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THE VALUE OF NOSTALGIA

I've noticed friends and family talking a lot about the past recently.  Usually on how things use to be better, or how (because we're now older and wiser) we aren't able to achieve the same level of fun we use to.  Maybe we're getting to that age, or maybe it's just that time of the year where everyone is reflecting on what they accomplished this year and deciding on goals to set themselves in the coming year. 

Maybe it's just a genetic predisposition to think things were better, so as to have a higher standard of what things should be in order to progress the human race?

"What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?"

-- Plato, 4th Century BCE

I've been watching a lot of Mad Men recently, and I did enjoy it to begin with but soon realised I was seeing the same story being told again and again.  I think what kept me coming back though was not the stories, but the feel that it captured for an era that I am only slightly aware of, and which I see poking out from people of that generation that I interact with every now and again. 

I think the producers of the show knew this too, and look to have acknowledged it in their first season with the following clip, where a fictional meeting was held with a group of advertising executives (the main characters in the show) pitching a campaign to Eastman Kodak using nostalgia to sell their Carousel slide projector.

I think the same appeal also holds true for something else I've been watching recently too, BBS: The Documentary, which goes goes through the bulletin board era in the United States.  (The entire documentary is a 3 DVD set which can be ordered via the web site, but has also been released under creative commons).

Coming out of it, and during the whole thing, it brought back memories that I'd thought I'd forgotten.  Every new memory it brought back, like the differences between baud vs bps, the region / node system on FidoNet, I got a twinge, and with every twinge I was forced to watch in the hope it would bring more.  

It reminded me of how I would spend hours dialing into my board list in Terminate (which I think was my first ever software purchase, and which I still may have the original floppy disk for somewhere back in Auckland).  How I would pick my top 10 boards, set to auto retry and then slump my way into the other room to watch TV and prick my ears for the sound of a CONNECT 14400/ARQ/V34/LAPM/V42BIS. 

Then once connected, getting my allocated 20 to 30 minutes to check my messages on the board, play a few door games, and check new files which were available.  Any files which I found that I wanted, I would then have to mark them and download them the next day when I connected as by the time I did all that, my time for the day would have been used up.  Then once disconnected from that board I'd slump my way back to the TV and start the the whole thing again.

I loved it, and watching the documentary made me think just how good things use to be but when I sit down and really think about it they weren't.  It was just the feeling obtained from reliving old memories which made us think  we had more fun when we were younger, but in actual fact we'll probably be looking back in 10 years time thinking the exact same thing that we do now.

I'm not sure if that thought is depressing or enlightening :)