Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Times Finally Reports on Nineties Nostalgia



NYTimes did a piece on Nineties Nostalgia (the existence of which, somehow, surprised them). What struck me is how smart Nick is in their redeployment of Doug and others. They're not only responding to pressures from social media outlets, but now also responding to audience participation on social networking sites to determine their schedules.

The other thing, as I've continually been thinking about nostalgia these past few months: we're nostalgic for forms of media engagement. As those forms change more rapidly, the thing we can be nostalgic for gets more and more recent. After school cable television was the primary form of entertainment. But check out these social networking stats (passed on me by Tyler, of course....). Notice the crazy-weird spike of internet usage by the youngest demographic. Also note that 11% of Facebook users are 13-17 years old. ELEVEN PERCENT! This is more than 75 million kids.

Forget about watching stuff like Nick. KIDS are online poking each other *cough* ever earlier.

These kids will be nostalgic for the old Facebook messaging interface, like, next week.

(Just kidding, they'll be nostalgic for Google+).

2 comments:

  1. Here's the thing: does anyone in our age group even have access to Nickelodeon any more? Or does the 12-2am time slot presume we're all living with our parents?

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  2. Interesting, A-J. What do you mean by "social media outlets"?

    What do you think governs whether or not we get nostalgic for something? Is it just the amount of time we spent engaged with something, or is it some form of value present in the thing that the replacement (or lack of) doesn't provide? I'm thinking the latter, because I'm not nostalgic about, eg, corded phones.

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