This is just the beginning: While these apps and websites let us glimpse the past, other technologies could place us more squarely inside it. But although psychologists believe nostalgia is crucial for finding meaning in life and for combatting loneliness, we don’t yet know whether too much of it will have negative, even dystopian, effects. As technology gives us unprecedented access to our memories, might we yearn for the good old days when we forgot things?

~~The End of Forgetting, Ben Rowen. The Atlantic, June 2017. Web.

From my personal experience, nostalgia rides on a mix of processed content and affect, relating to consumer audio and video as well as self interpreted stimulus. It is mostly prevalent in memories recorded in low light, almost as if the absence of visual noise made the aesthetic weight of foggy streetlights and waves of sounds punch even clearer. In true millenial tumblr user fashion, I used to archive everything I found attractive through one channel or another, whether it be on my camera roll or some sort of social media. I scoured through every ancient fashion forum post, listened to songs recommended in an archived thread, and torrented packs of curated movies. This led me to have a ridiculous amount of content from which to pull from, and subsequently a bunch of data from which to create nostalgia from. This raw data was filtered through my own understanding of nostalgia, me playing pokemon on my gameboy whilst my dad delivered packages to jfk, as I used the passing streetlights to light my screen and Thank You by Dido played on lite fm. This overarching structure was the nostalgic backboard where my brain flung newly encountered media to see what stuck. It makes me question what I find so damn nostalgic about 80s punk ballads, of boleros and tangos that have nothing to do with my own experiences, as welll as all that has to do with haze and tungsten lighting, that comes from beautifully spoken spanish and lightly tempered distortion, the nostalgia that appears to be simply intrinsic to everyone. The filtration of the negative out of these time periods makes me consider why I never feel nostalgic of 2014-7, where I felt I was doing nothing with my time. I think modern nostalgia is built on the backbone of the marketing advances made during the latter half of the past century. I also believe it is hereditary, filtering down from my mom’s scrapbooks and my dads casette mixtapes. 

I think its interesting to see what companies that hold our personal media, such as google and apple, have done to attempt to create a sense of nostalgia, among other requests to the subconscious. I was an early proponent to Google Photos and Dropbox, as it let me clear out my camera roll in an attempt to be streamlined and efficient. This led to a creation of two independent data sets, the stuff I have willfully curated and deemed important enough to save on my Google Photos backup, and the sheer mess of my phone’s camera roll. I thought this distinction was interesting due to how these two companies process this sheer data (to this day, I have not read the terms of service for google photos..) Google indexes them by their location, as well as being able to indentify people and group their photos together. While apple does this, it appears to not be as comprehensive as Google. I found this extremely nostalgic, as I saw not only the people of my present but also ones of the past, presented side by side on a grid which put all of them on a scle of equal importance. It was a reminder of events and the affect they had, connections that ended in good and bad, someones visage equated to the jasminc rice of the pho restaurant we used to frequent. Apple visualizes location on a geotag map, which aside from creating a sense of wonder, attaches other nostalgic factors to the photo’s location I otherwise would not have felt or remembered. As i have mostly cleared out my camera roll, I saw how the map was a reflection of my personality, compared to my girlfriends map (seeing that she is a camera roll hoarder.) Another digital catalogue of nostalgia i found interesting was in media repositories, such as youtube or apple music playlists. When I was deeply depressed in Providence I would title my music playlists by the season, and coming back to them to immediately remember all the feelings i felt as i smoked outside my apartment. Listening to them now almost presents a shadow of my former self, and I cant help but laugh at what I see as being a drama queen nowadays.

This exercise overall made me consider the difference between nostalgia and a major component of my life, longing. To me, nostalgia is an appreciative remembrance of what once was, with no attached desire to reconstitute those artifacts. It cherishes those moments and feelings without the need to be presently indulging. Longing is more of yearning wish to relive the past, an almost reactive, visceral instinct to truly be there.
Perhaps my definition of nostalgia has to do with the way digital media has dampened it, relegating it to a warm afterthought when i go into my instagram archive or story highlight. I do realize its impact and sway over me changes on my mood, with the urge to open folders of the past being all encompassing when i felt alone and abandoned. Nowadays, I can stumble upon those same photos and feel all of the positive things without the detrimental ones. However, I would never wish to forget these nostalgia laced files, because through them I can align myself with what I truly deem as good for me.