Technostalgia

Technostalgia = yearning (nostalgia) for an earlier state of technology and the ontology/epistemology (ways of feeling and being) that it represented.

Description

The following quote illustrates the concept:

From the Ghost in the Wire blog at http://ghostinthewire.org/archives/2006/01/technostalgia.php

"technostalgia, in which thinkers bemoan the present technological moment precisely because its presence cannot measure up to the tortured univocality their theorizing demands of it and look to a technological predecessor as a means of reestablishing their selves, their world, and their politics.i I use the term technostalgia here not to describe something as simple as a yearning for the past, but rather a particular formation in which a comfort with already established media ecologies becomes wedded to certain ways of thinking subjectivity and spirituality in such a way that newer and shifting media ecologies come to constitute the “outside" of that comfort zone...

[T]he theme of technostalgia finds its analogs in a number of media scholars who continue to align themselves with particular ontological precepts. Simply by way of a hypothetical, and knowing full well that a more sustained and critical reading would be required before being able to conclude anything, let me very briefly offer two potential examples: Harold Innis and Neil Postman. Innis famously remarked that his “bias is with the oral tradition, particularly as reflected in Greek civilization, and with the necessity of recapturing something of its spirit." He spoke of balancing particular media environments, but he was pretty explicit about where the spiritual center of culture found its historical grounding. Like Heidegger, Greek orality was idealized as a community and an ecology in which everything had its place. It might be worth charting how significant the spiritualist rhetoric was in Innis' explication of Greek society. A similar trajectory can be traced in Neil Postman, prominent media ecologist and thinker of technology, who has argued for returning to the thoughts of those unafflicted by nearly every modern medium: the political philosophers of the eighteenth century. Like Heidegger, Postman exhibits similar fascination in the near-prophetic power of the era’s poetry and appreciation for our “place" in the world, and while happier about the airplane, Postman nevertheless reverts to spiritual dicta, fearing that the modern age has lost its ability to dream, and yearning for a quasi-religious transcendence through which to ground human existence. Echoing Heidegger’s hope and terminology, Postman elsewhere contends that unlike the calculative reason of the twentieth century sociologist, the novelist of preceding centuries “proceeds by showing." As I noted earlier, the epideictic potential of showing offers us hope, but it will require significant theoretical and practical articulation. A less charitable reading of Postman finds a scholar who believes we will simply, through sheer dint of will, return to the age of showing, and all might yet be made aright, if – and this is a big if – we can just hold onto that past strongly enough.vii This avid humanism (and we could group Innis in with Postman here) no doubt has laudable qualities, but it also flies in the face of humanities research and thinking since the 60s, and requires a belief in a subject somehow unique and ontologically distinct from the media ecologies that form it. The critical task of this essay offers a different way of responding to and thinking about how our media continue, in McLuhan's words, to work us over completely." (http://ghostinthewire.org/archives/2006/01/technostalgia.php)

More Information

Also see "Technostalgia and the Animated GIF" from Swarming Media (http://www.swarmingmedia.com/2006/10/technostalgia_and_the_animated.html)