This article addresses the lack of analysis of the specific ways in which the online environment configures the relationship between the processual dynamics of nostalgia which allow for both creative and conservative modes of identification and the commercial exploitation and commodification of the nostalgia produced and articulated in online communities. We introduce an empirical case study of one of the companies operating on Facebook as a nostalgia maker: DoYouRemember.com and consider analytical frameworks for future work on the (online) ‘nostalgia business’ and its economic and political dimensions.
Keywords
Commodification, digital labour, Facebook, memory, nostalgia, online communities, political economy, popular culture, social media time, temporality
1Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
2Loughborough University, UK
Corresponding author(s):
Katharina Niemeyer, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Canada QC H3C 3P8. Email: niemeyer.katharina@uqam.ca
The role of media texts, technologies and consumption practices in the production of nostalgia has been explored by various recent studies (e.g. Menke, 2017; Niemeyer, 2014, 2015; Pickering and Keightley, 2014). This body of literature has increasingly moved away from a straightforward notion of either media or their users ‘being nostalgic’ towards a sense of media and their users being intertwined in a performative process. This kind of remembering practice at once seems to involve the pleasure of cultural consumption associated with mediated nostalgia (very often, the content or experience of these ‘nostalgias’ is related to the memory of media devices and their texts and technologies, and also consumer products or ritual leisure activities of the past) alongside a more profound search for identity and ‘home’, intermingling the playfulness of pastiche and the fulfilment of consumerist desires with a search for temporal moorings, mnemonic connections and narrative identities.
Despite this move towards an examination of the processual dimensions of nostalgia, research on online communities expressing nostalgia is scarce (Seta G de and Olivotti, 2016; Kalinina and Menke, 2016). More precisely, there has been a lack of analysis which examines the very specific ways in which the online environment configures the relationship between the processual dynamics of nostalgia which allow for both creative and conservative modes of identification and the commercial exploitation and commodification of the very nostalgia produced and articulated in online communities. It is this lacuna that our article seeks to address by asking: how are nostalgic texts mobilised on social media platforms for commercial purposes, and how are nostalgic, affective communities themselves commodified in this process? While all online communities have the potential to be sites for the articulation of nostalgic modes of remembering, our concern is with the deliberate elicitation and commercial exploitation of nostalgia in online communities developed for this purpose.
This article introduces the results of an empirical case study of one of the most important ‘nostalgic’ businesses operating on Facebook (FB): DoYouRemember.com (DYR), a start-up that defines itself as being ‘a media company devoted to all things nostalgia’ (FB). In December 2018, their page had received 6,077,021 likes. In September 2019, they count 6,077,021 likes. The company mainly publishes North American popular consumer and media culture dating between the 1960s and 1990s, always accompanied by the question ‘Do you remember?’. The case study research is based on quantitative content analysis, qualitative textual analysis and interviews with the company CEO and staff to show how nostalgic temporalities are structured and framed, first by the FB platform itself and second by the algorithm DYR employs. The company programmes most of its publications within a precise time-slot. This pre-fabricated and business-oriented way of publishing nostalgic content on FB creates a specific temporal mode of consumption and experience of time.
We discuss the theoretical frames and concepts necessary to the analysis of nostalgic online communities and their temporal features, most specifically the relations of nostalgia to time, memory and the political economy of the Web. The article tackles the following specific questions: What kinds of memories are shared on the main FB page of the company and how are they aggregated? What role and degree of temporal freedom do the users of DYR have and what is the relationship between exploitation and agency in the production and performance of commercially driven nostalgia? Who are the actors behind the scene and what kind of corporate strategies are at work? We conclude by suggesting that a delicate dance between audience creativity and the limits placed on this by commercial imperatives is crucial to understanding the performance of nostalgia online. We discuss the analytical frameworks this research offers for future work on the (online) ‘nostalgia business’, its economic and political dimensions and the abuses and possibilities of what could be labelled ‘commodification of time’.
Memory and nostalgia are intertwined modes of relating to time. They both implicate the past, present and future and emerge in the correlation and interaction of these three temporalities. By remembering the past in the present and often with an orientation to the future, particular pasts are prioritised over others and while some memories blossom, others remain latent and forgotten. This is the case in individual mnemonic practices and also in collective, social or institutional aspects of memorisation or commemorations. In this sense, both nostalgia and memory practices can be seen as being essential and useful to maintaining identities as they involve the selection and synthesis of experience into meaningful narratives, and also as being responsible for social amnesia. However, nostalgia is not reducible to remembering – it is a specific affective modality of engaging with the past. Bonnett (2015) in his challenge to Western-centric conceptualisations of nostalgia states: ‘The paradox is that nostalgia offers and reflects the turbulence of identity and meaning that is so typical of modernity and yet it strives to overcome modernity’ (p. 154). This paradox is also omnipresent in current reflections on nostalgia within media and communication studies. Mediated memories can become triggers for nostalgia: for example, a friend’s photograph of a holiday trip may produce nostalgic constellations of affect: a desire for a lost past in contradistinction from a present deficient in some way. Memory is not, in this sense, a feeling, but a potential trigger of feelings. Nostalgia is of course an important part of memory studies but as Atia and Davies (2010) have shown, nostalgic feelings can also emerge without the work of memory or recall as a yearning for the future. While they overlap and work in concert, nostalgia cannot be seen as a simple sub-category of memory as it exceeds the latter’s ‘cognitive territory’ (Bonnett, 2015: 17) and therefore requires its own specific research approaches.
