This episode originally aired on Sept. 21, 2026.
Whether its vinyl records, cassette tapes, VHS’ or Polaroid cameras, various analog legacy media have been making a comeback in the digital age.
On this edition of All Sides, we’re talking about why people are seeking out legacy media, how our analog memories are being preserved and the psychological benefits of nostalgia.
Guests:
- Annie Nickoloff, senior editor, Cleveland Magazine
- Dan Smith, owner, Familyography
- Scott Freshour, owner, Stereo Lab
- Krystine Batcho, professor of psychology, LeMoyne College
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to All Sides with Amy Juravich. We live in a world where everything is streamed, synced, and digitized, but a growing number of people are looking for relief from the relentless digital world. They are unplugging and picking up some legacy media at the same time. People are hunting thrift stores for film cameras or just buying new cameras that are not digital at all. And add to that a love of vinyl records and the fun of Polaroid cameras, and you may find yourself wondering. What decade we're in. Recently, Cleveland Magazine produced a piece featuring the growing analog movement. And we are joined now by Annie Nickoloff, senior editor at Cleveland Magazine. Welcome to All Sides, Annie. Thank you so much. So happy to be here. All right, so what sparked your interest in investigating analog forms of media? How'd you get started on this?
Annie Nickoloff: Yeah, personally, I'm a big vinyl record collector. I live in a very analog media household. We collect board games, books, records, cassettes. But what really sparked my interest in doing a story was seeing a resurgence in Cleveland and Akron in VHS rental stores, which just seemed very absurd and interesting to see this coming back when you really haven't seen that in the past decade or so. I remember growing up going to Blockbuster with my family and it just really evoked. A lot of nostalgia. So I was just interested in poking around on that and meeting the people who are behind these concepts and why they're sort of having a moment locally right now.
Juravich: All right, we'll talk about those video stores in just a minute. My video store in my hometown was called Instant Replay Video, so you know, same. But you cite a couple of interesting studies in your piece. I mean, tell me about how much time people are spending engrossed in the digital world versus this analog movement.
Nickoloff: Yeah, it's, screen time rates have been quite a bit up in the past several years. I know, especially on social media, I read a study where it said at the upper end, people were spending upwards of five hours a day just on social medial. I know personally, I spend a little bit too much time on Instagram and some of those sites every day. So, I just feel like there's this real connection between. Being online, feeling like maybe you've spent too much time online and looking for ways to disconnect. So I think that definitely plays a role in this whole trend that we're seeing right now.
Juravich: You wrote that it's called the Go Analog Movement, and it encourages people to put down their screens and pick up something that is not connected to the internet. But how does Go Analog become a movement without social media to push it along?
Nickoloff: That is a very fair question. But something I've noticed is these stores have real communities of customers that come in and talk to each other. I think that's one of the real draws, right? Going to a video rental store and having a human recommend something to you and talk you instead of an algorithm determining what you're gonna watch that night, so.
Juravich: Yeah, yeah. So tell me more about the Go Analog movement. I mean, who's pushing it along? Are we talking like millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, like old young? Who wants to go analog?
Nickoloff: Yeah, when I've spoken to the store owners and people involved in this, it really seems to be all ages. You've got the people who have always had, you know, the VCR player in their house or have always collected records where it's never been, you now, just this nostalgia play and you have younger people who are being pulled in. I've been to a few music festivals this year and I've seen people with digital, this little Digicam cameras instead of cell phone selfies. I've just noticed this trend away. And back to that nostalgia. But it really hit every generation from the people I've spoken with.
Juravich: So vinyl records have been popular again for a while now. I mean, you said you collect vinyl, lots of people do. Recording artists have been releasing new vinyl for years. But are we really going back to CDs and cassette tapes now? I mean really, cassettes? Yeah?
Nickoloff: You know, I wonder if they'll reach the heights that vinyl has, but there has been an uptick across all formats, at least among the people I've spoken to, just I think in collecting in general. If you look beyond some of the analog media, I did a story earlier this year about Pokemon cards and how those are having a big resurgence now. I think people are just really into collecting things and I think media falls really neatly into that.
Juravich: Yeah, you also give a shameless plug saying that go analog people can read the print edition of Cleveland magazine. So what does that mean to you to hold a physical magazine?
Nickoloff: I think it's tactile. I think you interact with a story differently when it's on a page compared to when you're scrolling on a screen. I think is very easy to get distracted. Check your email, check your notifications. And I think when you sit down with a piece, you can really be absorbed in it. At Cleveland Magazine, we do a lot of long form journalism. It's something that we pride ourselves on. And I, I think having a print magazine is the best way to really engage with what that reporter had worked on.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about the resurgence of legacy media with Annie Nicoloff, senior editor at Cleveland Magazine. I guess for this show's purposes, our version of Go Analog is people who are actually listening on the radio instead of streaming from our website or listening to the All S sides podcast. So a special shout out to all my radio listeners listening on an actual radio right now. You are very on trend. I mean, did you did you cover that at all of like, you know, there's so much streaming and podcasting versus people who listen to the radio?
