Haven’t We Seen This Before?
LOL, did you see Carson Daly on “TRL”? Welcome back to 2003.
“Nostalgia is a huge deal at the moment,” Katie Smith, a senior analyst at Edited, a company that tracks analytics for brands and retailers, told The Times. It’s especially big among millennials.
It wasn’t, however, enough to save AOL Instant Messenger. The parent company of AIM, as it was known, recently announced it will erase all its user’s screen names and buddy lists on December 15.
Released in 1997, Instant Messenger became a social center for teenagers, “the scene of deeply resonant memories and the place where people learned how to interact online,” The Times’s Daniel Victor wrote.
Caroline Moss, a 29-year- old writer in New York behind the parody Twitter account @YourAwayMessage, said AIM’s popularity changed the ways millennials interacted.
“There are a lot of people who had milestone moments in their lives that happened on AIM,” said Ms. Moss, alias sparklegurl27 on AIM. “Someone asked them out, or they got broken up with, or they got in a fight with a friend.”
In a world of text messages, Snapchat and social media, awkward adolescents no longer need AIM. But the company may have staved off extinction if it had cashed in on another millennial obsession: cartoons. SpongeBob Squarepants emoji might have ridden in to save the day.
The fashion world has adopted cartoon characters, The Times reported. Nothing says well-adjusted adult like Bart Simpson, Mickey Mouse, The Powerpuff Girls or SpongeBob emblazoned on a shirt.
Sales of these items are growing. The number of clothing items and accessories related to Disney sold online rose 150 percent in the past two years. Sales of emoji paraphernalia are up 502 percent. But it could cost you; a gold, diamond and ruby kissy-face pendant from Alison Lou goes for $9,680.
To be fashion forward, millennials are looking back.
“In the stories these products evoke, there is an escapism that’s reassuring,” Ms. Smith said. “The characters go through tough experiences but always come back to a good place.”
Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, told The Times that the feelings evoked by AIM and cartoon characters are reassuring. “Nostalgia helps keep you connected in terms of your self-identity,” she said. “It connects you to your own past through the continuity of self.”
Trying to recapture its own long-forgotten relevance, MTV is reaching back in time to revive “Total Request Live.” Starting in 1998, the countdown show was a millennial tastemaker that beamed music videos and thousands of screaming teenagers into American homes.
“When you talk to artists and they say to you, unaware of what we’re doing, ‘Can you bring back ‘TRL’?’ We’d be crazy not to reinvent that,” Chris McCarthy, the president of MTV, told The Times. “MTV’s reinvention is coming by harnessing its heritage.”
But for many, including The Times’s Jon Caramanica, the show might have been better off dead. “The fact that the Internet has leached attention and relevance away from television is only part of what’s befuddling this show,” he wrote. “It is preoccupied with viral moments but creates none of its own, or barely anything even worth a GIF.”
In some cases, the things we are nostalgic for should stay where they came from: the past.