One of my topics for phase #1 is nostalgia. I want to pursue this topic mainly because it comes from personal experience and feelings. Often when I look back to my memories I’m being filled with nostalgia in this bittersweet moment. It is not that I want to relive the moment or change it, it’s just the fact that I want to appreciate what I had. I know people often reminisce about “the good old days” but I think nostalgia is more than that for me. Nostalgia for me is like re-reading a really good book - you can never re-read it like when you opened it for the first time. You desperately want to hold on to that moment, that feeling, and you cling to it like a man on a sinking ship. Trying to piece together what is left of your memories so you can relive this moment and this feeling even for the few seconds it lasts.
Because the topic is so personal I am very interested in where it will take me. I expect a lot of articles that I will read will be more about the coming popularity of the target marketing of nostalgia. It will be interesting if it really will be like that.
The research questions I intend to answer are mainly about how we as humans view nostalgia. I want to see what is the point of nostalgia and how it constructs us as humans.
While reading about nostalgia and media nostalgia in specific, I have realized how weaved in society is nostalgia. Especially nowadays because of all the rapid development of not only technology but also societal morals, rules, and ideas, nostalgia has become our coping mechanism. From a psychological point of view, our brains can take only so much high-speed change before they need time to analyze and adapt to those changes. And because we don’t give our minds a break they search for other ways to cope with change - nostalgia.
By going back time and time again to the “good old times” we don’t necessarily crave what has been before but we long for the simplicity of it. We long for the times when people weren’t forced to get used to changes so fast and without a breather.
Because of those reasons, I think nostalgia as a topic would have much potential to be developed. It is an ongoing societal problem (especially with the boom of retro-anything) and it should be pointed out. A lot of marketing is now targeting older generation people so the product can gain bigger popularity, but I want to explore further why people have started doing that. Do the producers use this coping mechanism as a way to help society, or do they have other motivations? If this topic is chosen this is something I would wish to research further.