FEVER DREAMS AND THE FUTURE OF NOSTALGIA ON TIKTOK

Abstract

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