Digital Nostalgia: It’s Value and Cultural Role
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.
