1986

During my three months in Australia, I became fond of the TV-show "What a Year" (I'm embarrassed to admit this, as it's also a quite lame show). It's because I'm rather nostalgic, to the point where past times can make me relatively emotional. NRK (the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) currently runs a series called "Back to the 80s" feeding my nostalgia. Yesterday I was was taken back to 1986: the Challenger-explosion, Thatcher visits Norway and is met by a huge demonstration, Sandra Kim wins the Eurovision Song Contest, the Swedish prime minister Oluf Palme is shot and killed. And I remember it all so clearly. I was 11 years old and increasingly paying attention to mass mediated stories of the world. To me 1986 or any other year I have lived almost has a thing-like quality.

And today I read the following in Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: "Before writing was deeply interiorized by print, people did not feel themselves situated every moment of their lives in abstract computed time of any sort" (...) Persons whose world view has been formed by high literacy need to remind themselves that in functionally oral cultures the past is not felt as an itemized terrain, peppered with verifiable and disputed "facts" or bits of information."