The Death of Nostalgia

I’m not some sort of Luddite (and if I was, a blog would be an awfully inappropriate way to publish my manifesto) or even a grumpy “we-didn’t-have-spellcheck-when-we-were-in-school” kind of Dad.  On the contrary, I love technology.  I think it’s great that more of the world’s information is available to more of the world’s minds.  I’m thrilled by the advances in alternative energy.  And I really love the fact that there’s a friendly voice in my car telling me exactly how to get to small Czech villages that I can’t pronounce without swallowing my tongue.  But I fear technology may be slowly killing nostalgia.

Don’t get me wrong, technology has done wonders for the business of remembering.  We live in a world where friends and acquaintances go from “I-had-forgotten-about-you” obscurity to “enough-about-your-@%&-farm” ubiquity in the speed of a mouse click.  And now that the Library of Congress is archiving every Twitter tweet, people in the year 2050 will have access to exactly what made them “LOL” on August 3, 2009.  But in order to be converted into nostalgia, these memories have to have some degree of commonality.  And that’s why I’m worried.

My generation (and to varying extents, those before mine) was raised in a world of “broadcasting”.  A limited number of outlets pushed “one-size-fits-all” information to as wide an audience as possible.  We all fed from the same pop culture trough.  Consequently, we now have any number of common touchstones we can use to create nostalgia.  When someone born in the early to mid 1960s hears “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero”, (regardless of whether we liked it or not) it takes almost all of us to the same place and time.  On the other hand, future generations will increasingly live in a world of “narrowcasting”.  They’ll have access to exponentially more information, but they’ll get it individually: what they want, when and how they want it.  Consider television: once a mainstay of singular shared moments (The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or the Bradys in Hawaii) it is now experienced in different ways by different people.  I’ll watch something tonight on cable, you’ll watch it tomorrow on TiVo, someone else will catch it next week on the internet, and another will just wait for the DVD box set.   In junior high, when my friends and I discussed the previous evening’s episode of Welcome Back, Kotter, we didn’t have to preface things by saying, “Spoiler Alert!”  To make matters worse, the whole concept of “past” is, well, in the past.  Kids today have the same access to “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero” as they do to the most popular current tune (that I’m not going to pretend I can name).  So, with everyone doing their own thing, and the past bum-rushing the present, I wonder what future DJs will play at future wedding receptions (“Everyone on the dance floor!  It’s Piano-Playing Cat!”)

Here’s my bottom line, in a nice nursery school allegory.  In one room is my generation, with a limited number of Legos from which to build our recollections.  However, most of our Legos fit with those of our friends.  In another room, future generations are playing with infinitely more Legos, but precious few of them work with anyone else’s.

Which room sounds like more fun?