Sunday, January 15, 2012

Relative Nostalgia

More and more often, I see our generation united by common memories of mass consumer and pop culture from our childhoods (approximately 1983 to 1996), thus firmly establishing the popularity of sites like The Angry Video Game Nerd, the Nostalgia Critic, and this site examining awesome VHS covers from the ‘80s.

The ‘80s covers might be a different story, but were all those cartoons, movies, Nickelodeon shows, video games, and commercials really worth enshrining, or were we just at an impressionable age where even marginally serviceable entertainment would blow our minds? Is it possible that today’s mass culture (mediocre by our standards) has the same effect on kids, and in twelve years we’ll have a whole new generation talking about how cool the Geico gecko was?

Answer: not fucking likely.

4 comments:

Danicus said...

my friend Chris Sims wrote that VHS cover article.

Also: I totally remember this conversation.

trainor said...

every generation has their own things. culture is always moving forward and if you are stuck in the past or not paying attention it will easily move along without you. that looks like an "empty culture" (hipster,emo,bieber,etc) but since its always moving forward, trends today will be quaint and remembered fondly by teenagers now. cds pissed off our parents, digital music pissed off gen x, and streaming music will piss us off. i bet in 10 years, today's kids will be grown up, and pop culture fiends will have emulators to play classic iphone games.

Ian said...

@Dan: That's awesome. Also, a surprising number of these posts start out as conversations with friends.

@Jon: I imagine this post would have read differently had I not added the last line (as an afterthought, it turns out), though I intended it in a facetious, "let's make fun of the narrator" sense. In real life (and in the aforementioned conversation) I do think that our nostalgia is the same as that of today's kids.

Mike said...

I feel very unimportant when I think about how irrelevant my nostalgia may be to other generations. Although logical, it's unsettling.