Nickoloff: I think streaming is, you know, difficult. I've covered this in Cleveland's music scene, too. I think supporting through non-streaming formats is a great way to support artists and shows and programs and in the area. You know, it's long been talked about how little money makes its way from streaming to an artist or to a recording project. But if you buy a vinyl record, that is a much higher rate of income that can come through that. That's something we explore a bit in this piece as well.
Juravich: Yeah, if you if you buy a ticket to an actual real life live show as opposed to just listening to it on Spotify or, you know, Apple music. Yeah. Okay, so Annie, you featured several Cleveland area businesses and these businesses are all going analog and making analog look cool. You mentioned it before. So tell me about killer video and way cool video because they're bringing back the blockbuster nostalgia. Tell me more.
Nickoloff: Yeah, two very different takes on this VHS DVD rental store. Killer Video in Akron is actually a museum that's sort of dedicated to the video rental store experience. The founder worked in Hollywood for years and has memorabilia. It's primarily horror-focused, so you'll see a lot of scary movies there. You can go through sort of an exhibit that rotates topics and themes periodically. Then you can walk in and they actually do have a rental store there too. So after experiencing that museum, you know, throwback environment, you can go and also engage that way. Really interesting that they're doing. I know he mentioned that their collection for rentals actually surpasses some of what's available on Netflix and leading poor rental sites. So that's, that's pretty interesting, right? And at WayCool video, it's a little bit different. It's, she was more inspired by the corner rental store experience. So more of those block by block movie rental stores that used to exist, that you could ride your bike to rent a movie, ride your back home. And so a little of a smaller operation there. It's actually in the back of Lakewood's, Lakewood Art Supply, which the owner also operates. And she's really amassing quite a collection there as well. I think she just started with video game rentals there so people in the neighborhood can come, they can enjoy the whole selection to take home. I think she's also doing movie nights there, which sounds like a ton of fun to come and meet your neighbors and experience a little bit of that retro retro fun.
Juravich: So for the video rental, are you talking about video tapes or are you're talking about DVDs?
Nickoloff: A mix of both, at both locations. I know, way cool video, you also get a laminated membership card, which I feel adds to these.
Juravich: Yeah, yeah, okay. Do you do they rent VCRs or do you have to have one?
Nickoloff: Way cool video does. You can rent that DVD if you don't have one. It's all pretty low cost too, so they make that possible.
Juravich: Okay. Okay. I mean, did you look at the call? I didn't, I didn, I didn't see this in your story. I mean, how much does it cost to rent a video?
Nickoloff: I think it's $2 or $3, and then to get a VCR player, it's eight dollars, I think, for a few days. So yeah, and that's the tricky thing, right? Finding a VC player that works in 2026 can be a little bit difficult, and if you have one that's broken, how do you fix it, right, these are difficult questions, but for those who have the technology, I think they really enjoy it.
Juravich: And then taking the minute to figure out how to connect it to your TV. Then there's that, too. OK, yeah. You also wrote about the love of old school video games. Are we talking about like Gameboys and old like Sega systems? Like, what are you talking about?
Nickoloff: Yeah, yeah, so I spoke with Media Head, which is a local video game store here in Cleveland. And he has pretty much everything from, you know, the earliest home video game console releases up to the new releases. But I think what was interesting is he had some of these old school video games that were the highest selling products in the store. People who collect these, who enjoy playing like those sort of simple video games. There's still a lot of popularity around that. Even though... Video games have seen so much progress since those early day graphics. There's still love for that. And he just opened in November and his business has been growing steadily. It used to be the video game connection. He took over and sort of expanded what they offer there and added movies as well. But just a really cool example of other analog throwback there.
Juravich: Yeah, I mean, my son has a subscription to old school Nintendo games, but the thing that's different is, so this got my nostalgia going, was watching my son play old school Nintendo games that I played whenever I was his age, but he can pause them and start over, and like, you know, he can, pause them, and he can like all the things that I couldn't do, where you have to just like sit down and beat the game and you can't save it, he can now save it. So it's not completely how it used to be.
Nickoloff: Absolutely. Yeah, I grew up playing old Sega Sonic the Hedgehog. Yeah. You know all those old ones so
Juravich: Um, so one obvious one that you wrote about is you spoke with a photographer who teaches classes about film and even like instant film cameras. I mean, tell me about what he's teaching. That may seem more obvious for a teacher to teach people how to use film and develop film. Yeah.
