Gray's School of Art

Exploring digital nostalgia on visual media platforms

Digital platforms like Instagram and TikTok are significant in shaping visual culture and are recognised as simulated physical spaces, which provide opportunities for connection, self-expression and reflective nostalgia. Qualitative research exploring how communities engage with nostalgia in digital spaces would provide valuable insights into how these platforms are used to shape identity.

Award

MRes | MPhil | PhD | MSc by Research

Start Date

Usually February and October - at individual School's discretion

Research Opportunities

Summary

In contemporary culture, people’s complex relationships with the past have become increasingly documented through web-based technology (blogs, websites that include discussion forums and now digital platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and TikTok).

A significant amount of research has been carried out into the history and use of nostalgia as practice (Arnold-Forster, 2024, Becker, 2023). This suggests that people turn to the past (either in terms of lived experience e.g. childhood or non-experienced pasts) in times of uncertainty. Scholars such as David Lowenthal (1985, 2015) maintain that the attraction of the past is its completeness, a seemingly compelling reason for those people trying to cope with a fast-paced and fragmented digital society.

The term anemoia (Koenig, 2022) is often defined as a phenomenon whereby people are drawn towards a non-experienced past and construct a lifestyle surrounding that. This practice may involve dressing in fashion of the time and re-designing home interiors to align with the chosen time period. Online sites such as The Fedora Lounge, have for some time, provided community spaces for people to meet and discuss signifiers of their selected pasts.

With the development of social media and video sharing platforms there has been significant growth in the number of people recording such lifestyles in order to visually communicate their identities.

The research project aims to examine critically the practice of digital anemoia in social media and video sharing platforms, to explore individuals’ reasons for this practice and to offer explanations of how and why people connect with the past in contemporary society.

The project could include cases studies of the candidate’s choice. Methods of inquiry may include hermeneutic textual analysis (including content and sentiment analysis, semiotic or discourse analysis) and qualitative data gathering means such as focus groups and in-depth interviews.

References

Arnold-Forster, A. (2024) Nostalgia: a history of a dangerous emotion. London: Picador.
Becker, T. (2023) Yesterday: A new history of nostalgia. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Koenig, J. (2022) The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. London: Simon and Schuster.
Lowenthal, D. (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lowenthal, D. (2015) The Past is a Foreign Country Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.