| Sumario: | As the 40th anniversary of the Consumer Electronics Show, CES 2007 provides ample evidence of the contradictory impulses of nostalgic longing and technological advancement. As an application of the swarm methodology, this essay examines the use of nostalgia as a means of positioning new technologies as shown through CES 2007. Moreover, I look at the ways that both consumers of these technologies and the objects themselves are products of and subject to both public and private nostalgia. In the process, I discuss the possible cognitive basis for nostalgia, the evolutionary theory of technological advancement and the means through which consumer identities are formed and re-formed through their interactions with a technology's intermingling past, present and future.
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