Nostalgia without memory/the condition of the 90's kid

The topics within the reading that interested me most this week were theories centered on the concept of nostalgia - both nostalgia for the present, and nostalgia without memory - and on the image, the imagined, and the imaginary. I'm still grappling with the latter, but I'm working toward understanding in the context of what I know best (and what is dearest to my heart), media and the dissemination of image and information through technology. 

Nostalgia without memory is a concept that I believe is uniquely applicable to my generation: the Millennials, but more specifically, those born in the early 1990's. While Appadurai frames nostalgia without memory in a contemporary international context (through his discussion of the desire of those in the Philippines to "look back on a world they have never lost" through their replication of American pop culture), I believe the concept is applicable to the nostalgia that my generation tends to feel for "simpler times"- times that, in large part, we have little or no memory of. It is not only what Appadurai refers to as "a social imaginaire built largely around reruns", but the rapid advances in technology and media that occurred throughout our formative years.

We, the "90's kids," grew up alongside the growth of technology. We still have faint memories of a time before the popularization of cell phones (although the flip phone came out in 1989, text messaging wasn't developed until 1993 and popularized slightly later), memories of a time when children spent their free time playing jump rope outside and entertaining themselves with coloring books. However, by as early as our pre-teens and adolescence, the smart phone had become widely accessible and Game Boys and Xbox's had begun to replace more old-fashioned forms of entertainment, forms that were so rapidly dispelled by technology and media consumption that it left within my generation a nostalgia unbefitting of our age - a variation of nostalgia without (or with very little) memory. This is certainly a result of globalization, which goes hand in hand with the expansion of technology and media and the corresponding expansion of global interaction and integration.

This idea is also closely related, in my interpretation, to the concept of the image, the imagined, and the imaginary. The relatively contemporary advances in technology and development of a global media have changed how we process information, as well as the very information and images we receive. I believe this shifting role of the image in our lives has altered our perception of the world and of reality, and this as well creates a sense of longing for a simpler past, uncluttered by what David Harvey refers to as the “time-space compression” caused by globalization. I hope to explore this idea further as I gain a better understanding of the image, the imagined, and the imaginary and their respective (and shifting) roles in both contemporary life and recent history.