Modern Technology’s Most Dangerous Weapon is…Nostalgia

Will on-demand media content keep us from engaging our present crisis?

We all long for comfort, belonging and protection. It is part of human nature and you can see it in the films that chronicle journeys back home. Lion is a 2016 biographical film about a young Australian man’s search to return home twenty five years after being separated from his family in India. Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) is about alien arriving on earth, becoming homesick and a bunch of teens helping him get home. But don’t forget animal films (including fictional ones). When my children were young, they loved The Tigger movie (from the Winnie the Pooh universe). Released in 2000, it tells the story of a hyperactive tiger trying to find other tigers like himself, i.e., finding where he belonged. Before that was Homeward Bound, a 1993 film about the adventures of three pets trying to find their way home. There are more stories like this. Home is where the heart is, right? Well, let’s go back even further.

Odyssey is a Greek epic about the travels of Odysseus, King of Ithaca. On the way home from a war with Troy to rejoin his wife and son, his fleet encounters a storm and is blown far off course. They are captured by a Cyclops and eventually escape. The master of the winds gives Odysseus a bag containing all the winds (except the west wind) to help them get home. But in their greed, his men open the bag and the winds fly out altering their course again! As he continues to try to get home, he encounters cannibals, a witch, a dead prophet, his dead mother, other mythical creatures and bad situations. He loses most of his men along the way. Altogether, Odysseus’ nostalgia for home was so strong that he spent ten years at war and another ten years just trying to get back home. That’s a long time.

I stumbled across an article about nostalgia on Linkedin by Pino Blasone. It is a very heavy academic read so I did not get through all of it. LOL But I was able to glean a few things from it. He gives a very good definition of the word nostalgia:

“The term itself…is an early modern one, made up of ancient Greek roots: nostos, meaning return home, and algos, sorrow or suffering. Originally referred to the pain a sick person feels for his wish to return to his native land, and to his relevant fear never to see it again, this neologism was coined by the Alsatian student in medicine Johannes Hofer (1669-1752) in his Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia, or Homesickness at the University of Basel in Switzerland.” 

The idea of home is a powerful idea for most of us. It conjures feelings of security, good memories, contentment, etc. Whether good or bad, we all want to belong somewhere and our nostalgia for a place where we feel secure can impact how we exist in and create future spaces.

The Impact of Social Distancing

The present pandemic has basically brought the western world mostly to a standstill. Everything is closed except facilities that are deemed ‘essential.’ Over 30 million Americans lost their employment since the beginning of April wiping away all jobs created since the Great Recession in 2009. The national unemployment rate is estimated to be between 15-20%. (It was 25% at the peak of the Great Depression.)

For comparison, 4.4 million people applied for benefits for the week ending April 18 and 30.3 million have sought benefits in the past six weeks alone. That figure represents roughly 1 in 5 American workers.

Get the picture?

 

Americans are out of work and social distancing measures implemented by the U.S. Government, state governments and municipalities is further isolating us from each other.

These restrictions, the abrupt halt of the economy, the confusion generated by elected officials and the chaotic distribution of unemployment and business aid is causing Americans to further distrust government institutions, reach for conspiracy theories, become agitated and hunker down to absorb media content. Pandemic, zombies and disaster films are trending right now. What do they all have in common: the social, cultural and economic breakdown of society. In these films, humans turn against each other as they attempt to survive unpredictable dangers. Many of these films heighten our anxiety by masking the cause in conspiratorial tones. With all this leisure time, it is driving many to consume more online content from the sensible to the bizarre. Yet just like Blasone’s definition of nostalgia, we long to go back to what is familiar.

On-Demand Technology

Smartphones and attending technologies are getting more sophisticated at providing entertainment, information and collecting data based on your interests. Virtual assistant AI technologies (Alexa and Siri) will ask questions while one searches and there is an app for every desire. Satellite towers and wifi hotspots permanently connect us so we can be online anywhere and anytime. We are fed a very obese diet of online information and entertainment that encourages hyperindividualism and voyeurism. The pandemic has increased our focus on self, impacting our politics and how we view our rights as citizens. It is also tempting us to look only for groups that agree with our POVs. Cyberspace has amplified this echo chamber and social media has been the main conduit to express our contentious views. Also, very specificially, social media has become a mirror offering identity experimentation and feedback for teens and young adults like a mirror in a changing room.

Americans have access to a large supply of on-demand free and premium content at their fingertips for entertainment and distraction. This is part of the reason why I wrote a commentary stating that the western world is moving away from a print culture to an image culture. An image culture, in this age of technology, prioritizes branded superficial curation over the slow accumulation of knowledge and observation of the natural world changing the way we view the world, the self and each other.

The Demand for Familiarity

The manipulation of images allows humans to make meaning and context more elastic, deeply symbolic and even mysterious compared to words. This has produced a fair bit of visual culture that many would say is creative and necessary, for example, take a look at the murals and memorial statues in Philadelphia. 

Although images can push the boundaries of meaning and observation, according to Immanuel Kant, our imagination still tends to produce what is familiar. For example, aliens (extraterrestrial, demigods, etc.) in films may be scary (Alien film series) or cute (Spielberg’s E.T.) but they almost always have an humanoid quality about them, although exaggerated. Branding can also fit in this category as the best designers use color theory, behavioral psychology, gestalt psychology, text/image hierarchies, etc. to influence a specific audience.

