OTOH, I don’t think this applies to things you have to actively seek out. I could watch that movie from 10 years ago, and it’s easy to do so, but I just don’t. I focus on the here-and-now, so rediscovering that old thing is still fun.

There may be some revaluation of the currency of nostalgia, which perhaps will necessarily become more focussed on individual experiences rather than cultural artifacts, as the latter become endlessly replicable and readily recreateable. I, for one, get slightly misty-eyed recollecting afternoons smoking Benson & Hedges as I drank my Guinesses in nicotine-yellow-stained London pubs: in all likelihood there are only a few die-hards who genuinely want to go back to the days of smoke-fileld bars, but it’s the impossibilty of the return that lends nostalgia its particular poignancy.

And, of course, if the doomsayers & gloom-mongers are right, perhaps there will come a time when all of us fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to survive WW3, peak oil & climate change will be hopelessly nostalgic for the days of the internet, as the first dark-age generation in Europe may have been nostalgic for the remnants of the Roman Empire. Which is to say that nostalgia may yet have a great future.

I have an Odyssey 2 that I don’t think I have played since I was 10 or so. It’s one of the consoles with a hard-wired controller. On my unit, the player one controller (the left one) died. Until & unless I buy a new one off eBay, I can’t play those games.

Also, not everything is uploaded by far. For several years there was a Sesame Street clip I missed and wanted to see out of nostalgia… finally, someone uploaded it to YouTube this past year and I got to see it. :)

My gut reactions to a couple things:

- Reunions will get weirded up some, yeah. I would guess part of the charm and excitement of a reunion came from the gamble of seeing/re-upping with people you do want to see, and that that’s enough to justify the risk of spending some time again with people you don’t give a fig about or actively disliked when you last knew them. So, blammo, the interent and an increasing capacity for getting the stay-in-touch payoff without the people-you-don’t-like bullshit, and a suddenly a lot of the shine comes off the reunion notion. I don’t think they’ll collapse, but I be they’ll shrink or change.

- You’ll still have the joy of the song you haven’t heard since childhood, the TV show episode you only saw once 20 years ago, etc. This stuff is findable now in an unprecedented way, yes, but (a) no one has time to do nothing but sit around finding the stuff, so there’ll be a lot of stuff that gets forgotten and then surprises later on after all, and (b) nostalgia of this sort is in part a shared experience, and the happy accident of You plus Joe plus Thing From Your Shared Past will, I think remain a pretty vital sort of moment of connection.

Speaking as a kid from today, I’d say, yeah, nostalgia and the joy of rediscovery and reunions will still apply, simply due to the ridiculous amount of information we get bombarded with every day. Sure, all of it is available at our fingertips at a moment’s notice, but how many moments do we really have? In today’s ridiculous “hot media” age, information is forgotten as readily as it is absorbed. I’d even venture one step further to say that perhaps rediscovery is actually more joyous and serendipitous than what it was like in the Golden Ages, just because whatever it is you rediscovered occurred 2390857098132 concepts ago.

I mean, you’ve got 400 friends on Facebook, from grade 2 up till grad school, but how many of them do you talk to consistently? Facebook’s mini-feed algorithm is based on which people you interact with the most – your best friend from elementary school you fell out of touch with will rarely come across your mini-feed simply because you don’t actively seek them out, and Facebook prioritizes other ‘activity’ over that. So when one day, you notice something that reminds you of them, the pleasant surprise is still there.

I don’t think there is any less a sense of nostalgia. It’s simply easier for us to access whatever it is that satisfies that nostalgia’s craving.