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.