The Web and Collective Memory

I doubt I’m the first person to write about this, but: it’s incredible what the World Wide Web has done for our childhood memories. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about the Oversoul, about the existence of a collective unconscious; well, the Web is the home of our collective unconscious pop culture remembrances. You won’t find a site devoted to your childhood dog, or your fourth birthday party, or your sixth grade math teacher; but if you played with a toy, or watched a TV show, or had a particular lunch box, it’s catalogued somewhere on the Web. Stumble across one page, and the memories can come rushing back.

This used to happen at late-night sleepover parties or on long bus trips, or late at night in college dorm rooms. A bunch of people would be sitting around, bored, and someone would say, “Hey, remember that old TV show with…” or, “Did you ever have that toy that used to…” and then the conversation would take off like a rocket, and for the next hour, people would be coming up with long-lost TV shows or videogames and humming theme songs and whatnot.

This is a very modern phenomenon — I can’t picture a bunch of 18th-century adults sitting around and having a collective nostalgiafest, because they didn’t have any collective nostalgia, did they? Maybe they could talk about what it was like to milk a cow, or they could reminisce about the smell of burning leaves in autumn; but it’s really the rise of mass culture that has allowed adults to get together and commune over thousands of old memories.

And it’s so weird to be able to do that. Sometimes those old memories seem so private, so uniquely yours, that you wonder if they’re real: that red electronic toy called Merlin, or the arcade game Gauntlet, or child stars Alisdair, Lisa Ruddy, and Christine (a.k.a “Moose”) from You Can’t Do That on Television. Am I the only person who remembers these things?

And then you stumble across a website called Yesterdayland, and you realize that there are other people with exactly the same memories — and they even remember some things you’d completely forgotten about. It’s all out there:

— Merlin and Simon, two primitive electronic toys I remember from the early 80’s.

— the Frog family, who lived in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood before the Platypus family and their platypus mound replaced them.

– the phrases “Elf shot the food!” and “Valkyrie is about to die…” from the arcade game Gauntlet.

– the way the Bloodhound Gang used to answer the phone on 3-2-1 Contact: “Whenever there’s trouble we’re there on the double, Mr. Bloodhound isn’t here.” (It was that last part I’d forgotten about.)

– Wacky Pack stickers.

– “The Flintstones Comedy Hour,” which included the Shmoo, Captain Caveman (his alter ego was Chester, the newsboy at the Daily Granite), and a prehistoric version of the Munsters.

They’re not just dreams. They’re real. It all really happened. And it’s all at Yesterdayland.

Here are lots of ratings. Ratings of everything from the movie “Traffic,” to state quarters, to Fisher Price Little People, to Israeli snack foods, to the Legion of Doom, to marsupials. They’re all by L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg. I’m not sure who L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg is, but he or she is pretty entertaining. There’s supposed to be an umlaut over the “o” in Sjoberg, but I don’t particularly want to figure out how to make an umlaut right now. Unless it’s a cheese umlaut, because I’m hungry, and I feel like some eggs.

The Lox

Sometimes, when I’m at my parents’ house, our 14-year-old dog will just lie there on the ground, sleeping. My parents like to say that she’s lying there “like a lox.” That’s right — like a piece of smoked salmon. I have no idea where the expression comes from, but it seems to work, and that’s sort of how I feel today. Like a lox.

Last night I was online chatting with someone until about 2:45 in the morning. It wasn’t supposed to be that long — we began chatting at 11:00 at night and the hours just went by. In the meantime, my upstairs neighbor — who I think is about 20 and is an asshole — came home late at night with two of his female friends and I could hear them talking and laughing and watching TV and playing a videogame or something. The walls and ceilings in my building are shoddily constructed. They barely block out noise. Really sucks. I’ve talked to him before about the noise, but he just doesn’t care. I’ll have to put on some Clintonian smooth moves or something, make him want to turn down the noise because he likes me so much.

At any rate, after finishing the chat I was exhausted and wanted to go to bed, but I couldn’t because of the noise. Finally, I found my earplugs, plugged them into my ears, tuned my radio to static, and managed to fall asleep around 4.

At 9 I woke up, called in to work and said I wasn’t feeling well and would be in late… I slept until noon, got to work around 1. Today at work we were having a multicultural pot luck lunch or something, so I stuffed myself with food. Now it’s 3:30 in the afternoon, I have a legal memo I’m supposed to turn in on Friday that I’m way behind on, and what have I been doing? Writing e-mail, talking with people, and now I’m blogging. I just have a mental block on this particular memo — I can’t seem to concentrate on it. It’s actually no great tragedy if I don’t finish it on Friday, except that I’ve had so much time to work on it and it will seem odd if I don’t turn it in by then.

If I had my way, I would spend my day surfing the Internet, reading about the news, writing, blogging, reading blogs, reading books.