Regardless of our age, we've all uttered phrases like:
"Remember the Old Days?" or "Remember back when...?" or "It's old."
And inevitably, in a group of mixed ages, someone will think "That's not that old... I remember when that came out (etc.)..."
Nostalgia is something that people of my generation appear to be experienceing earlier in life than preceding generations, and it occurred to me why that might be...
It isn't ignorance of the past (as I heard a passing professor angrily proclaim in the hall), I think it's something much more fundamental - something I could suggest might point at an evolutionary step, rather than the degradation and decay of society.
The speed of technology allows for nostalgia to occur far more quickly in younger generations than it does with the older ones - things we remember fondly from our childhood are so changed in our adult life that they no longer seem to be the same thing.
Take Super Mario Brothers, for example...
I was around to see the rebirth of console gaming, and one of the forerunners of that resurrection took the form of a portly man with a mustache who wanted to save his princess from a dragon... Classic fairytale stuff, right? Well Mario and co. were only the beginning, and as video games pulled themselves from the ashes and began to flourish far and beyond what most thought even possible, the rate at which we had our favorite heroes, villains and games replaced, revamped and re-imagined accelerated at an ever increasing pace that just barely kept up with the continuing evolution of the technology on which they were based.
Now, in my mid twenties, I'm struck with a feeling of nostalgia...
I remember loading a computer game with an 8 inch floppy and typing C:/run_wordwizard...
I remember sticky fingers on little plastic rectangles of gray and black with red buttons labeled A and B...
I remember being impressed when Sonic moved faster than the in-game camera could keep up with...
I remember being awed by the 3-d world of Mario 64...
I remember when I began to gave trouble telling the diference between "real" game images and the computer-generated ones...
Some people suggest there's an age-limit, or at least a time-duration limit on being capable of nostalgia, but I disagree.
With the accelerated state of technological development in North American culture (and the ability of the public to access much of that technology), things "get old" faster and faster - lending toward the idea that our favorites of the present may be out-dated in as little as ten years. This doesn't deminish our love of them - perhaps it even heightens our appreciation of what went before, since it passes so much more quickly than it once did.
The argument that some make about my generation's focus on the present and future over the past is perhaps true to an extent, though what's often forgotten is the necessity of our ability to process the onslaught of information, technology and change that occur around us all the time...
But I'll rant about that later =)
"Remember the Old Days?" or "Remember back when...?" or "It's old."
And inevitably, in a group of mixed ages, someone will think "That's not that old... I remember when that came out (etc.)..."
Nostalgia is something that people of my generation appear to be experienceing earlier in life than preceding generations, and it occurred to me why that might be...
It isn't ignorance of the past (as I heard a passing professor angrily proclaim in the hall), I think it's something much more fundamental - something I could suggest might point at an evolutionary step, rather than the degradation and decay of society.
The speed of technology allows for nostalgia to occur far more quickly in younger generations than it does with the older ones - things we remember fondly from our childhood are so changed in our adult life that they no longer seem to be the same thing.
Take Super Mario Brothers, for example...
I was around to see the rebirth of console gaming, and one of the forerunners of that resurrection took the form of a portly man with a mustache who wanted to save his princess from a dragon... Classic fairytale stuff, right? Well Mario and co. were only the beginning, and as video games pulled themselves from the ashes and began to flourish far and beyond what most thought even possible, the rate at which we had our favorite heroes, villains and games replaced, revamped and re-imagined accelerated at an ever increasing pace that just barely kept up with the continuing evolution of the technology on which they were based.
Now, in my mid twenties, I'm struck with a feeling of nostalgia...
I remember loading a computer game with an 8 inch floppy and typing C:/run_wordwizard...
I remember sticky fingers on little plastic rectangles of gray and black with red buttons labeled A and B...
I remember being impressed when Sonic moved faster than the in-game camera could keep up with...
I remember being awed by the 3-d world of Mario 64...
I remember when I began to gave trouble telling the diference between "real" game images and the computer-generated ones...
Some people suggest there's an age-limit, or at least a time-duration limit on being capable of nostalgia, but I disagree.
With the accelerated state of technological development in North American culture (and the ability of the public to access much of that technology), things "get old" faster and faster - lending toward the idea that our favorites of the present may be out-dated in as little as ten years. This doesn't deminish our love of them - perhaps it even heightens our appreciation of what went before, since it passes so much more quickly than it once did.
The argument that some make about my generation's focus on the present and future over the past is perhaps true to an extent, though what's often forgotten is the necessity of our ability to process the onslaught of information, technology and change that occur around us all the time...
But I'll rant about that later =)
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