Nickoloff: Yeah, so Dorian Coleman, he's the University Circle, Inc. Artist in residence, and he teaches these analog photography classes. He focuses on film, I think, because it's more tactile and because it gives people a taste of technology that they might not be familiar with. Some of his younger students he's worked with, they've never used a camera, just used an iPhone. And so it's just a real way to connect people with the format. And he especially leans on Polaroids, which how much simpler does photography get than a Polaroid camera taking a picture and printing it out into your hands and showing what photography can be and the power of a single moment, unedited, right there, that's what you get. And I think that's a really unique approach to it.
Juravich: And is he teaching like, I don't remember if he was at a school or a college. I was just wondering like what kind of clientele he has. Is it like young students in their twenties who want to learn about this? And so Max, he teaches.
Nickoloff: At schools too, but at least at University Circle, I know those are more community-oriented classes, so workshops just with the surrounding community could be any age.
Juravich: Yeah, yeah. Now, I'm old enough to say that my high school had an A.V. Club, you know, they were in charge of the rolling carts with the TVs on them that went all around the building. The A. V. Club played video games, they developed film, you, they did lots of things. You talked with someone who literally has an A V club in Cleveland. Tell me more about that.
Nickoloff: Yeah, Ladybug AV Club, I spoke with them. They collect old cathode ray tube TVs, CRT TVs, those boxy, you know, old sets that they don't buy them. They pretty much find them on curbs or acquire them, you know through people getting rid of it, fix them up and they bring them as art installations. They have them at different music videos for local bands. You can see them in the background of these old TV's sort of. Stacked up like grids. And they also do movie nights here in Lakewood at Amazonia, where they have horror movies playing on these, you know, grid TVs. And it just gives this really cool effect. I think it's really unique to see when you're at an event and you see this wall of TVs that are old school, playing something you know that they have in their collection. So just sort of a unique angle on it where they're finding this old technology and finding this modern purpose for it.
Juravich: Yeah, so it sounds like they're making it more like a display. It's kind of like whenever you were mentioning the one video store is more like a museum. So people are interested in, some people are interested in using this and some people just want to see it in action, is that right?
Nickoloff: I think so. I think he mentioned when I interviewed him that people at events where they see it, they really connect with him talking about the nostalgia around it. And he loves having those conversations with people who grew up with that technology just like he did. And yeah, I think I've searched on Facebook Marketplace to get a CRT TV in Cleveland. They are not cheap. Like these are in high demand. Oh man. People want them, they wanna make their setups for their VHS tapes. They wanna go old school. So they're a little tricky to find.
Juravich: Wow. All right. Well, everything old is new again. And we've been speaking about nostalgia and everything old becoming new again with Annie Nicoloff, senior editor at Cleveland Magazine. Thanks so much for joining us today, Annie. Thank you so much. And coming up, we're going to talk about digitizing, organizing, restoring family memories. That's when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. The thing about legacy media is that it lasts a long time, but you might not ever look at it. Think about those home movies that are on film or videotape. Do you have them on a shelf, but you can't play them? Do you boxes and boxes of old printed out photos in a closet, but not in an album, unorganized? Are they more like clutter than cherished family memories? And what about that old stereo gathering dust in a corner? Are you listening to music on your phone while what was once a great piece of equipment sits broken on a shelf taking up space? It can feel good and important to hold on to all of this stuff, but what's gonna happen to it years down the road? Well, that's where a company like Familyography comes in. They digitize, organize, and restore family memories. Joining us now is Dan Smith, owner of Familyography, which has three stores here in Ohio, including one in Columbus. Welcome to All Sides, Dan. Thank you very much. And also joining us is Scott Freshour, owner of Stereo Lab, where he and his team repair vintage audio gear. Welcome back to All Sides, Scott.
Scott Freshour: Good morning, Amy.
Juravich: All right, Dan, let's start with you. So you take printed photos and digitize them. I mean, how many photos do you do in a year?
Dan Smith: Oh, hundreds of thousands? Yeah. In fact, right now, we probably have a backlog of about 30, 40,000 photos and albums. They come in all shapes and sizes.
Juravich: So what, people bring their albums to you? They bring shoe boxes? Tell me what they do.
Smith: I like to say we do anything from one photograph to a whole lifetime of memories. Mostly this seems this year we're getting a lot more estates and people downsizing. So they're literally people coming in, maybe the kids have lived out of town, they've moved away from the family home and their parents are either downsizing or they're deceased and they have a house full of stuff and they have limited time. So they get it in boxes. Or sometimes literally get it into laundry baskets and bring it in and we can offer a way to not only digitize it but curate it for them to kind of like have an agreement where we don't scan as many landscape photographs and we focus on people, you know, and we could identify things that are important. Sometimes you'd be surprised what people stick in their photo albums and it's actually significant. We've had significant art pieces stuck in them. We've very interesting old stuff like postcards and other memorabilia, so we help them with that kind of stuff.
Juravich: And when you say you digitize it, I mean, do they end up with some sort of like jump drive or like online file? Like what's the end product?
