You are then, this is now: nostalgia, technology and consumer identity at CES 2007

Abstract

As the 40th anniversary of the Consumer Electronics Show, CES 2007 provides ample evidence of the contradictory impulses of nostalgic longing and technological advancement. As an application of the swarm methodology, this essay examines the use of nostalgia as a means of positioning new technologies as shown through CES 2007. Moreover, I look at the ways that both consumers of these technologies and the objects themselves are products of and subject to both public and private nostalgia. In the process, I discuss the possible cognitive basis for nostalgia, the evolutionary theory of technological advancement and the means through which consumer identities are formed and re-formed through their interactions with a technology's intermingling past, present and future.

Keywords:

• nostalgia
• history of technology
• cognitive psychology
• marketing
• technological innovation
• user analysis
• media studies

Notes

1. The price for space at CES is $40 per square foot for non-CEA members and $35 per square foot for CEA members. To put this number in perspective, Microsoft had 15,000+ square feet alone of tents, totaling $600,000 for the event, a small sum for them, but a figure almost impossible for any smaller companies to match. This figure also does not include the cost of the booths themselves, which often run into the millions to produce.

2. Founded in 1919 as a unified entity, the RCA trademark has since been split and is now owned by a series of conglomerates. The consumer electronics division, whose products were on display at CES 2007, was purchased by Audiovox from Thomson SA in 2006 and includes RCA-branded televisions, camcorders, mp3 players and telephones (Forbes, 2006).

3. This was one of the rare instances at CES 2007 where a woman was given a powerful role. Most were cast as ‘booth babes’, erotically-clad models whose sole job at CES was to attract men to the booths.

4. This assertion, however, is with its exceptions. Traumatic events, such as an illness or a divorce, I feel, have a tendency to force upon us a hastened view of our nostalgic past, as a return to the seeming ‘innocence’ of a pre-trauma event seems impossible given present situations.

5. Like Eco, many theorists decree nostalgia as inauthentic experience. Susan Stewart, for instance, calls nostalgia a ‘social disease’, a ‘repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition and denies the repetitions capacity to form identity’ (1993, p. 23), while Frederic Jameson refers to it as a ‘pathos’ sprung from an ahistorical present (1991, p. 156).

6. In a study on television advertising, Unger, McConocha and Faier (1991) found that most nostalgic references in ads were related to food and beverages. Holbrook (1993) found that both music and film served as good indicators of a subject's nostalgia proneness, a psychographic indicator. Relatedly, Schindler and Holbrook (2003) found that consumer preferences for automobile styles is also often a reflection of their nostalgia proneness.