Author: Gary Cross Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231539606 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. For many of us, modern memory is shaped less by a longing for the social customs and practices of the past or for family heirlooms handed down over generations and more by childhood encounters with ephemeral commercial goods and fleeting media moments in our age of fast capitalism. This phenomenon has given rise to communities of nostalgia whose members remain loyal to the toys, television, and music of their youth. They return to the theme parks and pastimes of their upbringing, hoping to reclaim that feeling of childhood wonder or teenage freedom. Consumed nostalgia took definite shape in the 1970s, spurred by an increase in the turnover of consumer goods, the commercialization of childhood, and the skillful marketing of nostalgia. Gary Cross immerses readers in this fascinating and often delightful history, unpacking the cultural dynamics that turn pop tunes into oldies and childhood toys into valuable commodities. He compares the limited appeal of heritage sites such as Colonial Williamsburg to the perpetually attractive power of a Disney theme park and reveals how consumed nostalgia shapes how we cope with accelerating change. Today nostalgia can be owned, collected, and easily accessed, making it less elusive and often more fun than in the past, but its commercialization has sometimes limited memory and complicated the positive goals of recollection. By unmasking the fascinating, idiosyncratic character of modern nostalgia, Cross helps us better understand the rituals of recall in an age of fast capitalism.
Author: Clay Routledge Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317363736 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 163
Book Description
Nostalgia is a topic that most lay people are familiar with, but, until recently, few social scientists understood. Once viewed as a disease, nostalgia is now considered to be an important psychological resource. It involves revisiting personally cherished memories that involve close others. When people engage in nostalgia, they experience a boost in positive psychological states such as positive mood, feelings of social connectedness, self-esteem, self-continuity, and perceptions of meaning in life. Since nostalgia promotes these positive states, when people experience negative states (such as loneliness or meaninglessness), they use nostalgia to regulate distress. This book explains in detail what nostalgia is, how views of it have changed over time, and how it has been studied by social scientists. It explores issues like how common nostalgia is and whether people differ in their tendency to be nostalgic. It looks at the triggers and inspiration for nostalgia, and the emotional states that are associated with it. Finally, the psychological, social, and behavioral effects of engaging in nostalgia are discussed. This volume provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the social scientific research into the complex and intriguing phenomenon of nostalgia. It will be of interest to a range of students and researchers in psychology and beyond, and its accessible writing style and engaging anecdotes will also be appreciated by a wider, non-academic audience.
Author: Ryan Lizardi Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 0739196227 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 167
Book Description
Considering the current rash of film remakes, vintage video game downloads, and box sets of bygone television shows, media today is obsessed with nostalgia. Instead of presenting a past that functions as an adaptive mirror with which we can compare our contemporary situation, the past is instead presented as an individualized version that transfixes us as uncritical citizens of our own culture. Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media argues that the cultural implication of a cross-media eternal return to nostalgia is an increasing reliance on defining who we are as people and societies by what media we consumed as children. The unblinking eye toward the past knows no progress, or at the very least, does not employ the past to compare and adaptively engage with the present or future. Examining film, literature, television, and video games, Ryan Lizardi tackles the idea of why that strong sense of nostalgia is such a popular tactic for the media industry, and why it is problematic.
Author: Michael Hviid Jacobsen Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000034097 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 213
Book Description
This volume explores the nature of nostalgia as an important emotion in contemporary society and social theory. Situated between the ‘sociology of emotions’ and ‘nostalgia studies’, it considers the reasons for which nostalgia appears to be becoming an increasingly significant and debated emotion in late-modern culture. With chapters offering studies of nostalgia at micro-, meso- and macro-levels of society, it offers insights into the rise to prominence of nostalgia and the attendant consequences. Thematically organised and examining the role of nostalgia on an individual level – in the lives of concrete individuals – as well as analysing its function on a more historical social level as a collective and culturally shared emotion, Nostalgia Now brings together the latest empirical and theoretical work on an important contemporary emotion and proposes new agendas for research. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, psychology and cultural studies with interests in the emotions.
Author: Niklas Salmose Publisher: MDPI ISBN: 3039215566 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 2
Book Description
Some of the most pressing contemporary issues (ecological crisis, migration and integration, fragmented worldviews, social media, fake news, extremist politics and terrorism) can be understood more profoundly through how they interact with both individual and collective forces of nostalgia. Nostalgia is politics, but these politics are also interwoven with media and culture. Notwithstanding how nostalgia is used or contextualized in terms of politics and social practices, commodification or personal development, its power is primarily situated within its efficacy as a governing, influential human emotion. The vast and luminous contributions to this special issue on contemporary nostalgia are all investigating the role different aesthetic media formats (film, music, literature, computer games) plays in nostalgic negotiations with style, history, migration, love, nationalism, diaspora, irony, modernity, colonial and postcolonial discourses, and adoption. Mutually, these essays stand out as important, original, critical contributions to the expanding field of nostalgia studies and offer a valued insight on our world.