Smith: Products. The biggest thing we do now is we have an online service, a cloud service that we offer to people. It has a lot of advantages because it's really hard to lose anything. You can't delete without being, you know, purposeful about it and it's so easy to share. If you have family members all over the place, you can share everything with everybody and they have access to it as opposed to a thumb drive or a jump drive where people often most You can't put a label on it. They can get corrupted. I mean, people don't realize that if you don't eject it properly, you know, you can corrupt the file. Or if you're shuffling your feet across a carpet and you get a little static electricity, it can corrupt a file. So we educate them as well as to what media will best serve their needs.
Juravich: And you also take videotapes, basically, and save them too, right? Do you put them on DVD, or you put them in this digital thing? No, we- Yeah.
Smith: No, we digitize them, usually to MP4 files, which is a digital file. We do film. We do everything. So just so you know, that's one advantage as to having somebody local that you can bring in everything and we can sort it out and deal with it rather than to kind of pick and choose what you want to do and some places do some things and other places do others. But we do everything
Juravich: And Scott, to bring you into the conversation, you and your team, you care for and repair vintage audio gear. You bought Stereo Lab in 2019. Why do you think people like their older audio devices that are considered outdated? Like what's the appeal? Tell me about that.
Freshour: Many times we find that an individual bought it at a point in their life where they were much younger and they remember, you know, the car, the girl, the song, and that's a huge part of what we sell. They don't want to get rid of it. But additionally, the quality compared to today's gear is really off the charts. It's good stuff, right? So you have two prongs. It is not just nostalgia, although that's a huge part of. But it's also, this is sturdy, good sounding equipment. And so that drives a lot.
Juravich: Do you get people who come to you and they don't know whether it works or not and they bring it to you and they say like, you know, figure this out for me.
Freshour: Every day.
Juravich: Are you are you sometimes surprised what people bring you where you're like you've had this and it's this is amazing. Yeah
Freshour: Once again, it's always an adventure and I mean that in a good way because we see gear that I've never seen before. We get stuff like, where did this come from? What really tickles me is when a piece comes in and it's been so well cared for, it looks like it came off the shelf that day.
Juravich: Oh, wow.
Freshour: And that's really, that's a treat when we see something like that.
Juravich: And are they bringing it to you for you to buy it and like to sell, like they want you to buy it off of them or do they want you to fix it?
Freshour: Up both, yeah. And it's about 50-50. We get a lot of calls from people wanting to sell things. We're kind of picky about that, you know. But, and a lot repairs, I mean, a lot times we'll get a piece that's 50 years old that's never been serviced. But we know how to put it back together and let you get another 50 years out of it.
Juravich: Yeah, so and we just spent the earlier part of the show talking about the resurgence of vinyl CDs and cassette tapes And I kind of I said to Annie from Cleveland magazine I was like really cassette tapes, but I bet you have Stereos that can play these cassette tapes right and they work still they do
Freshour: Cassette decks are a little bit problematic because for a period there, they were using a lot of plastic parts and they get brittle, but there were other models that will continue on and work for a very long time.
Juravich: Can you still get the parts or do you have to can you make a new plastic part?
Freshour: We're doing that too. We have two 3D printers in the back room.
Juravich: Okay. Yeah. So that makes sense. If you can't get the plastic part anymore, you can make one. All right. And then Dan, back to you. It says on your website that you pride yourself on attention to detail. I mean, tell me about that. These are people's memories. You take that seriously. Sure. I'll see. Yeah, tell me about your attention to detail
Smith: Well, first of all, there's an issue of quality. And one thing that people don't know when they're shopping around, they don't really know sometimes what they're buying. So what kind of resolution are they getting their pictures at, or what kind resolution are getting their films transferred to, things like that. So with photographs, we do restoration. And we're very careful to make sure that when scans are done, they're not over-saturated and under-satuated. If things need corrected, they're corrected. It's not photoshopping a damaged photograph, but it's making sure you're getting a proper scan. Add an optimal resolution. With film, we do a lot of attention to color correct, because film can fade over time. It can brittle when we're careful with it, so that we're not, like sometimes there's situations where part of the film is good, part of them is bad. We'll take the time to do the editing to make sure that it's right for you. With sound quality, a lot of times, if you send something off to an online service that gives you a nice pretty box to mail it off to, anything that they get that they can't get done quickly, they send back and say they can do it. It's not cashable. We oftentimes get those customers and we clean the mold out of the videotape or we handle things where we can then get the capture that somebody else said that they cannot because... They're operating on the metrics of time and generating a profit.
Juravich: Okay, so you're talking about like an old home movie. You could try to like or videotape. Yeah
Smith: or videotape. Just about anything suffers damage from time. You know, and sometimes you can't capture something because it's really too worn out. But we've also been called miracle workers.
