The past several years in popular culture has been marked with an increased demand and popularity in nostalgic content (reunion tours, fashion trends, TV and movie reboots). This article seeks to explore the area in which the device paradigm and personal nostalgia intersect. Using Rushkoff’s (2013) theory of digiphrenia, I will discuss how nostalgia gives society a way to ignore the perils of the temporal moment and instead provides a way to avoid engaging with the liquidity of fear or uncertainty of each day. However, engaging with this nostalgic content does not force individuals to unplug from the omnipresent “global village,” thereby, allowing this wave of popular culture nostalgia to fill a gap in what Borgmann (1984) calls the device paradigm. This framework allows adults to remember and even enter a time in their lives in which they had rituals, community and phenomenological experiences which Arendt (1993) claims have been lost.
Key words: nostalgia, pop culture, device paradigm, digiphrenia
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