In our article Mustache Mania: The Fascination with the Stache, we talked a bit about how the love for the old has brought back things like vintage cocktails, vinyl records, and yes, handlebar mustaches. A great pairing to that article is a observation piece by The Atlantic's Megan Garber. Garber looks at our nostalgic longings through the lens of the internet, exploring how the 90s in particular is making a comeback on the interwebs,
as Millennial's reach an age (some call it young adulthood) where they can fondly look back on their young formative years. Garber contends that in addition to "real" nostalgia, there is a type of retro-acculturation of nostalgia that is used by the media; think Uncle Joey and the gang from Full House selling yogurt, or Vanilla Ice selling Ninja Turtle shaped mac & cheese (most assuredly not to todays kids). The reason is simple; marketers use these references and characters because our fondness for a familiar past, sells--something the internet makes all too clear. Platforms like Pinterest, which is often credited as an aspirational image board, also has the reverse as a nostalgic scrapbook, with users pinning familiar recipes, places and things from their youth. Spotify serves up song suggestions from your high school years, Facebook's Look Back (an sentimental carousel of your timeline), the proliferation of old photos and memories on Throwback Thursday, and endless surveys and quizzes on Buzzfeed of What 90s ____ Are You? An interesting byproduct of this is the targeting of micro generations, such as, Garber shows, the generations caught between X and Y. While nostalgia is nothing new, the internet does create a more easy way to document and look back on our lives, as well as to target very specific experiencers and generations. A fantastic article and worth the read.
ARTICLE: The Atlantic, February 2014
SITE: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/how-the-internet-uses-nostalgia/283966/