Juravich: Yeah, Scott, you were nodding your head whenever he mentioned bold. Do you, do you run across that inside stereo equipment?
Freshour: We do. We run into all kinds of things, Amy. Even vermin waste, you know, it gets bad sometimes.
Juravich: A mouse living in the stereo.
Freshour: Put on the PPE and we cleaned it all out and it doesn't mean it's fatal, it just means we have a lot of cleaning to do.
Juravich: Mm-hmm. Have you found some very some photos in bad shape?
Smith: Well yeah, but the other thing about attention to detail is keeping an eye on organizing things. You know, like we just don't scan the photographs. If we can see that these photographs belong to one decade, these photographs belonging to another, we'll put them in different folders, we will organize them for them. Often times people bring their photographs in albums, they can't take them out because they got that sticky stuff on the back of the album, so again that's something other companies don't do. We'll scan them, and then each album. Try to define, even if it's not labeled, we can often define what years it comes from and label it properly. So that's also the attention to detail. And most of our customers, I should say, you know, this is not always rocket science. There's some things that take care and knowledge, but it's nothing that people can't learn. But most people don't have the time, the knowledge, or want to buy the equipment to do it. So it's important that you have somebody. That knows all this stuff to deliver for you a package that not only is saying, just saying, oh, I got it digitized, but hey, it's gonna be useful for me and my family long into the future.
Juravich: So what if you have like, you know, your grandparents' wedding album and the plastic is stuck to the photos? Can you, do you just like flip over the whole book and scan it in?
Smith: Not really in that situation. We have a conversation with every customer that comes in about the condition of their stuff and with the albums We generally have to tell them we're gonna have to take things apart to get a good scan Most the time they understand that they're getting it digitized because they don't want to take it with them They don't have the space for it. No one else in the family does but they want to make sure they share it or we've had situations where family members are fighting over things, and the best way to resolve that conflict is to digitize everything and give a complete set to everybody. Everyone can have a copy of Mom's wedding album. If a person does not want the wedding album damaged, we can still scan it, but we're gonna tell them that plastic is gonna affect the quality of the scan. The important thing is giving people complete knowledge to let them make an informed decision.
Juravich: Have you developed tricks over the years to get the plastic off? Like, do you have special equipment?
Smith: Most of the time we can slip it out, but sometimes you can't, and sometimes, even in that case, because the plastic is brittle or the cardboard around it is rotted, you just got to tell somebody, I'll exercise my best care, I'm not going to rip it out. But sometimes it'll rip, you know, just because it's old, and there's nothing I can do about that.
Juravich: Scott, Stereolab is, on your website, it says central Ohio's only, is it Worfandale? How do you say it? It's Worfdale. Worfdale, sorry. I add an extra letter. Worf Dale Dealer. This is a particular type of speaker. Tell me about why it's so special.
Freshour: Well, they're modern speakers with Kevlar cones, continually winning awards ever since they came out a couple of years ago. So the audiophiles love them. They're a great price point. But the reason I carry them is because they look vintage. So they match perfectly with the vintage receivers and amplifiers that I sell.
Juravich: Okay, so you this could be a brand new speaker, but it'll look like it's from the 70s.
Freshour: Yes ma'am. Okay.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about vintage items and restoring family memories. And we're talking with Dan Smith, owner of Familyography, a store that digitizes family photos and videos. And we are talking with Scott Freshour, owner of Stereolab, where he and his team repair vintage audio gear. Dan, earlier we were talking about that trend earlier in the show, where more and more people are buying film cameras again. You know, they don't want to take pictures on their phone anymore. They want the film camera. What do you make of that, that people are printing photos again?
Smith: I think all that is great. Unfortunately, or not fortunately, is that even if you want to use analog stuff, oftentimes to do it, especially with old family memories, you still have to digitize it first and then make a print or then take that and convert it to another analog format. You just can't do it straight from analog to analog. A lot of times we'll have people come in having used film, wanna know if we develop it. And we don't develop it, we're not that person, but then they discover that once they've developed it, to do what they want to do with it, they have to get it digitized.
Juravich: Yeah, so then they need a scanner and they're like, oh I haven't had a scanner since 2005, right? Yeah
Smith: Well, you can't digitize film with just a scanner though, yeah. I mean, film film, movie film. Yes. Yeah. Okay.
Juravich: Well, tell me about I mean, do you do you put the way I'm thinking from like the early 2000s? Do you put photos on a scanner? Or like what how do you did? Yeah, tell
Smith: Well, there's some high-end equipment that will do it faster for us, but the photos have to be in a condition so that they can be moved through fast, and a lot of times when you're taking them off albums, they're sticky on the back, and you can't do that, it'll mess up your equipment. So I'd say 50% of our photographs, especially photographs, are from the 90s and on, work well with fast photo scanning. The other, anything below, below. Before the 1990s generally have to be flatbed scan.
