Faculty profile: Ryan Lizardi

How will you look back on your past when the future arrives?

That’s the kind of perceptual question that Ryan Lizardi examines as part of his research into the media’s role in shaping nostalgic views of the past—as a culture and as individuals.

“As consumers, we are told that the way we should look at the past is to continually revisit stuff—usually through the media,” Lizardi says. “Instead of having a genuinely shared culture, we are encouraged by contemporary media companies to see their products as depicting culturally important events.”

Lizardi says media messages that drive people to believe they loved what they did from their own past and the past of popular culture, creates the illusion of a shared connection. Personal reflection helped him realize how much of a role the media had played in his own reminiscing, charting the course for his research and teaching specialty.

“I saw I was making playlists that were labeled with time periods . . . such as, ‘Summer of 2005,’ and I noticed they weren’t really organized by genre, or by artist. They were just playlists that I liked to listen to back in the summer of 2005,” he says. “That was when I realized it was interesting to me and wanted to see if there were any similarities on a broader scale.”

Lizardi holds the following degrees: Ph.D. in Mass Communications, M.A. in Media Studies and B.A. in Film and Video from Pennsylvania State University.

“Whether it’s studies about representations of the past or any kind of media studies, I’m hoping to develop media literacy and the idea that, as long as students are actively aware of ways in which maybe they’re being manipulated, asked to think about the media, or asked to think about different issues – as long as they’re aware, they can make more informed decisions,” he says. “For example, I’m not going to tell them not to watch a remake [of a film] but instead will ask them to go see it and think about how it is asking them to think about certain things. Or understand how celebrity culture is asking them to conceptualize different things.”

If the past we look back on now is retroactively influenced by current media, how will the social-media-saturated present affect future nostalgia?

“I’m not sure, but it might end up being a more individualized version, where they tailor your history,” Lizardi says. “It’s sort of like thinking of a social media version of history . . . in 20 years, will a celebrity look back on 2013 and say, ‘That was the year I was big on Twitter’?  Is that what we’re going to think about our own past—is that what we’ll define as 2013? Or maybe we’ll grow tired of it. It’s difficult to prognosticate.”

Predicting the future is hard, but one thing is easy to foretell: Lizardi’s students will be much more media savvy thanks to his expertise.