Fever Dreams and the Future of Nostalgia on Tiktok
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22009245 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Viki Askounis Conner (0000-0001-9854-7423, University of Illinois Chicago, corresponding author), Viki Conner |
| Year | 2023 |
| Publication date | 2023-12-31 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2162-3317 • E-ISSN: 2162-3317 |
| Publisher | University of Illinois Libraries (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5210/spir.v2023i0.13408 |
| OpenAlex | W4392406534 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 23 |
This paper contributes to the growing body of literature that interrogates the modalities of nostalgia afforded in, by, and through digital media technologies with a focus on its performative dimension within one social formation of nostalgia – the TikTok aesthetic. Drawing on a fine-grained, qualitative artifact analysis of the most viewed video in #nostalgicore on TikTok, this paper asks how the platform’s socio-technical affordances enable and/or constrain Boym’s “restorative” (regressive) and “reflective” (progressive) modalities of nostalgia as a basis for action. Drawing on performance studies and emotion theory, I conceptualize nostalgia as “emotive” to foreground its performative dynamics and allow for further study of nostalgia as a performance or “narrative event” that articulates time, space, and affective feeling. Through the interplay of TikTok’s temporal and spatial affordances, I find that TikTok permits the feeling of the "thick present" to emerge, encouraging liminal, fever dream-like performances of nostalgia in which young people imaginatively construct nostalgic worlds. I argue that this practice constitutes a form of digital placemaking that resists normative assumptions of nostalgia operating on a linear temporal horizon of action (i.e., backward/past vs. forward/future) as it is made, remade, and algorithmically circulated. Contributing to recent work on “algorithmic nostalgia,” these findings suggest that creative and mnemonic practices are entangled in algorithmically structured aesthetic social formations of nostalgia and invite further consideration to how TikTok encourages the “mnemonic imagination” through performance. Keywords: nostalgia, TikTok, performance, temporality, affect, social media affordances
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Asian Culture and Media Studies
The ritual process
How Artifacts Afford
The Navigation of Feeling
The Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods
Performance Studies
Deep Nostalgia
Mapping Internet Celebrity on TikTok
Story, Performance, and Event
Theorizing the present
Staying with the Trouble
The emergence of creative and digital place-making
The sociality of personal and collective nostalgia
Extending the Internet meme
The commodification of time and memory
Making, managing and experiencing ‘the now’
Facebook time
We Can Remember It for You
The Ritual Process
Why's Everyone on TikTok Now? The Algorithmized Self and the Future of Self-Making on Social Media
Showing They Care (Or Don't)
Quantified Nostalgia
The Modalities of Nostalgia
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |