By the time you’re reading this, I will be done with college. After twenty-two years of parental support and seventeen years of public education, I will finally enter the workforce and become a productive member of society engaged in gainful employment “or whatever.” Rather than confront this major life change and the rapidly deteriorating socio-econo-geopolitical state of the world, I’ve been reflecting on the past—specifically on whether or not it was better.
It’s natural, of course, to look back. There were certainly good things about the past, and holding onto these things can be worthwhile. However, the internet has shifted how we think about this phenomenon of yearning for the past, better known as nostalgia. In many ways, the rapid pace of technological progress has pushed people toward the past.
Wherever you look, it seems someone’s lost childhood is propping something up. Movie remakes, Pokemon cards, TV reboots, Fox News, a country music resurgence, the same 20 Christmas songs every year… it all adds up to the inescapable realization that the past is not past: it’s overwhelmingly present.
The exact definition of nostalgia is quite difficult. Svetlana Boym, a writer and scholar, defines nostalgia as “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” Per Boym’s definition, nostalgia is unique as an emotion due to its connection to time, as well as its immobilizing nature. Whenever I experience nostalgia, I’m always forced to slow down, to proverbially sit back and reflect. In contrast to anticipation, nostalgia encourages doing nothing: if the past will always be better, what’s the point in trying?
Megan Ankerson, Associate Professor of New Media in the Department of Communication and Media and the Digital Studies Institute, has recently taught a course on digital nostalgia. Professor Ankerson’s COMM820, “Digital Nostalgia: New Media, New Memory,” involves complex considerations of factors of nostalgia, such as diaspora, marketing, and memory. One reading from the class, “Retrotyping and the Marketing of Nostalgia,” details how corporations monetize the “good ol’ days.” In this reading, the Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley define a common type of nostalgia known as “regressive nostalgia.” By regressive nostalgia, Pickering and Keightley refer to “those forms of nostalgia which, through a limited set of idealised images of the past, appeal only to the component of backwards longing in nostalgia, and conceal or deny the loss and painful sense of lack which elsewhere are its other two components.”
For me, this definition immediately brings to mind internet communities dedicated to nostalgia, such as the subreddit r/Nostalgia. r/Nostalgia’s top posts contain many icons of millennial and to a lesser extent Gen Z childhood: square pizza, the Windows XP login screen, Dirt Cups, the warehouse stage on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater for the Nintendo 64, etc. “I've spent the entirety of my adult life chasing the high of a Scholastic book fair,” writes u/ProtectThisHaus.
Other nostalgia sites on the internet are more ad hoc and less centralized, such as the Instagram page @rundownbuildings. Featuring videos of stitched together Google Street View screenshots over a slowed version of “Stand by Me” by Ben E. King, the account has garnered nearly 660k followers. The videos progress chronologically, showing the gradual deterioration of the particular site. Watching these videos is in fact quite sad, but there’s a weird sense of homeliness felt for this place that one’s never been to.
Not just the comforting photos of a blurry 2007 image taken from a moving car garner attention on this account’s page. The sense that this time of apparent prosperity is over, and that it’s never coming back does, too. “Why does it seem like the world looked way happier and prettier during 2000-2012? We just don’t have it anymore but I don’t know what it is,” writes @gabrielaw_r.
Of course, the internet cannot leave a rhetorical question unanswered. The usual cast of internet characters and tropes assembles to express their displeasure. There is the vibe-killing Marxist blaming it on capitalism, the European feigning shock and asserting national superiority (“In France we don’t have cases like that”), the teenager trying to be cool by agreeing with the general sentiment to an extreme degree, people complaining about homogeneity while all sharing the same opinion.
The nostalgic reaction produced by these images is unique for the internet, given its general agreement. Nostalgia is frequently used to delineate in-groups and out-groups. “Only 90s kids will understand,” “only people born before 1970 will get this reference,” “don’t talk to me unless you remember the smell of a Blockbuster,” etc. Often, people do “understand” or “get” the references even if they’re temporally not “meant” to, in larger part because of how nostalgia gets mediated. “So many of our memories—and by extension, nostalgic experiences—are tied to media: media revisit, media that reminds us of a time, media we understand as meant to evoke nostalgia, and so on” explains DSI grad student Júlia Irion Martins, who will present a paper about online nostalgia and “trad” cultures at this year’s upcoming ASAP (Association for the Study of Arts of the Present) conference. The “Only 90s kids will understand” genre of nostalgia posting makes evident the important role of mediation in discourses of nostalgia, which has been largely ignored by scholars—including Boym—who theorize nostalgia.
Millennials are slowly beginning to acknowledge they no longer control internet culture, and these nostalgia spaces give them a place to ignore their mortality and aging. Even Gen-Z is slowly recognizing its own lack of relevance, with the ascendant Gen Alpha encroaching on internet culture with Skibidi Toilet. In response, Gen Z-ers are ruthlessly criticizing Gen Alpha members by alleging they can’t read or have attention spans no longer than five seconds. The Wikipedia page for Gen Alpha actually includes the sentence, “Generation Z often uses the term ‘iPad kids’ when referring to Generation Alpha.”
Implicitly, this critique reveals a sense of nostalgia. Highlighting the negative aspects of a younger generation shows a feeling of decline, a feeling of “things were better for me, back in that time.” When American culture places such a high emphasis on youth and energy, nostalgia is often the only option to feel relevant, to feel hope. The internet exacerbates this emphasis by allowing younger and younger voices into the mainstream, thereby lowering the parameters for who qualifies as “young.”
Perhaps it’s the internet’s emphasis on novelty that pushes people toward the past. Perhaps it’s the flood of ads and other inconveniences that heightens the past. Regardless, nostalgia remains a potent force on the internet. Who needs a time machine when we’ve got this?
