Nostalgia for the Pre-Digital Age

There is getting to be a great deal of nostalgia for a time when technology wasn't as central to our lives now that baby boomers are nearing retirement and generations that grew up surrounded by computer s are coming of age. However, technology has its good and its bad just like anything else. There are online yearbooks. There are computer viruses. There are spam e-mails. There are connections made with loved ones.

The nostalgia for an analog world exists, though, partly because the parents and grandparents of the baby boomers embraced a sort of social amnesia. The horrors of the first half of the 20th century were so vivid and damaging that the best thing to do was to forget. It was easier to create a new epoch than to remember the first world war that killed millions, the desperation of the Great Depression, or the atrocities and mass destruction of the second world war.

In the United States, the period after the second world war was a new epoch, defined by prosperity and growth . A new way of life was born with the building of highways, the creation of the suburbs, and the institution of the GI bill, which allowed servicemen to go to school, get an education, and become professionals. Those GIs had seen some of history's most awful events, and perhaps as a result they tended to insulate their children. Even though the Korean War was fought when the baby boomers were still children, they were protected from it.

That left the baby boomer generation naive in a way. They may have chosen to test their ideals, but the great machinations of society didn't present them with the kind of hardship that makes people introspective. It was a time of relative security, economic growth, massive proliferation of consumer goods, and the evolution of a dynamic consumerist lifestyle. Events conspired to create a unique time in which the past was left behind and the future opened up, bright and inviting.

No boom lasts forever, however, and the largesse of the 1950s and 1960s inevitably gave way to the economic challenges and social cynicism of the 1970s. It's no surprise that this change coincided with the time when the baby boomers started hitting 30. After Nixon, the country examined its conscience and re-examined its position in the world. The idyllic post war era was gone, and because it was caused by a unique combination of events it will never be repeated.

In the second half of the 1980s, a new boom began, but this one was fundamentally different than postwar boom. The idea behind postwar America was that if you invest in people, they'll make the country great. The idea behind the boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s was that if you invest in technology it will make expensive people obsolete. While the 1950s were defined by the isolationism that always occurs when nations must rebuild after a war, the tech boom was defined by the things computers do best: connection and communication.

There is no room for isolation, either for nations or for people, in our technology driven world. News travels fast: an event is documented and communicated around the world in a matter of minutes, creating sometimes unpredictable and unstoppable reactions. In a sense, the butterfly of chaos theory is manifest in this time: it flutters its wings on one side of the world and creates a hurricane on the other side. While this is exhilarating for those who grew up with technology, it can be terrifying for those who did not.

Hence the nostalgia. Luckily, although the world moves at a faster pace now and there is no way to turn the clock back to a different age, there are places to indulge one's nostalgic urges. We have to beware of computer viruses, yes. But we can also peruse online yearbooks and remember what it was like - or what we wish it had been like - way back when.