As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, the stage is set for a changing tableau to play out in households across the country. Friends and relations will cluster in conversation, as small children scurry about their knees. A crackling fire, a televised football game, or both, will flicker in the corner. Applause will erupt when the turkey dinner is brought to the table. And someone will snap a few pictures with their camera phone, and immediately e-mail them to several other people in the room. Within seconds, cousins will be scrolling through the images they just received, holding their smart phones up to the still-unfolding scene, and nod approvingly at just how true-to-life the pictures are.
Instantaneous nostalgia strikes again.
It used to be that some time would pass before people felt compelled to reminisce. A thousand years separated the Roman Empire and the Italian Renaissance that mimicked it. 168 years elapsed after the Pilgrims first broke bread in Plymouth, before Thanksgiving was declared a national holiday in the US. It was ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union that Russians really yearned for Brezhnev, Khrushchev, and even Stalin.
Over time, the span between moments in time and our fond remembrances of them has been shrinking, in an ever-tightening spiral. I attended my first 1980s-themed party 1991, featuring British new wave music and a dance floor choked with would-be Olivia Newton Johns and Don Johnsons. I saw a video recounting the excitement of the 2008 Presidential campaign just three days after it ended.
The time-nostalgia spiral leads inescapably to a final destination: The future.
Don't laugh, there's a precedent for it. People's memories of the past are not comprised merely of people, places, and events. They also contain an intangible dimension, including the thoughts, hopes, dreams and aspirations that they once possessed. In other words, people are often nostalgic for a vision of the future that they held in the past.
Think back to the excitement with which you viewed the future on your graduation day from high school or college. Fast forward to your revised vision on the day you were married, on the day your first child was born, or when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000.
I still have tender feelings for how I expected the future to unfold during the dot com boom years. With a passel of pre-IPO stock options in hand, a back pocket brimming with business plans, and city intersections choked with dreamers and financiers every night, all things seemed possible.
People are nostalgic for moments that never happened.
It is not a giant conceptual leap, then, to imagine people feeling wistful about the constantly-receding horizon of the future as they they imagine it now...and five minutes from now.
This trend is more than a mind trick. It has practical, commercial applications.
Nostalgia has always been a mainstay of commerce. Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart have built empires by evoking a history that, for the vast majority of people, never existed. How many of us have country squires nesting in our family trees? And witness how Corona beer revived its brand in this decade by conjuring a grown-up version of the Cancun Spring Break of the 1980s, when it first came to prominence. Their more recent ads picture a care-free couple lounging on a desolate beach, skipping cells phones across the ocean surf. The same couple might have been doing keg stands and dancing in a mosh pit on an adjoining beach, just twenty-five years before.
The instantaneous flavor of nostalgia also has its champions. Photo-sharing websites like Kodak Gallery, Snapfish and Shutterfly are hell-bent on getting people to convert pictures that they post online into physical prints, coffee mugs, holiday cards or other products.
What's next? For one, I expect to see more apps on handheld devices that will allow people to manipulate still and video images in near real-time. Recall our Thanksgiving dinner scene again, but visualize that, instead of mere snapshots being sent around the room, the pictures are first manipulated somehow. Your niece who was caught on camera dressing the family dog as a princess will now be transplanted into a Hollywood hair salon. Your nephews doing pro wrestling moves on the sofa will now be transported to a more appropriate WWE ring. Mom, holding a groaning platter of turkey before her, will now have Martha Stewart at her elbow to assist her.
Pictures aren't the end of it, though. With almost limitless storage capacity, people regularly archive years of e-mails, SMS chats, and instant messenger exchanges. I predict we will be presented with untold opportunities to re-purpose and re-mix those, too.
I am almost teary-eyed in anticipation of other people's thoughts on the subject.
Copyright 2008, John Hearn
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