Juravich: Yeah, before the 90s, people put everything in albums. Was it around the 90's when people stopped to stop? Yeah, pretty much. That's right. It's the era of the doubles. Everyone got free doubles of all their pictures.
Smith: Or the technology change so you have plastic sheaves that you can slide them in rather than the sticky cardboard pages.
Juravich: Okay, interesting. Scott, we put this hour together because we're just talking about nostalgia, and we're talking about equipment from bygone days, everything old is new again. What do you think of whenever you think about the sense of nostalgia? Basically, where you work and what you do every day is just a nostalgia job. Is that how you see it?
Freshour: Yes, very much so. And we have designed our store that when you walk in, you know, you're going to have a memory, you know, and it's pretty much targeted to, you guys my age, I'm 60, you know, I mean, we have Farrah Fawcett on the wall.
Juravich: As you do.
Freshour: But but let's let's also back up just a little bit that that receiver from you know 1978 is a mid-century masterpiece yeah it's beautiful you know and a lot of the uh you know that that kind of gets lost not only is it a high performer but the thing is gorgeous and so it's it's a joy to look at as well as being nostalgic. Yes.
Juravich: Okay, so Scott, let's do an example. So my dad has his dad's stereo, right? Which still works. Maybe not well, but it works. And then he, my dad, has his stereo that he bought in like the late 70s, early 80s. And it still works very well because he's taken good care of it. But someday my siblings and I will inherit all of this. What do I do with it?
Freshour: Well, you can sell it to a company like me, or what I would do is I would keep it and let me restore it for you, and then you get to keep it and even pass it on.
Juravich: So which one would you keep though? The one that's my grandfather's or my father's?
Freshour: Probably your father's.
Juravich: Yeah, so what is the one that was my grandfather's from like the 50s?
Freshour: Well, the 50s were, the materials they used and the technology wasn't quite there yet. Okay. Okay, so it's likely to be an AM radio or instead of a stereo.
Juravich: Oh, that's true. It is, yeah. Okay.
Freshour: Or an early stereo, which that stuff's getting, it's really tricky. Yeah. Okay, like what we call MPX, that's what gives you two-site stereo.
Juravich: Oh, okay. You're right. Yeah.
Freshour: And it was really just in its infancy back then.
Juravich: Okay. So this one, that one's more to look at than to actually listen to it.
Freshour: Yeah, we can bring it back to life. We do work on stuff all the way back to the thirties. We work on antiques sometimes. Okay.
Juravich: All right, Dan, and now an example for you. So I have my senior high school musical on a VHS tape. If I wanted to save it, because I don't have a VCR anymore, what would you do if I brought you these two videos that have my high school music on it?
Smith: Well, we transfer it at a reasonable cost. You'd have your choice of media. We offer a free one-month upload download via our cloud. And you can put it on your computer or buy your own flash drive. It's always smart to back up digital information.
Juravich: Put it more than one place.
Smith: Yeah, put it more than one place now. We'll also also sell you a flash drive if that's what you want to use But we're really trying to push people towards the cloud We have my best example that a 95 year old person that brought in a 120 video tapes And she all wanted DVDs and I told her she did not we argued about it for 10 10 minutes I told to talk to her great-grandkids about it. She called up and said we'll do the cloud And I said if you don't like the cloud Give me a call, we can always do something else. There's no mutually exclusive option on here. She called up two weeks later, and I'm thinking, oh God, she's gonna want everything on DVDs, which is a pain. And she just called up in her raspy, smokey voice, said, damn, this is Rita, I just wanna let you know, we love this cloud thing.
Juravich: Great!
Smith: You know.
Juravich: Do you digitize DVDs too, like my wedding video is on a DVD?
Smith: Yeah, because most people don't have a DVD player anymore.
Juravich: Right. Yeah, right. We have been talking about restoring family memories with Dan Smith, owner of Familyography, which has three stores located in Ohio, including one here in Columbus. Thank you for being here, Dan.
Smith: My pleasure. Thank you.
Juravich: And we've been talking about vintage audio equipment with Stereo Lab's Scott Freshour. Thanks for being here, Scott.
Freshour: Thank you, Amy.
Juravich: And coming up, we're going to talk about nostalgia. Is it good for you? Is it bad for you. We're going talk about the psychology. That is when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. People are looking to unplug an escape from the day-to-day of our digital world, and they're finding that escape by turning to legacy media. Whether it's vinyl records, older cars, Polaroid cameras, or video cassettes, people are seeking out analog media for many reasons. One of the major reasons is the sentimental and wistful longing for what we feel like was a simpler, perhaps better time. But is nostalgia good for us? And what time in our history are we longing for exactly? Well, joining us now to talk about the benefits and the trappings of nostalgia is Krystine Batcho, professor of psychology at LeMoyne College. Welcome to the show, Krystine.
