Nostalgia's Privilege

Everyone gets nostalgic sometimes.  I know that I get nostalgic when I think about having dinner with Grandma every Friday night when I was a kid.  She made the best spaghetti, and after we ate dinner, we would always watch Cops and then nick@night.  Thinking about those nights with her always give me this little pang in my heart area; they are happy memories, but they carry the bite of something I cannot return to.

On the other hand, I know now that dinners with Grandma carried a risk I wasn't aware of.  Namely, radium poisoning.  See, my grandmother was one of the many women in Ottawa, IL, to work at the Radium Dial Company or Luminous Processes painting radium dials.  Though not my grandmother's fault, her body was inundated with radiation, which spread to her clothes, her bedding, her home, her family... See the problem?

But nostalgia isn't about the complicated and messy realities of our past.  It's about "a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition;" it's about a longing to return to a past that is "often in idealized form."  On its own, there isn't anything wrong with that.  It's probably pretty normal to maintain some feeling for a part of your life that felt enduring, and in so doing became naturalized.  It is easy to forget that it wasn't all rainbows and unicorns.

The issue with nostalgia is when it gets employed as a form of evidence. Nostalgia often takes the form of argumentum ad antiquitatem, a fallacy also known as "appeal to tradition."  Nostalgia allows us to bask in the happy glow of those days of old when the grass was greener, people spoke proper English, political dialogue leading to consensus happened in coffeeshops all across the country between diverse citizens, and everybody loved each other so much that they sat down to dinner every night with no distractions to engage in enriching family conversation in which every person could be an equal participant.  Errr, um, well... that's how it was right?


Yeah, not so much.  And that's exactly the problem with nostalgia: it erases histories of privilege, difference, dissent, violence, and oppression.  

So why bring it up in this context, when we're talking about digital/virtual communication?

Sometimes just typing in the search bar can tell us a lot.

Notice how only one of those "common search terms" has a positive connotation.  In so many of the critiques of the use of communication online, writers have argued that it is some how less... less smart, less engaged, less social, less human.  Less than what, though?  What we used to have, of course!  These arguments rely on comparisons to the past, a past that is seen through the lens of nostalgia.

In a piece written for The New York Times, "The Twitter Trap," Bill Keller writes:  

The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter.

In his piece, he seems to be emphasizing that in the use of these technologies, we are losing something.  Implying, of course, that there ever was something to lose, and more, that these practices can't act as additional literacies instead of replacement ones.  Apparently, conversation via these technologies are "faux," "illusory," "reductive," and "redundant."  After all, #TwitterMakesYouStupid.  You obviously can't express complexity or intelligent thought in less than 140 characters, because obviously communicating those things that make us "essentially human" requires long form; that's how we've always done it before!  In that way, his arguments end up being pretty similar to - if thankfully more brief than - Sherry Turkle's new book, Alone Together.  

In many ways, his critique reminds me of some of the arguments presented in the debate about the use of African American Vernacular English (or ebonics) in Oakland, CA, in the 90s.  For those who don't want to comb through all those links, essentially, the schools in the area wanted to begin treating Ebonics as a language in order to improve the education of students for whom that was their primary dialect.  The idea was that through an emphasis on code switching, students would be able to better comprehend material, learn "Standard English" more effectively, and work with teachers who were trained in their dialect in order for the two dialects to be additive and complementary to the students' educational practice.  In other words, ya know, treat these students' culture with respect even though it wasn't *gasp* white.  Oh the horror!

The arguments against the attempted policy change were numerous, but most focused on assumptions that this method of communication was just plain inadequate.  Commentators often made claims (see links above) that it would hurt the kids because when they tried to go into the "real world," employers would think they were ignorant based on how they sounded.  People expressed concern that the children would appear uneducated, sound annoying, and be unable to use "proper" English.  If we let them use Ebonics, they'll never learn "proper" English! You obviously can't express complexity or intelligent thought in Ebonics, because obviously communicating those things that make us "essentially human" requires proper English; that's how we've always done it before!

Both Keller's argument and the argument against Ebonics in the school system assume that there is a traditional way of doing things (ex. long form, face-to-face communication, so-called "proper" English), that these traditions are stable, and that this traditional way is the best way.  The question neither addresses is: what did the traditions they want to cling to normalize, and at whose expense?

This is slightly easier to answer in regards to the Ebonics controversy.  Firstly, the idea of "proper" English assumes that language practices are stable.  This is patently untrue, or else British and American English wouldn't differ so greatly, and we'd all be reading The Canterbury Tales as it first appeared.  More than that, though, the assertion of a "proper" English implies one that is decidedly American, masculinist, white, and highly educated.  By emphasizing a perceived lack in regards to Ebonics, commentators reify normative ideas about what gets to count as knowledge, as well as which culturally-specific communication practices have value.  In other words, the insistence on "proper" English erases the importance of difference, as well as the context for the historical development of such difference.  What the school children in California witnessed in this debate was the public denigration, regulation, and dismissal of non-normative methods of communication; they were told, in not so many words, that their culture was stupid.  In order to access public discourse, they were told, they had to discipline their communication.

Now, the arguments against Twitter certainly don't carry the same weight of history as the racism inherent in the anti-Ebonics claims.  But the logic is functioning in similar ways.  Keller's nostalgia leads him to paint a picture of the past in which everyone spent hours a day in rapt contemplation and deep conversation, where arguments were civil and logical, and we shared "a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity."  His article boldly declares that he finds a very particular kind of communication valuable, and Twitter is not that kind because it "makes smart people look stupid."


First of all, the assumption that everyone just magically had a bunch of extra time to sit around all day reading books and pondering life's great questions is ridiculous.  The fact is that the harder information is to access, the less people are going to access it.  To assume that one's access hasn't always been tied to class, education, gender, race, or even location is to deny the underlying privilege in the assumption.  Maybe Keller or Turkle has had time to sit around memorizing books and crafting long, handwritten letters to people.  But I never have.  The erasure of class difference is astounding in how the issue of time spent gets handled.

Bill Keller

It seems to me that Keller has forgotten what he has that so many don't: he's white, he's male, he's got money, he's relatively attractive, and he's in a heterosexual marriage.  He is the epitome of the normative ideal.  The community he says we're starting to lose has always been his.  The rules under which we defined rapport or intelligence or conversation or civility - all of this was crafted and maintained by a system that privileges people just like him.  He doesn't seem to realize that the rest of us have had to code switch for him all along.  That doesn't mean he shouldn't have the right to speak to his experience, but it does mean that he would stand to lose very little in our nostalgic time travel.  It's a privilege to be unreflexively nostalgic.


I don't want to fall into a fallacious appeal to novelty here, so keep in mind that I'm not saying all the changes in technology are intrinsically good just because they are new.  But clearly the threat they pose to normative ideals about communication practices is a real one.  Twitter and other social networking sites are something new, and they bring with them both the fear of change and the exciting possibility of it.  In our critique of these new practices, we have to be careful that our nostalgia doesn't blind us to a history that is rife with disagreement and inequality.  We have to remember that communication practices change over time, that they are culturally specific, and more, that certain practices are valued more than others - often in ways that continue to silence minorities.  And maybe that is the way it's always been... but it doesn't have to be.