In just three months, this decade will come to a close and a new one will begin. But if they had the ability to go back in time through these little devices and remember the past fondly, I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t. Maybe they’re right about us wasting time on these platforms and ignoring real life by looking at old pictures and videos. Yes, the older generations can make fun of us: the anti-social generation, the iGeneration or whatever name they want to call us this time. We’ve been given platforms to create and to share that are largely dominated by us. But ours is the first generation to be able to communicate this internationally. I’m sure all the older generations that preceded us had their own inside jokes or maybe some shared experience, whether it was discussed or not. We all laughed at this because we all had this shared childhood experience. But what really makes me smile, isn’t the badly cropped image likely stolen from another creator, it’s the fact that the same image I found funny, has thousands and thousands of likes. It’s easy to laugh-or to blow air out of my nose slightly harder than normal-at the memes with the caption “remember when…” along with a picture that somehow manages to pull out a childhood memory from the deepest recesses of my mind. Whether or not social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram are trying to sell us this notion of “nostalgia,” we can’t deny it’s working in their favor. In the first episode of Mad Men, Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm, describes nostalgia as “a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” Everyone believes the first rule of marketing is “sex sells,” but Draper knows that nostalgia always wins. Columnist reflects on the end of the decade and the importance of nostalgia.
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