This post is part of an ongoing narrative about how media affects our interactions with food and also reveals a glimpse of my nostalgia for old media.
In his introduction to The New Media Reader, Manovich (2003) asserts that the human-computer interface “comes to act as a new form through which all older forms of cultural production are being mediated” (p. 16).
His statement came to mind recently as I perused the vintage recipe website Hey, My Mom Used to Make That! The site showcases recipes from advertisements dating back to the 1910s. Some recipes look scrumptious, some look repulsive, but all of them take us back in time. Images of the original ads accompany each recipe, and era-appropriate photographs add even more to the site’s nostalgic ambience.
As I think back to life before the Internet (yes, I lived it), I realize that new media is like a time machine at our fingertips. How else could we so easily find old magazine recipe ads from pre-digital eras so we can enjoy a stroll down memory lane? I sure don’t have a vintage ad recipe collection of my own, but the human-computer interface allows me to enjoy the fact that someone out there does and has taken the time to digitize it so we can peer into the past.
Sometimes the convergence of old and new lets us bring the old more sharply into focus, and that can be a wonderful thing.
References:
Manovich, L. (2003). New media from Borges to HTML. In N. Wardrip-Fruin & N. Montfort (Eds.), The new media reader (pp. 13-25). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Newmergence Nosh 