Exactly three years ago my roommate said something witty while sitting on our couch and looking up images of French fries. About two years ago I was eating dumplings in Chicago. About a year ago my uncle said something mildly insulting about my Warby Parker glasses.
I know these things not because I am a serial diarist (though I have unsuccessfully attempted to become one at many points in my life) but because of an app called Timehop. Timehop is a mobile app that scans your social media profiles and lets you know exactly what you Instagrammed, Facebooked and tweeted that day a year or more ago.
The app, which many have called a time capsule for the digital age, has grown tremendously over the past year, growing from 1 million users to 14 million users in the past year. Given the popularity of trends like #TBT, the fact that an app that catalogs what you did in the past is becoming more and more popular is not too surprising. One of the major ways Myspace gains traffic is through users going back and downloading old photos. A Facebook trend is going around where people sport their very first profile picture as an ode to awkward phases and old times. And with all those sepia-toned Instagrams filling our social feeds and nostalgic commercials filling our TV screens, it is easy to think that our obsession with everything retro and nostalgic is unique to our particular time period.
David Sprott, a marketing professor at Washington State University who has conducted studies on nostalgia's effect on advertisements, says that nostalgia has always been a pretty constant theme in our consciousness but that academic interest about nostalgia certainly became stronger around the late 1990s as people wanted to look back on the past before the start of the new millennium. A representative for Timehop, Jake Simms, points out that photo albums and scrapbooks have been around forever but now it is simply easier to access and participate in nostalgia because of digital documentation.
Timehop is an app I usually scroll through every morning along with my email, Instagram and Facebook. It seems weird and perhaps a little depressing to start off your morning by taking a look back at what you did on that exact day one year ago, two years ago and so on. With nostalgia comes a certain melancholic stigma, which perhaps this comes from the term's historical roots.
The term nostalgia first came into use in 1688 by a Swiss doctor by the name of Johannes Hofer. Hofer described nostalgia in his medical dissertation as a "neurological disease of essentially demonic cause." But even before Hofer officially coined the term, nostalgia was a condition often diagnosed for Swiss soldiers who were feeling homesick during the Thirty Years War. Equating nostalgia with disease was also common in United States during the Civil War. Dr. John Taylor of the Third Missouri Calvary told homesick soldiers that they were indolent hypochondriacs and that suffering from nostalgia "was looked upon with contempt -- that gonorrhea and syphilis were no more detestable."
Modern research has proven that nostalgia isn't an ailment of hypochondriacs and in most cases has an overall positive effect on people. Studies have been done showing that when people reflect on nostalgic memories in a cold room they report feeling warmer afterward. In another study, researchers at the University of Southampton conducted an experiment where they had participants read about a fatal disaster and then instructed the participants to take a personality test that informed them that they were incredibly lonely. People who were sad about the disaster or stressed out about being lonely were more likely to think about nostalgic feelings. Consequently, the people who reported using nostalgia as a coping method felt less lonely and depressed.
"In general people respond favorably to nostalgia although nostalgia does have a negative aspect to it," Sprott points out. "There is that bittersweet dimension of nostalgia in that it's something that you desire and want but it's also something you can't have. You can't go back to high school or that old boyfriend. "
It's the complicated emotions associated with nostalgia that make it particularly salient and popular during the age of the Internet, according to Mary Beth Oliver, the co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State. "There is a tendency for people to want to share content that is emotionally powerful and nostalgia is a very charged emotionally state," Oliver says. She also uses this reasoning to explain why sites like Upworthy, a compendium of curated emotional content, are so popular.
But why is the pull to post a Facebook Year in Review or that Buzzfeed article about "The Best '90s Snacks" so alluring?
Susan Krauss, author of the book The Search for Fulfillment, says that connecting with older memories is vital for maintaining a sense of identity. "People with amnesia retain their personalities, but they lose that vital sense of connection with their own past. The blank spaces in their life stories leave gaps in their sense of personal identity. "
This curation of our personal identity explains why nostalgia is particularly popular on social networks, according to Mun-Young Chung, who is doing his dissertation on media and nostalgia at Penn State University.
"People like to share their nostalgic feelings on Facebook and Twitter because it is related to collective memory and social identity," Chung says. "After sharing media content on a social network you have a feeling that you are a part of a certain generation and you're more likely to want to connect with other people who share the same nostalgia as you. Nostalgia increases that social bonding. "
In our hyper-curated generation where Pinterest paints our future and your Instagram feed makes a statement about your brunch preferences, using nostalgia as another marker of social image makes sense.
But our society's infatuation with nostalgia seems to be incongruous with apps like Snapchat, which emphasize the ephemeral and fleeting. The digital world vacillates between valuing the fleeting and remembering the past.
But when viewed through the lens of social curation, apps like Timehop and Snapchat have the same end effect. Whether you're Snapchatting the Kombucha you drank for breakfast or #TBT-ing a photo of your five-year-old self dressed as a Power Ranger, both actions are about reinforcing a certain social identity. Nostalgia on the Internet doesn't really seem to be about the past but about carving a presence for ourselves in the present.
Photo Credit: Charles Wagner/Flickr
