Nostalgia, Technology and the Home

During the first season finale of AMC's hit television series, Mad Men, Don Draper makes an emotional pitch to Kodak on the domestic benefits of their latest invention, The Kodak Wheel – a simple, circular device that allows photography enthusiasts to seamlessly organize and showcase their photographic slides. As Kodak's first attempt at creating a photographic projector, the Wheel undoubtedly represents a technological milestone. However, while the executives at Kodak remain committed to the Wheel's technological and commercial value, its advertising potential is far from convincing. Containing none of the technological flash or enticing novelty that attracts consumers, the “archaic” nature of the projector (one of the executives comments that “the wheel is one of man's oldest inventions”) introduces the problem of how to advertise a product that appears to have been around forever. Unperturbed by the Wheel's lack of aesthetic flash, Draper insists that the projector's dependence on an old technology is irrelevant. Advertising, Draper claims, is undeniably predicated on the lure of the new. Yet this is only one side of advertising's arsenal of seduction; advertising also works to create deeper bonds with the emotional life of the consumer, to draw on the consumer's feelings of homely comfort and warmth. Yes, the wheel may be an old technology, but framed in a particular way, the old can easily become seductive, especially when it spurs the desire to go back in time, to emotionally reconnect with some long-lost place or memory.