NOSTALGIC NEIGHBORHOODS OF TIKTOK: MAPPING A TOPOLOGY OF AFFECTIVE PUBLICS

Resumen

Nostalgia is a culturally resonant, politically potent, and increasingly networked sensemaking resource that frames how people see the past and understand their place in the world. Despite nostalgia's locative meaning, there is a lack of research applying network analytic methods to study its structure and social-semiotic function in online networks which enable connective action based on discursive, affective, and mimetic bonds. While research indicates nostalgia’s dual-edge social function in group dynamics of solidarity and exclusion, these studies often take collective identity a priori, limiting understanding of how platform affordances structure the formation of affective publics around nostalgic discourse and sentiment. Through a semantic network analysis of the popular hashtag #nostalgia (>140B views) on TikTok, this study offers a first step toward understanding the meaning of nostalgia in networked processes of group identification by mapping a topology of “nostalgic neighborhoods” emerging from the co-linkages of hashtags on the platform. Based on the equivalence of these neighborhoods’ semantic structures and thematic meanings, I identify three types of affective publics – play-grounds, heart-lands, and reflecting pools – that emerged in relation to different linguistic and technical functions of the hashtag. I argue the different affective intensities and meanings of nostalgia within these publics reflected the platform’s dynamics of imitation and virality. As TikTok’s algorithmic affordances of visibility and association are less rooted in interpersonal social ties, this study contributes important insights into how the hashtag, as a semiotic technology (Zappavigna, 2018), structures nostalgic affective publics on popular site for nostalgia within youth cultures.