rather "YooTube", is associated with the portable VHS player.
YouTube
Image credits: Sheng Lam
Image credits: Sheng Lam
Twitter might have been quite a difficult task, however, the artist thought of a device which most youngsters may not have heard of - a telegraph machine with the name, "Tweeter". Moreover, Lam imagined another device for music lovers - a CD player -"Soundkloud" which is equivalent to Sound Cloud, and last but not least, a CRT TV called "Netflex" as the streaming platform for those cozy evenings with Netflix.
SoundCloud
Image credits: Sheng Lam
Netflix
Image credits: Sheng Lam
We must admit that Lam perfectly shows how everything has changed in the span of a couple decades, and how we became dependant on online services that today we take for granted. He gives us an opportunity to reflect on the extreme dematerialization and disintermediation processes of our consumption habits. It makes us think that maybe it's time to change?