For decades, we treated screens as the main event and everything else as peripheral. Now, the most valuable parts of culture are happening around them, in communities, rituals and experiences that algorithms can't replicate. The peripheral has become the point, writes Founder of ICONIC, James Kirkham.

In the late eighties I kept reading about peripherals and didn't get what they were. I mean I was only about 10 years old so give me a break. But I slowly found out that it meant this piece of clumsy looking hardware you affixed to the back of a ZX Spectrum, like the little grey box that let you plug a joystick into the back.

They were the supporting cast, the accessories to the real machine because nobody bought a computer for the peripherals; you bought the box, then resentfully added the bits that made it do anything.

Forty years later, I feel the peripheral has become the point now.

These days, peripherals are all around us, these small fortifications people are building against the screen. A whole society putting emotional padding around the internet.

The easy reading is that analogue is back but am not sure analogue never went anywhere entirely, more that the screen got given top billing for a while and we all agreed to call everything else accessories. Everywhere you look though, culture is now reorganising itself around the edges of digital life rather than the centre of it. The run club outranks the running app. The listening bar outranks the streaming service. The WhatsApp group outranks the social network. All these supposedly secondary experiences have now become culturally primary, and the screen is the thing we tolerate purely to get to the rest.

There is a real argument under this, beyond nostalgia for me that the platforms won the utility war but lost all of the romance bit. They made distribution free and in the process made attention itself a commodity which sounds like progress until you ask where the value went instead. 

It went to our presence, to the thing the algorithm cannot manufacture en masse for us which is time spent in actual rooms, and recommendations passed hand to hand by people whose taste you trust, or little ritual moments you have to physically show up for. None of it competes on convenience but it has real value and mainly stems from this refusal to scale.

This is awkward for marketing folk and wider industry because we spent twenty years deferring to the engineers who told us the centre of the experience was the glowing rectangle in front of our faces. We treated the platform as the destination and the human bits as mere garnish whilst we joyfully measured reach, gamed the algorithm and baited for clicks.

And while we were doing that, our audiences were building their lives in the bits we ignored. 

The brands beginning to read this aren't broadcasting harder they're instead acting as a host. Aperol didn't conquer European summers through advertising really, instead it colonised the early evening, doing it via a gorgeous colour reeking of sunshine.

And am not sure Aesop ever really sold hand wash to us but more it sold the small cute ceremony of the perfectly manicured shop like walking into an IRL of one of those flat top overlay shots we've scrolled past a million times. 

Each understands that hand-to-hand information now travels further than the one which just broadcasts at scale, and that the peripheral has become the experience. 

The peripherals became personality, which is ironic so it isn't much of a leap to think that the most important technology products of the next decade may not be on screens at all but are instead the objects, artefacts or spaces that help us create most distance from them.