Kant also says that our human imagination is so strong that we can believe we are seeing and feeling something outside of ourselves even though it is only in the mind. Religion immediately comes to mind for many. But we also cannot ignore CGI technology combined with a movie theater’s sensory environment. The question is, can these experience ever become deceptive? Youtube is full of bizarre conspiracy theories (religious and secular) that one can watch in the comfort of home. What makes these messages believable when there is no movie theater or high quality CGI? Can our imagination actually deceive us?

During times of sustained crisis, existential angst can easily show itself. Life can begin to feel isolating, alienating, uncertain and absurd. Some drop off of society’s grid altogether, some virtually disappear into cyberspace (or appspace) while others seek relief through familiar pleasure and entertainment. What they all have in common is a desire for control and a desire for the familiar. In spite of films showing social breakdown, safe nostalgic media content tailored to our specific tastes is the preferred choice for many right now. What TV show/film from your childhood would you want to marathon-watch right now that reminds you of a stable time in your life?

What TV show/film from your childhood would you want to marathon-watch right now that communicates an easily digestible coherent view of life?

The Double Edged Sword of Nostalgia

Krystine Batcho, a licensed psychologist and a professor at Le Moyne College who researches nostalgia, says watching our favorite old TV shows satisfies our nostalgic need and has real emotional benefits. She believes it is a mostly healthy regression in the service of the ego because it can make us feel safe and secure in a chaotic world. But since the internet is replacing how we receive media content, how does this square with the latest research that says being constantly plugged into the internet and social media is thought to be associated with higher rates of anxiety and depression? What if the pandemic lasts three years?

Although the professor says that indulging in nostalgia can bring us reassurance, it can also seduce us into retreating into a romanticized past. Escaping into an imagined idealized world is why some like films based on science fiction (Star Wars and Star Trek), dystopian stories. But there is also historical nostalgia where the values of bravery, courage and sacrifice in the content harken back to earlier times. It also reveals a more cynical perspective of the present and can become unhealthy if it becomes a perpetual yearning to return to the past. Many white supremacists and militia groups fit into this category.

Some argue that the latest trend toward minimalism in logo design reflects a form of nostalgia for the simplicity and austerity of visual communications inspired by Swiss design. Its impact on 1950s American corporate design is noteworthy. In those days, drafting tools were necessary for drawing high quality logos. But the biggest asset was having a visual eye developed through the use of Gestalt Psychology. This allowed designers to move away from a formulaic advertising look and explore other simpler creative ways to display images comparable to fine art. Is this a response to the increase in visual noise that crowds the internet and increasingly bombards us in big cities?

In Conclusion

Nostalgia has become a much more powerful lure presented to us through on-demand technology. My daughter, who is a college sophomore, loves watching the 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel Air so much that she purchased all of the seasons via digital download. I am pretty sure she saw a few of the episodes on some youtube channel when she was younger. After talking with her about it, I surmised that this sitcom represents a more holistic view of life and family to her compared to the present sitcoms targeting her age group that focus mainly on an adult-less world of narcissistic young people. So, is my daughter nostalgic for a time that she has only heard about from her parents or is she mourning her own childhood? 

But this may also point to something that is even more insidious: Existential boredom. This is a deep dissatisfaction with the present. With all of our on-demand comforts and conveniences, we still struggle to feel completely satisfied and rooted in the present. My argument would be that this boredom comes with the failures of modernity to knit humans together through promises of progress and innovation while disregarding the past. Although rapid change has given us endless choices today, it has reduced our ability to know what is true, what is necessary to know and who to trust.

Over the last decade, New York University professor Jonathan Haidt has been paying attention to how Americans debate politics and religion and how this plays out online and in the media. He was recently interviewed by the Atlantic and made this statement:

“Social media essentially gives a megaphone to the extremes, so it’s very hard to know what most people really think. And when you look at the people who are loudest on Twitter and elsewhere, it’s quite clear that this pandemic is turning into just another culture-war issue, where people on the left see what they want to see and people on the right see what they want to see.”

The loudest and most extreme voices get much of the attention since social media, by its very nature, is performative. So, many of us follow the voices that are saying what we want to hear and appear to be getting a lot of likes and shares This reveals a deep distrust of government and the mainstream media (MSM) since many of those voices belong to neither estate. Today, we are bloated with easily shareable curated content from films, pundits, youtube channels and tweets. But knowledge and wisdom that comes from careful patient observation, reflection and study are in short supply. Even our colleges and universities are falling victim to this.

9/11 galvanized most Americans to unite and respond to domestic terrorism (even though our initial focus was incorrect.) But nineteen years later, Americans have grown even more self focused and cynical. I privately wonder if even a major war conflict could pull us altogether now. The pandemic validates this idea as we witness arguments in the media about when states should relax social distancing restrictions and restart their economies. However, most Americans seem to be attempting to follow some of the social distancing rules since it could mean the difference between life and death of an elderly relative or friend.

Even still, a rapid feedback loop of ideas using on-demand technology and social media that don’t challenge us to go beyond what we know is how conspiracy theories take root. It makes our desire for quick spectacle the ‘actual news’ as opposed to time tested ideas (right or wrong) filtrated and passed down over the ages. You don’t believe me? How many young white men are being drawn to white supremacy in its various forms (Nazism, alt-right, etc.)? How many young adults believe in socialism but really don’t know what it means? How many bizarre ideas are gaining steam around the pandemic?

What Do You Think?