The Zombification Of Nostalgia

Anything that affects us at an emotional level is exhaustively mined for commercial reasons, but this has only intensified with digitization and new media. One could argue that Coca-Cola was the first marketer to use nostalgia as a business model, but today’s hottest consumer tech brands take it math and machine-driven new heights. Your Kodak moment just got cropped, tagged, filtered, published, shared, liked and stored forever. Great for memory, not so good for nostalgia. 

As one writer put it, "Images of our weddings and graduations, memories of kids' births and grandparents' faces now get snugly wrapped by ads for automobiles and toothpaste. The commercialization of our personal and collective pasts has significant cultural and marketing implications. As a matter of fact, it's now doing what was heretofore unthinkable: it's killing nostalgia dead." Of course, nostalgia can't be killed dead. Even as it's hollowed out, it's demise is lamented nostalgically. But the experience of our nostalgia has changed. If not less potent, it's made less delicate and less personal.

Then this is the endgame, perhaps; packaging the past as the future and selling our memories back to us, one freemium at a time. Look at today's three hottest consumer tech brands. Etsy, Pinterest and Instagram all combine a predigital activity (scrapbooking, photography, handicrafts) with new rewards and a social platform. How sophisticated is "Nostalgia Innovation"? Pinterest was the fastest brand ever to reach 10 million visitors, averages 89 minutes per visitor, has become a significant source of referral traffic for retailers and has yet to scratch the surface of its powerful database of detailed information about our tastes, interests and favorite brands.

The best example of digital accumulation, and how it affects our relationship with our past, is Facebook and its new Timeline. The Timeline makes extremely personal images — faces, places, clothing, hairstyles — from our own years past immediately accessible. What Facebook in general, and the Timeline specifically, offers is shortcuts to consumers’ own memories, carefully tagged, chronologically ordered: And snugly wrapped with advertisements — you see them framing the page each time you page through a friend’s wedding pictures or look back at the digital remnants of your own kid’s last birthday party.

Further, each year, more of us make public to services like Facebook more and more information. Online privacy wariness has given way to greater openness by consumers about what we’re willing to share. Some of that openness is consciously chosen and mindful. Other data sharing by consumers is done either grudgingly or through ignorance. But no matter why it happens, for a vast swath of people, the amount of personal information that’s available, the amount of their lives and pasts that’s instantly accessible, increases by the month and the year.