technically nostalgic

At this point, it’s has become a running gag in our family, my alleged first encounter with (digital) media.
In our living room, we had a huge cabinet, that was filled with all sorts of things: books, picture frames, souvenirs, toys, – some sort of modern cabinet of wonders, I thought the other day.
Early on, a TV also became part of said cabinet, embedded in this wall of somewhat random, but identifying objects my parents assembled and displayed in our living room over the years. The TV was very small, a tube television, probably as deep as wide and thus merged quite unobtrusively with the rest of the cabinet. With my parents being rather strict with my exposure to the TV, I only ever saw the thing turned off, a small black box, that didn’t catch my attention really.
It was only when my grandparents were visiting after they had attended the wedding of some other family members and had brought a video recording of the event with them, that I saw the TV in action for the first time.
In the recording, people are walking in and out of the picture frame, but with the TV in our cabinet being placed between all sorts of other things, my childish brain – I must have been around 3 years old by the time – could not comprehend where these little figures on the screen came from, and where they were going. That’s why I, apparently quite indignantly and bewildered, said: ,,The people are walking right into my books!” – which caused quite the amusement.
This phrase then somehow became very iconic and often quoted in our family until this day, which I guess makes sense, since it bears, especially from the adult’s perspective, both a very comedic and innocent notion.

I believe we also like to recall this moment of my childhood because it captures quite well the extent, media and technology had on our lives “back then”. Mind you, who reads this, I am only 22 years old, so this episode probably took place around the year 2006, the digital revolution had happened, the world wide web had been developed already and people owned cell phones and myspace profiles.
However, we like to think back of these times, 20 years ago, with a very nostalgic sentiment.
Almost proudly I can share that later on (after the wedding recording), my next encounters with media where video tapes that we would buy on the flea market or borrow from the library to watch ,,Pippi Langstrumpf”. I can still recall the physical sensations of manually rewinding the tape, by turning your finger around in this small slot.
Just the other day I saw someone posting a reel on Instagram, showing how they bought a tube TV and all seasons of Gilmore Girls on tape, cause they were ,,craving physical media”.

And it’s a quite common phenomenon, this more or less recent nostalgic turn to outdated media, sometimes just in line with aesthetic developments, like vintage filters or cameras, sometimes more serious, like the refusal to own a smartphone.
This ,,pride” to be born just before digital media truly trickled down in every aspects of life, not being an ,,iPad kid” and rolling your eyes at parents who actually hand their kids a tablet in the restaurant is a very common attitude in my generation.

What is also captured in this simple phrase of 3 year old me, is this ,,myth” that surrounds technology we are unfamiliar with. I could have only said this sentence because by the time, I didn’t know better, had never come across a video recording before and associated what I saw with what I knew from the ,,real world”. Back then, it was my parents and grandparents laughing, today it is me who sometimes has to hold it in while I explain my grandpa for the third time how to take a ,,screenshot” on his smartphone.
It seems like, however, what used to be a mesmerizing mystery and source of curiosity in the early 2000s, has turned into frustration, up until to rejection of contemporary technological advances.
What difference does it make, could one ask, whether I watch my favourite show on my tablet or a tube TV, store my memories in my iPhones camera role or in a paperback photo album in my parent’s cabinet of wonders or scan a QR code instead of being handed a greasy menu card?
I think sometimes that it is not so much the actual media from our past, but our associations we attach to them. Maybe they trigger our memories of the time we were children, were things were ,,simple” and ,,alright”, were we didn’t see the news cause it was past our bedtime and our brains weren’t overstimulated because the average image rate in the children series we watched was ten times less then an average YouTube video today.
In my opinion, it is not so much ,,everything was better back in the days”, but everything was different – naturally.