Major Practical Project/Dissertation - Nostalgia

An article from December 2012 entitled A Point of View: Nostalgia - it's not like it used to be by Will Self explores the authors opinions about nostalgia and his growing feeling that he is not truly living in the present.

Full article available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20726824

Here follows some quotes from the article.

"The ease with which we can now assemble a digital archive of our lives and times means younger people are far more nostalgic about their loves, losses and travels"

"Like everyone else, I suppose, there was a period in my life when 'now' was of paramount importance - if we take "now" to be a wobbly phenomenon, something like a raindrop, encompassing the moment as well as immersing consciousness, and reflecting each to the other as it plummets into the future.

Inside the now all was scintillatingly significant, hip and happening, while the un-become future was void of everything except for one or two events I was looking forward to, or away from. As for the past, well, it was black and white, jerky, frumpy and lifeless - gelid, certainly, but altogether uncool. Unless, it was coloured by my own vivid memories."

"I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom. For those of us who have months, years and even entire decades mouldering in the attics of our memories, nostalgia seems a curiously boastful kind of hoarding. So you had a love affair, or moved abroad, you got ill, or had a parent die - well, so did I, so did I - and more than once."

"Before the late 19th Century, the manufacture of memory was a laborious business, requiring cumbersome mechanical processes and even craft. Offset printing, followed by the mass dissemination of photographic images allowed the generality of people - who heretofore had been denied a record of the times - to line their shelves with them.
Throughout the 20th Century, the preservation of individuals' memories became cheaper and so more ubiquitous, but it wasn't until the last decade that the seamless interconnection of mobile recording devices with the world wide web allowed for the retention of the past almost in its entirety."

Self suggests that now, in the digital age, we have nearly all of our memories on record, photographs of all events and our own past recorded almost daily through social networking updates. Nostalgia is a reflection on the past with a sort of longing, a homesickness, often triggered by something familiar in the present. It has been described as looking back on meaningful memories that we have idealised over time. But if our collective past is almost entirely on record, is there still room for nostalgia?
I think so. Perhaps it is simply because I am from a different generation and, like Self suggests, I "have so little by way of personal history that [I] polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom". I think back to my childhood as an almost perfect few years. Ask my mum, on the other hand, and she'd probably disagree.