Author: Jerome de Groot Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317277953 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Consuming History examines how history works in contemporary popular culture. Analysing a wide range of cultural entities from computer games to daytime television, it investigates the ways in which society consumes history and how a reading of this consumption can help us understand popular culture and issues of representation. In this second edition, Jerome de Groot probes how museums have responded to the heritage debate and how new technologies from online game-playing to internet genealogy have brought about a shift in access to history, discussing the often conflicted relationship between ‘public’ and academic history and raising important questions about the theory and practice of history as a discipline. Fully revised throughout with up-to-date examples from sources such as Wolf Hall, Game of Thrones and 12 Years a Slave, this edition also includes new sections on the historical novel, gaming, social media and genealogy. It considers new, ground-breaking texts and media such as YouTube in addition to entities and practices, such as re-enactment, that have been underrepresented in historical discussion thus far. Engaging with a broad spectrum of source material and comparing the experiences of the UK, the USA, France and Germany as well as exploring more global trends, Consuming History offers an essential path through the debates for readers interested in history, cultural studies and the media.
Author: Gary Cross Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 9780195348132 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
The twentieth century was, by any reckoning, the age of the child in America. Today, we pay homage at the altar of childhood, heaping endless goods on the young, reveling in memories of a more innocent time, and finding solace in the softly backlit memories of our earliest years. We are, the proclamation goes, just big kids at heart. And, accordingly, we delight in prolonging and inflating the childhood experiences of our offspring. In images of the naughty but nice Buster Brown and the coquettish but sweet Shirley Temple, Americans at mid-century offered up a fantastic world of treats, toys, and stories, creating a new image of the child as "cute." Holidays such as Christmas and Halloween became blockbuster affairs, vehicles to fuel the bedazzled and wondrous innocence of the adorable child. All this, Gary Cross illustrates, reflected the preoccupations of a more gentle and affluent culture, but it also served to liberate adults from their rational and often tedious worlds of work and responsibility. But trouble soon entered paradise. The "cute" turned into "cool" as children, following their parental example, embraced the gift of fantasy and unrestrained desire to rebel against the saccharine excesses of wondrous innocence in deliberate pursuit of the anti-cute. Movies, comic books, and video games beckoned to children with the allures of an often violent, sexualized, and increasingly harsh worldview. Unwitting and resistant accomplices to this commercial transformation of childhood, adults sought-over and over again, in repeated and predictable cycles-to rein in these threats in a largely futile jeremiad to preserve the old order. Thus, the cute child-deliberately manufactured and cultivated--has ironically fostered a profoundly troubled ambivalence toward youth and child rearing today. Expertly weaving his way through the cultural artifacts, commercial currents, and parenting anxieties of the previous century, Gary Cross offers a vibrant and entirely fresh portrait of the forces that have defined American childhood.
Author: Tobias Becker Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 067425175X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
Nostalgia, supposedly, is the sphere of the sentimentalist. But also, and most definitely, it is a force in the creation of the present and future and thus worth careful thought. Yesterday argues that nostalgia's critics defend an idea of progress as naïve as the longing they denounce, while conflating nostalgia itself with historical whitewashing.
Author: John M. Jordan Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271098449 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
The meteoric rise of online video is reshaping the competition for human attention. The Rise of the Algorithms argues that this new technology has changed the way we interact with others, our relationships with public institutions, and our very own behaviors and psyches. In tracing the origins and evolution of online video, John M. Jordan examines the mechanics—and the ethical stakes—of online video platforms, especially YouTube and TikTok but also others, such as Twitch. Tracing the use of algorithms pioneered by Facebook and Google and so successfully exploited by TikTok’s corporate parent, ByteDance, Jordan shows how these platforms now engineer human behavior—with consequences for culture, politics, and identity. Jordan argues that we are at an inflection point. Until now we have proved, as a society, ill-prepared or unwilling to address such problems as the power of digital platforms, the personal cost of viral celebrity, the invasion of privacy, and the proliferation of disinformation. The Rise of the Algorithms combines this urgent assessment with a clear-eyed discussion of present challenges and recommendations for reclaiming our online futures. A valuable resource for understanding the transformations that have been and will be brought by YouTube, TikTok, and similar platforms, Jordan’s timely book is a vital work for anyone who uses the internet and especially for policy makers, technologists, communication and media specialists, and researchers who have a direct hand in determining the future of our online world.
Author: Christopher W. Anderson Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 1666915653 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 245
Book Description
This book explores the history of church camps and retreat centers to show how environmental stewardship became the dominant paradigm for Protestant environmentalism, why that is a flawed and fractious model, and why it has stalled.
Author: Gary Cross
Author: Clay Routledge
Author: Ryan Lizardi
Author: Michael Hviid Jacobsen
Author: Niklas Salmose
Author: Jerome de Groot
Author: Gary Cross
Author: Tobias Becker
Author: John M. Jordan
Author: Christopher W. Anderson