Nostalgia and Tech: Balancing Past and Present

Nostalgia has been a factor of life forever. The word comes from Greek, with nostos meaning return home and algos meaning pain. It is a feeling of a lost era that we long to return to. Studies have shown that nostalgic items can cause negative emotions to occur, but mostly they create warm feelings. But isn’t it weird that this applies to tech, one of the fastest and most adaptive industries in the world? For example, Analogue, an American video game hardware company, started producing the Analogue Pocket in late 2021. The Pocket is a remake of the Nintendo Gameboy, which was a bestseller and still carries this nostalgia with it. Analogue recently came out with new colors for the Pocket, and they sold out. Why do people want to downgrade to a less capable, less functional portable console? Let’s get into it.

The golden age of technology has been acknowledged by some as the 40s to the 80s. From World War II, when technological advancement was necessary for victory, to the age of neon, the Macintosh, and the Walkman, technology kept changing faster and faster as culture changed in a flash. As most of the world heads to a place of faster processing, quantum computers, and smart homes, part of us holds onto the tech of yesteryear, when things were simpler. The Analogue Pocket ties into that longing, the same longing that has encouraged the rapid reintroduction of vinyl into pop culture. A popular tech Youtuber, Marques Brownlee, created a video series called Retro Tech about 4 years ago, and his video on the Game Boy is his most watched one, with 16 million more views on that video than any other video of his. To this day, you will still find Street Fighter and Pac-Man in any arcade because people still like those sorts of games. There is an air of simplicity about the Walkman, Game Boy, and NES that makes it to this day super fun to play. As a tech enthusiast, I’ve always wanted a PS5 or Switch, but I only have a Wii. Despite it being from 2009, my friends still enjoy it, and some with a better consul tell me that they wish they still had a Wii. The future will only get more complicated, despite how much we are trying to simplify our complications. Phones will only get more features, headphones will only get more buttons, and computers will only get more websites. That’s why it's not hard to see why people are flocking to get a nostalgic piece of tech, one that plays into their childhood and their desire for simplicity.

Nostalgia and tech will never become untwined, and it's best for both parties. The past will never stop tying into the present, and the present will not stop affecting the future.