Mediated Nostalgia: touching the past in Reply 1994

ABSTRACT ‘Mediated Nostalgia: Touching the Past in Reply 1994’ argues that the aesthetic and thematic treatment of television technology in the nostalgic 2013 South Korean television drama Reply 1994 puts viewers productively in ‘touch’ with the past. The high definition aesthetics of the 2013 series and the low definition image of 1990s television and other domestic media featured in Reply 1994 produce viewing modes that oscillate between closeness and distance. While watching, the viewer enters a sensory dialogue with the medium of television in its dual guise as a cathode ray tube monitor and flat screen. The sensory interaction with memories of the recent past that materialize in her present disturbs the linearity of cosmological time with the time of mediated phenomenological experience. This nostalgic dialogue is not a trivial consumption of meaningless images but a powerful interaction with the past which produces a new version of history about politics and about media. By putting analogue and digital television images in dialogue, Reply 1994 gestures toward a new narrative of the media archaeology of convergence culture and a new mode of understanding contemporary South Korean history.