In early March, I scoured the internet for a reliable penpal website. Those two words next to one another almost sound like an oxymoron, a little too contradictory. Penpal invokes a feeling reminiscing, that of actual tangible letters from the past, while a website is the direct product of the online future. That feeling of reminiscing is what overtook me when I received a letter in the mail from one of my close friends. She had sent the letter out of the blue, not for any specific reason or to relay any needed information, yet opening and reading its few sentences felt more sentimental than any paragraph by text or email I could have received. 

The nostalgia I felt by having her letter in my hands is not the only instance where I have experienced such emotion. I’ve found that it’s a feeling present when doing things like looking through my parents’ old photographs or their clothing from when they were young or even going through the records stacked on top of each other in my basement. These tasks all entail looking at the persevered evidence of a time I was not a part of, my parents’ past life. The evidence of their prior lives is tangible, and I feel like I’m able to re-experience it through the boxes of clothes, the tethered records, photographs, dated yearbooks, and other items they have saved. For many young people now, I believe that looking at old objects like these causes enjoyment because it is contradictory to our lives now. 

I fear that I cannot preserve the remnants of my childhood through “real” things as well as my parents did. I complete all of my schoolwork and creative work using online platforms. Pictures and videos I take of friends and family daily are saved to my phone and computer, which could be lost with an easy hard drive wipe. My music collection is entirely online, and although music has been well preserved for decades, something electronically saved never truly feels like mine.

These feelings and fears that I could lose all memories of early life at the destruction of a device, seem to be prevalent in many other teens today. Through many aspects of life, we seem to want to continue or revitalize the old ways of generations before us. The first I can remember of these revitalizations was the popularization of new record players advertised to a younger teen population during the early 2010s. I remember my parents’ confusion seeing that they were once again popular items online for teenage Christmas lists, even though iPods and iPhones had digitized the music scene by then. Many large retailers continue to fill this demand and sell many record players in colors such as teal and pink, which are no longer uncommon items among the rooms of teenagers. More recently, another product, disposable cameras, have become increasingly popular. Brands like QuickSnap and Kodak are the primary producers of these limited use film cameras that help to encapsulate a moment without the use of a phone camera. Celebrities like David Dobrik and others have even aided in this movement by popularising separate Instagram accounts strictly for disposable camera photos.  

As for my personal experience, in late March after a few weeks of communicating online through a penpal website, I reached out to a new friend living across the country using a letter. Being able to talk to someone using a method that can’t fade away or be deleted filled me with great satisfaction and joy, and I continue to look forward to responses back. I’m also a user of disposable cameras and find the greatest fulfillment in receiving the printed photos and hanging them in my bedroom. The “realness” of keeping the printed photos makes me excited that they’ll be with me forever. It’s this authentic feeling that is rarely felt with technologies today that seems to pull me and other teenagers back to the past of other generations.