Krystine Batcho: Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here
Juravich: All right, so your research focuses on nostalgia, also known as longing for the good old days. So can we start with what are the good ol' days? When are they?
Batcho: Well, the good old days can be different for different people. Part of it depends upon what generation you're from or what age group you're in. So for instance, one of the universals is that most people throughout their entire life will think of the good ol' days as being during their childhood. As you get a little older, that sort of morphs or moves up to your early adolescence or early adulthood. But definitely childhood ranks up there very high as. What you think of as the good old days.
Juravich: Yeah, I read about your research finding that people who are prone to nostalgia excel at maintaining personal relationships and choose healthy social ways of coping with their troubles. So can you explain that to me? Tell me about how well-adjusted people are nostalgic. What does What does that mean?
Batcho: It's very important because when I began my research, I had read all the opinions and theories about nostalgia that were available at that time. And they were all very negative. They portrayed nostalgic individuals as somehow unhealthy as being trapped in the past or following unhealthy coping such as escapism. But when I begin collecting empirical social science data, what I found is that The kind of nostalgia I am primarily interested in, which I refer to as personal nostalgia, is connected with very, very social characteristics and values. In other words, what I found in my earliest research was that highly nostalgic individuals tend to be people-oriented. They tend to have really positive traits. They're pro-social. They like to help others. They like to remain connected to others. So they're interested in activities that will sustain their relationships. They seek out other people. And so that sort of overflows into a number of very important parts of mental health. One of which is coping with stress. And we can talk about that as we go along, if you'd like.
Juravich: Yeah. Well, let's talk about how we are more stressed out today. And it's probably because of the Internet. You know, there's plenty of studies out there that show that the Internet, especially social media, causes depression and anxiety. So are we just longing for a time when we were less connected, when social media didn't exist? That's a.
Batcho: Two-edged sword in a way because what we don't want is to be isolated. And in fact, loneliness is one of the triggers for nostalgia, because when you're lonely, you want to reconnect with others. And right now, in this current period, I think we're suffering through a double whammy, as it were. We do have some disconnects due to the distancing, the psychological distancing of social media, and the virtual reality in general. But at the same time, we're just getting used to figuring out how to live in a post-pandemic world. And during the pandemic, so many people became either isolated or they became at least minimally distanced from others. You might remember the six-foot distancing rule, which effectively closed down many opportunities for in-person activities. And so right now people are just trying to figure out how to get back to, and this is where nostalgia comes in. I think most people have a vision that it wasn't always this way. And that's true. We weren't always in a post-pandemic world and we were never before in human history in a virtual reality centered world. So there are so many things that spring out from that. Anxiety, of course, is one. Loneliness and sadness is another. And then I'll also, if you care to follow up on it at all, I'll be looking at the idea that people have lost that sense of trust in others and also control over things. Technology and science have advanced so rapidly that people are starting to worry that they won't be able to keep up with it. And then... Recently, of course, we have the media attention to AI and whether AI will be controlling us rather than the other way around.
Juravich: Yeah, and then everyone's gonna be, if AI starts controlling us, is everyone then gonna be nostalgic for social media and be like, oh, that was a simpler time?
Batcho: That's true. And in fact, how old you are does make a difference. The most senior of our citizens are actually nostalgic for Facebook, because it takes back to a very simple kind of thing. And younger people, of course, are into the more fast paced, you know, the TikTok and the Instagram and so on and so forth. And every facet of life. I can't think of one that hasn't been affected. You know, dating among those individuals who are of that part of their lives. Dating has been taken over by virtual reality, social media, how we try to find someone new, and can you trust someone. And so we really have a number of anxieties, not just one sort of stress.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about the benefits and trappings of nostalgia with Christine Bacho, professor of psychology at LeMoyne College who also happens to be an alumna of Ohio State University. Did you study nostalgia during your time at Ohio State or is it something you picked up later in your career?
Batcho: Not when I was at Ohio State, I got my PhD in cognitive psychology. And so it wasn't too long afterwards when I had come to LeMoyne College that I began looking at nostalgia, partly because it's maybe not unique, but it's very distinctive by combining the way we think, which is cognitive, and the way remember, which is great, and then emotions. And I love the paradoxical nature. Of nostalgia. It is bittersweet, and there's very few things in life that take opposites and literally push them together, blend them together. I often thought of the analogy of bittersweets chocolate. It's sort of bitter and it's sort sweet, and that's what nostalgia is like too.
Juravich: Yeah, because you can you can long for that time, but all of it maybe was not a good time, right? But you can still long for it.
