No one would argue that one of our biggest nostalgia vectors is imagery. In her essay On Photography, Susan Sontag said that modern photography has changed the viewer by creating an overabundance of visual material and by desensitizing the audience. This was 1973.
"Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own," Sontag said. A picture evokes, a hundred pictures numb and the kind of twitchy high-rep shutterbug maximalism enabled by digital photography and virtually limitless storage has created a noisy digital gauze that masks memory with too many pixels.
The past also has big proportions. If there had been countless photos or videos of the past, the objective information would probably tell us different stories from the ones we choose to remember. The forest you got lost in when you were 5 is a copse of trees behind the shed. The tree you scaled when you were 8 was not 80 feet but 20. Digital photography takes memories that are idealistic and unrealistic and fossilizes them in 7/8-scale, color-corrected realism. But digitization's assault on nostalgia is really only getting started.
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