How Technology Fosters Instant Nostalgia Through Self-Documentation
Life As Document
Nathan Jurgenson at the Cyborgology blog has a wonderfully comprehensive and fascinating post on the rise in popularity of faux vintage photograph apps like Hipstamatic which instantly turn a regular iPhone photo into a retro-looking pic by altering their color, light and other elements. With this effect the photos can achieve a convincing style of a photo taken thirty or more years ago - perhaps like an old Polaroid found in a drawer or a Nan Goldin print in a gallery. [Note: I was led to this post because it was a precursor to Jurgenson’s post on Facebook and self-documentation, which I referenced here].
In the essay, Jurgenson touches on a number of areas of great interest to me, as they deeply relate to my research into FDS. Some of his suppositions nicely support the FDS hypothesis. Such as when he states, ”social media increasingly force us to view our present as always a potential documented past.” And “social media users have become always aware of the present as a potential document to be consumed by others. Facebook fixates the present as always a future past.” As we experience life more and more as something to be documented, rather than something to be lived, we, ultimately, are forced to view ourselves, and indeed life itself, as a document. In turn, this documentary eye, out of necessity, distances or depersonalizes us from ourselves, forcing us to view ourselves from afar. As a passage from my novel Swimming Inside the Sun darkly put it:
For so long: I have felt the crushing disappointment of middling days; I’ve drifted away as if the only way to bear it was to watch my life from afar, frustrated and powerless, relegated to the role of mere observer of an insipid play.
* * *
Capturing Time
But the real juice of Jurgenson’s essay is his exploration into how these apps relate to the phenomenon that philosopher Fredric Jameson called a nostalgia for the present. Jurgenson writes:
The explosion of ubiquitous self-documentation possibilities, and the audience for our documents that social media promises, has positioned us to live life in the present with the constant awareness of how it will be perceived as having already happened. We come to see what we do as always a potential document, imploding the present with the past, and ultimately making us nostalgic for the here and now.
My knowledge of Jameson is cursory at best, but my sense is that when he talked about a nostalgia for the present he was saying we perceive our lives’ events (and even nostalgia itself) in a historical context (which roughly is the interpretation Jeffrey Herron discussed here), as we package our lives into eras like the “fifties” or the “eighties.” I don’t necessarily disagree with this notion, however, it’s not something I’ve thought about often. Instead, nostalgia for the present, to me, has always been about the personal, events and moments occurring on the island of my own life, not thought of in some larger cultural context.
Dating as far back as when I was a teenager, I’ve been plagued by a periodic sensation of being separated from the moment. This occurs especially during emotionally powerful moments (which often includes the mundane but poignant moments of everyday life). This feeling, which sometimes reaches a dissociative point of depersonalization, is one where rather than being in the moment, looking out from the first-person, I am detached, aware of myself and of the moment itself. Reflecting on our lives of course is natural, healthy, and indeed essential. But what I am describing is an involuntary sort of flash of reflection, a sense of reflecting on the moment while its occurring (as opposed to reflection by its standard retrospective-contemplative definition).
What I’ve come to realize over time is that this flash reflection, which is always shrouded in a cloud of panicked melancholy, is an attempt to capture time. The wrenching beauty of seeing my daughter smile, even one of a thousand smiles in a day, sometimes is a moment of such power that my mind instantly wants to preserve it forever. This preservation, with its gripping poignancy and import - for lack of a better analogy or semantic tools to explain - is quite like a vintage photograph, hovering right there in space, frozen, while, of course, time keeps rolling on. During these points in time, what I called Frozen Moments in Swimming Inside the Sun, the past, present, and future collapse into one.
I often feel a grip of sadness in moments of great joy because I’m unable to escape an awareness that they’re ending. Which of course prevents me from fully enjoying the experience. It’s a catch 22 - in order to fully enjoy something, in a way, you need to not be aware you’re enjoying it or how important it is, because once you become aware you are, to some degree, removed from the moment, alienated from the experience.
In fact, it sometimes seems I feel this way not just in moments, but existentially, a permanent low-grade bittersweet sensation. A smile that is also a wince. Everything wonderful must end, of course, including life itself. Instant nostalgia is cherishing life by mourning its inexorable end. After all, how can you cherish life without reflection? And how can you reflect without mourning the loss of what has passed? (Side note: not surprisingly, many of my favorite pieces of music, films and other works of art - at least abstractly - evoke this complex joyful wistfulness. One of my first, and still favorite examples of this is Harold and Maude.)
* * *
How Technology Fosters Instant Nostalgia Through Self-Documentation
Now we have the technological tools to harness these nostalgia-for-the-present feelings. For many years our technology has enabled us, in one sense or another, to preserve moments. Language, painting, and more recently, cameras all enable this. But in the past few years we’ve developed a nearly limitless ability for documentation, which in many ways is synonymous with preservation. The most obvious of these tools are digital cameras and video recorders, and of course smart phones which incorporate both of those technologies but also allow for myriad additional documenting tools, from Facebook updates to tweets to mapping apps, and on and on. Indeed, as I commented on before, there is an unstoppable movement of “self-tracking.” Smart phones are like little electronic pushers, always on, always at our side, as they prey on this desire.
We document to show others, to show ourselves or both. But it’s our documentation as an act of preservation of moments for ourselves that’s most meaningful, and perhaps troubling to me. As I wrote, ever since I was a teenager (and perhaps even before then), I have had these Frozen Moments, where my mind seemingly was trying to capture time. Yet now with an iPhone generally always on my person, not to mention a DSLR toted along on trips both far and near, this innate tendency (pathology?) to preserve moments in my mind is advanced by tools that take that image, that feeling, and make it tangible, or at least digitally viewable. Because of this I simultaneously love and loathe this technological augmentation of my mind’s intention. Being able to record in this way is both a burden and a gift. I get to easily create wonderful documents of times I want to preserve, (and enjoy the creativity of making those documents - the Sontagian “poet and scribe” that Jurgenson referenced). Yet taking photographs and making other documents only serves to amplify a tendency to separate from the moment that already is a largely unwelcome habit of my mind.
