I've been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately. It kind of came to a head in the wake of watching the Ready Player One movie, but the kernels of my thoughts go back to the last handful of years. It's undeniable how fascinated people are with the concept. Every remake, re-release, prequel, sequel, and reference, we eat it up. Whether it's converting Tron to blu-ray with "never before seen" interviews, making a miniature NES that's effectively a Raspberry Pi with a few ROMs on it, or filling Ready Player One with every 80s pop culture reference Ernest Cline could think of, history has proven that people will buy into the phenomenon, but why is that? More importantly, what does nostalgia mean in a digital age where nearly every piece of media ever is available at our fingertips anytime we want it? Does the way we think of nostalgia need to change?





Webster defines nostalgia as: "A wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time." I find this definition interesting because typically, when we talk of nostalgia in pop culture it's very tied to things. A movie, a video game, a song, what have you. But Webster's definition doesn't appear to have much to do with things. This probably shouldn't be surprising; since we can't go back in time and relive the fondly-remembered moments of our youth, society has latched onto the idea of nostalgia by way of the media we consumed at that time.

For a long time, that meant trying to acquire a physical thing you had as a child. For those of us in our 30s or older, this is one of the reasons many of us started collecting. We wanted those things we had when we were young and got so much happiness from. The more time that passed, the rarer those things got, the harder they were to find, thus the more significant the chasing of nostalgia became. But for the past decade or so, digital distribution has exploded in popularity, and as a result, completely changed the concept of nostalgia as we know it.

For someone who didn't have their childhood NES anymore, and didn't have access to the games they loved as a kid, they might decide randomly one day to seek out a used console to try and recapture that memory. But to someone who never got rid of their NES and has always had access to play those games, that form of media was never lost. In that sense, I would argue that the feeling of nostalgia they have would be different than that felt by the person who's seeking out NES Classics on Ebay.


This is something I've struggled with for a while now. In 2018, we have so many channels with which to get what we want. YouTube, Google Play, iTunes, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, PSN, XBL, and on and on and on. The most difficult decision now is no longer "how do I get a copy of Killer Klowns From Outer Space?" The hard part now is figuring out which platform has it available so I can watch it right now, and how many of these digital distribution services can I afford to subscribe to so that I have the most media available to me at any given moment. Many times in the past several years I've been standing in a used game store, looking at a pile of games, and being frozen with indecision. The most recent example is with the release of Mega Man Legacy Collection 1&2 on Switch. I could spend weeks/months and potentially a couple hundred dollars tracking down physical copies of every one of those early Mega Man games (not to mention finding my NES and getting it working on my modern TV), or I could spend $40, download them to my Switch right now, and be able to play them on a genuine Nintendo console literally everywhere I go at any time. Every time I buy a blu-ray now, I redeem the code for the digital copy and then never pull the disc off my shelf again because I can access that movie on my phone, PC, or Chromecast no matter where I am or what time of day it is with just a few clicks of my mouse.

I don't mean to turn this into a digital vs. physical media debate (I still buy my games and movies in physical form whenever possible), but my point is that once you have every piece of media from your childhood available to you at any time, what is left of nostalgia? As I mentioned before, we can't go back and relive the past, but the tools to access what we played and read and watched have never been more accessible. I have a cousin who's 10 years younger than me. She and most of her younger friends can't remember a time when the music or movies they wanted to watch haven't been available at a moment's notice. My 16-year old nephew grew up with touch screens, smartphones, and YouTube. When I was 16, almost nothing had a touch screen, websites were still slow and clunky to navigate, and if you weren't wise enough to buy Earthbound during its limited release two years earlier, you wouldn't have a cheap and easy (not to mention official/legal) way to play it for another 17 years. I recently asked my cousin what she's nostalgic for and she couldn't come up with anything.


I don't mean to argue that nostalgia is dead. Without the ability to relive our past, there will always be memories and feelings from our youth to be sentimental about. I'm also not invalidating collecting as a hobby. The thrill of the hunt, being able to look at a shelf full of games with pride, being able to feel and touch the cartridges, feel and smell the paper in your hands as you turn the pages of an instruction manual, blow on that NES cart in the way that is uniquely your own, these are all wonderful things, and completely valid reasons to still seek out physical media. I would very much like to own CIB copies of those early Mega Man games, and I will always enjoy collecting games, books, movies, and music, but I've come to realize that for me, nostalgia isn't necessarily part of the collecting equation anymore.


I heard it said recently that for people around my age (The Oregon Trail generation and early Millennials specifically), ours was the last generation to experience nostalgia in the traditional sense, and that struck a very real chord for me. With the instant accessibility of everything I loved as a kid, my idea of nostalgia has changed, and I still haven't figured out what it means to me in the age of so much on-demand accessibility. Yes, digital distribution rights expire and change hands, but nothing goes away permanently anymore. Netflix may lose a handful of movies or my favorite TV show, but it's not long before Hulu or Amazon snatch them up and they're once again available to me somewhere else. XBL may not sell Doom and Doom II anymore, but there are nearly half a dozen other ways I can get them. Even in the rare case where the company who holds the rights to something doesn't do anything with it, the collective internet of things will be there to ensure there will be some way to get it, even if it means resorting to quasi-legal methods. At the end of the day, there's nothing tangible for me to recapture if the thing I'm longing for never goes away.

I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Are you still nostalgic for the things of your youth, even with the knowledge that they'll never be lost again? Have your ideas of nostalgia changed over the years? For the younger crowd, what are you nostalgic for, or rather, what does nostalgia mean to you if you've never lost the ability to access the things you enjoyed when you were a kid?

Permalink | Comments [12] | Digg This Article | Tweet