Remembrance and the feeling of nostalgic experience is one of the basic elements mature people use to make decisions during the day. People like to get back to the past, using tangible and intangible objects to keep their remembrance. In this paper we will focus on pictures as a trigger of nostalgic feelings. Sontag and Barthes already in the 1970's gave their feedback on the effect on remembrance of those media. Founded on their reflections we see the same effects happen while using digital photography, but stronger. Our research contains two projects, zooming in on these effects of the nostalgic experience. Project 1 (The Digital Polaroid) gives a reaction on the way behaviour has changed with digital photography, project 2 (The Digital Shoebox) investigates the way people store their pictures. In the end we think Sontag was right in her statement Photography has caused a cultural change. In Digital Photography the change is even worse. The way people make and conserve their digital photos has strongly changed. Next to that, people use digital photography to lookup memories, but the factual data pictures provide can cause a change in nostalgic experience.

"New Media Kills Nostalgia" is the title of a research paper of Klaas Jan Mollema and Willem van Vliet about the effects of new media on the creation of memories and the feeling of nostalgia. The research is part of the graduation procedure of the Master of Media Technology at the University of Leiden.

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The graduation presentation will be on the 29th of august 2008 at 11.20h in Leiden, Niels Bohrweg 1 - SNELLIUS Building. Room 413. If you want to attend the presentation, we will ask you to be in front of the room around 11.10h.

The digital polaroid
The digital shoebox

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