Digital Nostalgia: It’s Value and Cultural Role
Digital nostalgia is a real cultural device as part of nostalgia as a whole. It helps to understand it and how it shapes our technological future societies.
Gen Alpha today will only hear the painful squeals and squawks of a dial-up modem in old video and audio clips. They’ll never know the experience of eating ones dinner while the news website downloaded into a clunky old browser. For Gen X a memory we often tell as tales to our kids. This is a form of digital nostalgia.
What is digital nostalgia then and what role does it and nostalgia as a whole, play in our lives and culture as a whole? Much more, it turns out, than you might think.
What Is Digital Nostalgia?
At its core, digital nostalgia is our longing for past technologies, even though some longings for “old” technology are from just a decade or so ago. Like remembering the Blackberry, a mobile device that is most fondly remembered for its physical keyboard. So much so that one company created a physical keyboard to attach to current iPhones.
Digital nostalgia includes older video games, early mobile devices, old school websites, how we used email in the past (like the ones where if you forwarded that email to ten people, Bill Gates would send you a million dollars), and old software tools. Even for the original cell phones, where the famous Nokia phone features in memes to this day.
Nostalgia and the subset of digital nostalgia isn’t fully defined and is as mutable as culture itself.
The Role of Nostalgia As a Sociocultural Device
Nostalgia as a memory mechanism has been part of our sociocultural systems for thousands of years. How it is expressed in cultures and especially generationally, has evolved over time. For most, it serves as a mental anchor.
Nostalgia sees us reimagining our past, it helps frame our references for today and for technologies, it can help with how we form our imagining the future and how the role we want technologies to play in our societies.
Nostalgia plays an important role in our own and cultural identities, politics, economics and emotional lives. Marketers often use nostalgia as a way of creatively engaging with a demographic and it’s a powerful tool.
Nostalgia plays a part in how we perceive our current state of affairs, it is a form of longing for what is missing in our changed present time. We use it personally as a means of making sense and meaning out of today just as broader culture does much the same.
Too, nostalgia serves as a mnemonic source for creativity, often helping us cope with painful memories and a present where we are unsure, either individually or socially and wary of an unknown future.
Perhaps one of the best more recent examples of using nostalgia in entertainment is the Netflix series Stranger Things which played heavily on nostalgia and the role of technologies at the time, including music. Then of course there’s Better Call Saul, Mad Men and Vinyl shows. And the retro-futuristic of Fallout, based on a video game packed with nostalgic technological references.
The Role and Value of Digital Nostalgia
There’s a bit of a trend these days with Gen Z ordering landline telephones. A form of nostalgia perhaps in part influenced by tales of their parents and old shows and movies where having a landline meant a form of freedom from not always being connected.
I still have a landline at home, it’s a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) type phone, meaning it is not connected to the fibre optic network of my carrier, but rather copper wires. I keep it for one primary reason. It works when the power goes out. It costs me a whopping $3/mo including voice mail and caller ID.
We see more minimalist mobile phones with eInk screens in black and white, one even featuring a physical keyboard. A blend of imagining a less distracted future and leveraging the power of past technologies. There’s the increasing popularity of eInk tablets like the reMarkable 2 and Boox.
At a sociocultural level, nostalgia around technologies plays a role in how we think about the way we want to use, govern and manage present technologies we are evaluating and how we will eventually adapt them into our societies.
As Artificial Intelligence tools like Generative AI (GAI) from ChatGPT and Claude to Sora and Midjourney become more pervasive in so many aspects of our society, we often use nostalgia, usually without realizing it, to frame the present and the future. We call upon nostalgic ideas along with cultural norms, behaviours and traditions to anchor AI in our sociocultural collective minds.
Nostalgia plays a political role in how we seek to govern our societies too, especially with regard to technology. It is in part why schools at the junior levels are increasingly looking to or have, banned the use of smartphones in certain school levels. Nostalgia for a time without such devices in the classroom becomes a reference point.
In the economic part of culture, digital nostalgia has and will play a role in physical and software product design. It plays a key role for marketers creating awareness and for the creative aspects of the profession. Digital nostalgia has a role in politics and power systems as well.
Nostalgia itself is a powerful cultural tool and digital nostalgia is a cultural tool that will help shape how we adapt technologies into our sociocultural systems.
Nostalgia stitches together our cultures and generational views of the world. In our digital lives it helps inform how we will develop new methods of social norms and behaviours in online communities, how we deal with mis/disinformation, cyberbullying, online dating and how we evolve our sense of identity both individually and societally.