Instant nostalgia: partying like it's 1989

We live in a digital age where everything is immediate. We no longer have to wait for weeks to get a letter in the mail from family and friends who are far away, but are instantly connected through email, webcams, and text messaging. So history appears to be moving faster than ever before. With each year that passes we are creating more and more records of our lives. So much is documented that the smallest changes seem monumental, from hairstyles to the design of our personal computers, and we are eager to categorize the events and changes we see in our own lifetime. David Lowenthal explores this phenomenon in The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History where he suggests “modern media magnify the past’s remoteness.” [1]

The problem with focusing on our recent past is that perspective is difficult to achieve. Interpretation of past events changes over time, as it should, benefitting from hindsight and a broader of view of context and effects. In our eager race to document the ever more recent past, we risk losing a clear idea of the big picture while being bogged down by minutiae – missing the proverbial forest for the trees.

This phenomenon of instant nostalgia is all over the place in popular culture. Retrospectives and ironic celebrations of decades past are commonplace. As an example, we have been looking back on the decade of my early childhood – the 1980s – with a nostalgic sigh and a chuckle for years now. The Wedding Singer, an homage to eighties culture, came out in 1998, a mere eight years after the decade was over. Maybe the 1980s weren’t really that great (I don’t remember them too well myself but I had some pretty awful haircuts), but it’s not the Recession or the Cold War that people want to remember. It’s the little details of pop culture; the tv shows, the music, the toys, and the greatest contribution the 1980s made to humanity: the fashion. Maybe people aren’t really looking for answers. Life wasn’t simpler or better back then. Vertical blinds in pink and grey were not a good idea. So what is it? Are we so self-obsessed that we can’t look beyond our own lifetimes? Or is there just something about a past that is almost identical to our present, but just different enough, that is comforting?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with looking back on our recent past with such longing, but as Lowenthal reminds us, things haven’t really changed that much in the past couple of decades. So let’s keep some perspective. And keep our fingers crossed that the flock of seagulls hairdo (see above) remains a distant memory.

[1] David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusades and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge 1998), p.8