College students hitting nostalgic peak, prof. says

‘Rocko’s Modern Life’ isn’t quite so modern anymore, but students in their late teens and early 20s find themselves bringing up the good old days of Nickelodeon cartoons and ‘spicing up’ their lives with the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys. College students’ nostalgia for the films, music and television they grew up with is not just a passing trend; it’s natural human behavior. College students are typically at the age when nostalgic preferences peak, Columbia Business School marketing professor Morris Holbrook, who studies consumer nostalgia, said. In several studies and analyses during his career, Holbrook and colleague Robert Schindler, a Rutgers School of Business professor, have found common phenomena related to nostalgia. A plot of an individual’s nostalgic preferences takes on an ‘inverted U shape,’ typically peaking somewhere in late adolescence and early adulthood, Holbrook said. ‘What this means is that people form preferences for things that were popular in culture when they were roughly 20 years old or so,’ Holbrook said. ‘They carry these preferences for the rest of their lives.’ Individuals vary, so their nostalgic peak might come several years earlier or later, Holbrook said. ‘Nostalgia has nothing to do with being old,’ Holbrook said. ‘Young people are just as nostalgic as older people. It’s a phenomenon very much spread across different age groups.’ The Allston art exhibit ‘Spin’ uses vinyl records and cassette tapes to create pieces of art in hopes of drawing attention to the way technology has changed the way people consume music, Liz Comperchio, co-founder of Glovebox, the nonprofit organization hosting the show, said. ‘For the Glovebox artists, the use of the vinyl records and cassette tapes was a nostalgic throwback to the past,’ Comperchio said. ‘Some explored the medium as a new use for an old, useless object.’ Boston University School of Management sophomore Christina Rodriguez said her nostalgia for old television shows is a result of her distaste for today’s popular shows. However, she and her friends reminisce about old songs because of the memories attached to them, Rodriguez said. ‘I think that we tend to reminisce about our best memories,’ Rodriguez said. In the future, Rodriguez might reminisce about the things she does now and the things she did as a child she said. College of Communication senior Ryan Dreyer said he and his fellow hip-hop artists always talk about the classics in music that were on cassette tapes and vinyl. ‘Rap, like anything else, is cyclical, and, right now, we feel it’s in the Dark Age, and we’re trying to bring it back to life,’ Dreyer said. ‘That’s why we reminisce.’