Nostalgia And NEWstalgia

Nostalgia provides us with feelings of the past whether positive or negative. Nostalgia is a strong link to emotions, with our past emotions and memorizes of an experiences being brought back forward in the mind to remind us of that good experience. Nostalgia is a funny thing, it can remind you of things you have forgotten about in the past, about ones self, and the time period the memory took place. Nostalgia is almost like jumping in a time machine for your own life, reliving fond memories. With nostalgia's affect on memory its obvious that those who have lived longer can experience more nostalgic moments during their life. Now look at how this can be tied in to advertising, those who have been alive for more then 50 60 or 70 are able to remember products or norms of an earlier time that could bring them back to more of those memories of the past.

Jack Daniels is the most prime example for a very nostalgic feel, it has a classic and traditional style for making their whiskey. At Jack Daniels they use the same process they have for many year, which takes more time and is more labor but it is the hard work and time that makes JD such a profound whiskey. This idea of traditional and hard working values can bring a very nostalgic feel to ones mind who has experienced traditional living. Milan Kundera once said “The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” This is a very dark way of looking at nostalgia but it is true! We experience nostalgia and we think about how that time period was so great an profound but while we were in that timer period it wasn't any more profound than the very moment you took to think about the past.

Now while Nostalgia is meant to bring back fond memories of the good in the past, what it those memories don't exist? In the younger generations nostalgic advertising might not provide the same sense of mind for them as it would for older generations. And as the younger generation continue to grow it pushes older ideas or nostalgic memories away only to discover an entire new generation of fond memories.

This ad shows a website that blew up during the younger generations time, although YouTube is not all that old provided with this nostalgic view on it with the older retro art style it does give a sense of nostalgia or NEWstalgia. I know to me this ad brings me back to the days when I was a kid and would make skits of my friends and I and we would all upload them on YouTube in hopes of becoming "YouTube Famous".