On Nostalgia by David Berry

Author:David Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

5A Breath of Relief from This Fast-Paced World:On Consumed Nostalgia

Among the most consistent and popular posts on the nostalgia subreddit, one of the internet’s foremost collective repositories of recollection and reminiscence, are images of toys. Most of these toys tend to be derived from the childhood sweet spot of the first few generations with mass computer literacy, which is to say the mid-to-late eighties, nineties, and, more frequently now, the early 2000s. There is a mild tendency toward slightly more techy toys like video game systems – which are more than mere toys now but certainly weren’t in the time most people are recollecting – but, Reddit reflecting the relentless interest of the crowd, no other real organizing principle beyond a rough timeline: Etch A Sketches and Easy-Bake Ovens show up as often as action figures and Pogs.

Toys are a natural focus for nostalgic inspiration: they are so ubiquitous throughout childhood that the act of putting them away for good is synonymous with growing up, giving them a symbolic weight that might well be unmatched, except maybe among certain childish foods. As objects, they are a natural repository for memory, and since presumably most of those memories are both positive and social – playing with siblings and friends, getting a special present from a relative, bragging to a classmate about that exact same present – they are ideal stuff for frequent, fond recollection. If play is truly as important as the psychologists think for forming full-blown humans from the primordial soup of childhood, toys might even represent some crucial aspect of our personality, stand-ins for formative experience or essential aspect of who we are.

The toys of this particular cohort of people, though, are unique from the dolls and board-game pieces that have counted as childhood amusements for at least as long as there has been society. Part of it is the simple fact that we live in an age of mass production, where it is easy for us to produce exact replicas of the things we might be yearning for: my grandmother might never have found an exact replica of the cloth doll her grandmother made for her, whereas I can go out and buy Barbies cut from the very same moulds – or at least the same patterns of moulds – that my mother would have had. More potent than the toys’ substance, though, is their psychological setting: thanks to a sustained rise in influence of market-based decisions on what constitutes appropriate mass communication toward children, and concurrent deregulation of advertising standards and television programming, any child born after roughly the mid-seventies – at least in advanced Western economies, and maybe most particularly in North America – has been subject to a ubiquitous and relentless marketing effort meant to ensure that those toys would become an essential and meaningful part of their childhood (at least until next season’s batch came along). Barring the most steadfast woodworking grandparent or paranoid unplugged parent, it is virtually guaranteed that at least one

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