Batcho: There is that that is absolutely true and in addition to that the bitterness comes from that Insight or recognition that what you long for what you miss can never happen again. You can never have it. So it's a little bit like unrequited love. You want it so desperately, but you can't have it. And this is one of the reasons, as we go along, I'm sure you'll draw my attention to focus on this idea of legacy media. We don't live in an abstract. We live in a physical reality. We have bodies, we have touch, we the five senses. And so when we start to feel disengaged or distanced or lonely. Or fear that we won't be able to control things in our lives, we want something tangible when we anchor or ground ourself. And so the idea of going back, now for people who are older, when they pull out their old collection of vinyl records, that's tangible. But what about an 18 year old or an undergraduate or a graduate student who never really had that as part of their early life? I think that's particularly fascinating. And I think that the two types of nostalgia are a little bit different for younger people turning to tangible items of the past, the old kinds of cameras, the old kind of telephones, television programs, there they're searching and what they're search for is what I would think of as the ideal or the best that life could be. And this is particularly true for how we relate to one another. It's, what are the best ways that we can love people, be loved by people, trust people, and be trusted by people? And if you're younger today, one of the problems is there is a crisis of trust. So much. You know, my college students whom I teach often bring up this issue of saying, well, I have discovered going through high school and college. So much on the internet might not be true or accurate. In fact, you can change photos, you can have Photoshop, you could change videos. And now with AI, the music industry has been altered perhaps forever because now AI is creating art and music. And so there's a problem there with figuring out. But if you pull out an old vinyl record, it is what it is. No one has altered it.
Juravich: Yeah, you write about people, I think of all ages, longing for stability, like change is the threat, but change is a part of life, right? So are we long, do we use nostalgia to help us deal with the change, maybe?
Batcho: That's an excellent way of expressing it. I love that because without change there is no life change is life Right from the beginning with gestation growth depends upon change and I think We're clear on that humans are clear on because we get bored rather easily Once again, we're into this paradox where if you say the same thing three times people are already tuning you out because boring we want change, but it's bittersweet because then change creates this anxiety. So when two people are deciding to enter into a serious relationship, on the one hand, they want stability. They want to know that they can count on this other person being there for them for the long haul. At the same time, they're a little nervous about what would that really mean then. I have to turn away perhaps from other opportunities for other individuals to be my partner. And you can see how it's almost always a conflict. And psychology has had a long history of recognizing the fact that conflict is part of the human condition.
Juravich: And nostalgia tends to occur more around periods of transition, like your child leaving the nest or retirement, you move from one house to another. Does dreaming in the past help us deal with that change or does it sometimes put off our ability to deal with it?
Batcho: Nostalgia most definitely helps. And the research on that is very clear. And when you ask, well, how does it help? It helps in a couple of ways. One way that it helps is that it brings back the right kind of memories. We all have all kinds of memories, painful ones, sad ones, but nostalgic memories are dominated by relationships and people. And so I like to think of it this way. Whenever you're going to tackle something that might be challenging. Isn't it nice to know that you have someone or something to bring with you to that challenge? And what is the thing you bring with? Well, with nostalgia, it brings a couple of things. One are the memories of how you and other people in your life who were important to you tackled challenges before. And when you recall those successes or achievements, that is very comforting. It's as if you're saying logically, well I've done this before I can do it again. It's just that the challenge is a different challenge. Even when you don't have that kind of memory, you might have the memory of someone you loved. It could be a sibling, a parent, a friend, a coach, a teacher. And you think, well, how did they deal with challenge? How did they advise me to deal with a challenge? And then those things are comforting. And last but not least, we're pretty clear now that nostalgia relies upon certain areas of the brain. And one of the areas of the brain does actually promote comforting emotions. So we have the physiological asset to.
Juravich: Take with us as well. And we only have a little less than two minutes left, so I'm sorry to ask you this to answer in a minute, but you mentioned a few times there's personal nostalgia, which is longing for your own past. There's also historical nostalgia, which is long for a distant era. But I'm guessing that your personal nostalgia maybe is better for you than longing for like an era. Is that right?
Batcho: Generally, yes. You can have both types, by the way. So as long as you have some of the personal, it's fine to engage in the fantasy and the imagination of the historical. The problem that I found in my research were individuals who were mostly the historic nostalgic prone, and they didn't have the personal. In those individuals, and these these people do exist. It's very often that they're very unhappy with their current conditions. And you might find this, by the way, as just a phase, like a time period that you have to go through. Right now, the literature is becoming rich, sadly, because we have so many people who are exiled from their home country. We have refugee status individuals. And for some time before they can adapt and accept a new lifestyle as their home. They very often long for the days gone by and the days gone by can even predate the ones that they just left because the recent memories are sometimes too painful to deal with given the conditions they left or they abandoned behind them and so when you think about it you can have both kinds of nostalgia and the wisdom is in matching it up to the right conditions and knowing what to do with them.
Juravich: We have been talking about the benefits and trappings of nostalgia, and we've been talking with Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology at LeMoyne College. Krystine, thank you so much for your time today. You're most welcome, it was my pleasure. And you are listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. If you missed any part of today's show, listen back at our website or find our podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Amy Juravich.