Technology

How the Internet Uses Nostalgia

   Long-lost memories pop up in music recommendations, personality
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   House are selling Greek yogurt. Boyz II Men recently made a cameo on
   How I Met Your Mother. This year's Super Bowl featured, of all people,
   Flea. We are having a moment of '90s nostalgia, occasioned in part by
   millennials (or The Youths or Those Kids or whatever you want to call
   them) who are aging into adulthood and therefore eager to relive their
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   ***

   Nostalgia, the copious literature on it suggests, comes in two basic
   forms. One is organic, the kind that washes over you when you see an
   old picture of yourself and your cousins, aged 7 and 9 and 10, giggling
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   Dawson’s Creek's Joey and/or Blossom's Joey, appropriated to arouse a
   vague sense that we have lost something as we’ve moved, inexorably,
   into our future. This form of nostalgia is usually invoked, in one way
   or another, to sell us stuff. You could, because of that, dismiss its
   validity (fauxstalgia?). But it will live on, inevitably, because media
   producers know exactly what advertisers have long understood: that
   nostalgia, like sex, sells.

   The products of that basic insight, whether they're movies or TV shows
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   Lebowski.

   Nostalgia, under the stewardship of the Internet, has been made nimble.

   As market goods, however, these products can also be recursive: Mad Men
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   While, sure, commercial culture is commercial, it’s also notable how
   ambient nostalgia has become. The memorial-industrial complex ensures
   that our past—our collective past—permeates our present. That complex
   markets directly to memories that are shared, across generations and
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   to realize the vague-but-also-urgent goal shared by many social
   networks and services: user engagement. "For almost everyone,” Sung
   says, a nostalgia-focused Spotify story “usually triggers some sort of
   strong emotion. Sometimes it's, 'Wow, I totally forgot that song.
   Thanks so much for reminding me of it.' Other times, it's more like,
--
   Either way, though: engagement. And an experience of the past that is
   customized—if not to a person, individually, then to that person's
   generational demographic. Spotify’s interpretation of nostalgia, in
   that sense, is pretty much the opposite of The LEGO® Movie’s or Mad
   Men's or that of Kraft-by-way-of-the-Ninja Turtles-by-way-of-Vanilla
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                                     ***

   Spotify isn’t alone in its use of nostalgia as a marketing tool. Social
   networks in general, you could argue, are
   implicitly—preemptively—nostalgic, combining our pasts and our
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   Networks, however, are also experimenting with more explicit forms of
   nostalgia-baiting. Earlier this month, Facebook rolled out “Look Back”
   compilations that collect users’ most-liked photos, statuses, and life
   events into an easily viewable video. (These collections come in
--

   Even Pinterest, which is most commonly associated with future-oriented
   and aspirational image-collecting, makes use of customized nostalgia.
   Gabriel Trionfi, Pinterest's user experience researcher, is a
   psychologist by training, and he points out that the flip side of
   anticipation—one of the emotions Pinterest uses to generation its own
   version of user engagement—is, yep, nostalgia.

   Journalists have long recognized the same thing advertisers have, which
   is that nostalgia is an extremely efficient tool for selling stuff.

   “Nostalgia is a known way to boost people's mood,” Trionfi told me. It
   allows people to live (and re-live) “something familiar, something they
   remember, a positive emotional experience.” On Pinterest, he points
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   past.

   Nostalgia, at its most basic level, requires access to memories—and
   there is, of course, no better archive than the Internet. The social
   networks that are becoming increasingly synonymous with our experience
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   The good feeling is growing. Many media outlets ("content producers,"
   you could call them) are selling nostalgia in one form or another:
   There’s Retronaut and @historyinpix and the many similar—and
   controversial—features dedicated to the resurfacing of the past.
   There’s New York magazine’s late, great “Nostalgia Face-Check” series.
   Yesterday, Wired—known mostly for its reporting on the future—published
   a list, curated by Questlove, of the top hip-hop tracks of the ’90s.
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   This is all fairly unremarkable; journalists have long recognized the
   same thing advertisers have, which is that nostalgia is an extremely
   efficient tool for selling stuff. But media outlets—especially the ones
   that are merging technological prowess with journalistic—aren’t just
   leveraging our soft enthusiasms for the past; they’re also taking a
   platform-focused approach to that work. They, like the social networks,
   are trafficking in targeted nostalgia.

   Take Buzzfeed’s ever-more-ubiquitous quizzes. “Which ‘90s Movie
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   people who fit those demographics.

   The upshot of all this? Nostalgia no longer comes in one-size-fits-all,
   and that size is no longer “large.” Nostalgia, under the stewardship of
   the Internet, has been made nimble. Our tenuous relationship with the
   past can now be customized and made relevant, in the manner of a