Located between remembrance and forgetting, idealisation and creativity, nostalgia is a recollection of times and places that are no more, no longer accessible or perhaps never were. It can also refer to a desire for a return to a past time that we never experienced or the regret for a past that never was, but that could have been, or for a future that never will be. Nostalgia often still suffers from a reputation for being superficial. The works by Jameson (1991) on contemporary forms of nostalgia as a product of both consumer society and of late modernity, as well as those by Davis (1979) are but two examples of this kind of pejorative assessment. Without denying that nostalgia is often a tool of economic and political expropriation, its status as a dialectical, Western, postcolonial construction which is inevitably retrogressive to modernity has shifted somewhat. In the mid-2000s, Keightley and Pickering (2006) launched a call for rethinking the place of nostalgia in sociological research to recognise (but not guarantee) its creative and progressive potential, and in the same year, the more constructive nature of nostalgia as a way for overcoming personal crises of the present was empirically demonstrated (Arndt et al., 2006). The publication of a special issue of Memory Studies on the historical misconceptions about nostalgia finally opened the way towards a more performative approach to nostalgia (Dames, 2010) and a transition to the verb ‘to nostalgize’ (Sedikides et al., 2015; Niemeyer, 2014) became possible. A more empirically informed exploration of the multiple and diverse relationships between the media, communications and nostalgia began to emerge in the mid-2010s (see, for example, Lizardi, 2015; Menke, 2017; Niemeyer, 2014; Schrey, 2017; Sielke, 2017). While nostalgia has become of increasing concern for media and communication scholars1 reflection on methodological and conceptual approaches – especially when it comes to the question of how and why nostalgia is produced and performed in online activities and communities – remains rare.
Research on online communities has exponentially increased over the last decades. Studies dealing with political engagement on or via the Web have shown the potential and the limits of online activities and community building (e.g. Granjon and Denouël, 2010; Kaun, 2017) for feminist movements (Jouët et al., 2017; Rentschler and Thrift, 2015), to name just a few examples. At the same time, with the arrival of Web 2.0, a protean mnemonic universe has also taken shape and numerous scholars have concerned themselves with the digital articulation of memories (e.g. Ernst, 2013; Reading, 2011) or specific modalities of digital forms of remembering (e.g. Casalegno, 2006; Hoskins, 2018). Working across and between research on online communities and digital time and memory offers the opportunity to see nostalgia not only as being part of a mnemonic process but also a social engagement with the present and the future. Kalinina and Menke (2016) made a first step in this direction by focussing on post-soviet nostalgic online communities. Seta G de and Olivotti (2016) tackled the question by analysing online Hong Kong nostalgia. What these studies have not engaged with thus far in the ways in which nostalgia is produced, exploited and circulated in online communities which are not cause- or issue-based, and are instead part of an implicitly commercial enterprise in the interests of extracting economic value from the process of nostalgising.
Nostalgia has been mobilised as a commercial strategy by media and other cultural industries (Cross, 2017), marketing companies (Kessous and Roux, 2012), advertisers (Fantin, 2014; Pickering and Keightley, 2014) and other consumer-oriented institutions and actors (Holbrook, 1993) for decades. This is also the case when nostalgia moves online. Research to date on online nostalgia has been focussed on peer-to-peer, independent or ‘bottom-up’ social communities, emphasising the latter affordance. Attention has been paid to the progressive potential of audiences’ nostalgic practices of engagement (Kalinina and Menke, 2016) or to the ephemeral standardised social media time of mnemonic online communities on FB (Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014), but a commensurate critical focus on the practices involved in the commercial exploitation of nostalgia in online environments is routinely overlooked, especially the work of companies that we might characterise as explicitly ‘nostalgia businesses’ which seek to monetise the process of nostalgising. It remains unclear how, for example, when we move our analytical focus online, particularly in relation to the exploitation of social networking platforms, the extent to which the conceptual and methodological separation between creative, vernacular nostalgic activity which allows for the mobilisation of fondly remembered pasts in the interests change and transformation in the present and future, and the corporate fixing of a sanitised past, oriented solely to a fantasy of a lost past and emptied of progressive potential remains sustainable.
To address this question, we need to adopt an analytical focus which attends to the ways in which nostalgia is produced in commercially constructed online communities through the commodification and standardisation of time. This means understanding how audiences are strategically and potentially engaged in nostalgising and how user activity can be created, managed, structured and finally exploited for profit.2 At the same time, it is necessary to consider how audience activity is able to exceed the commercial imperatives which solicit their activity and, by virtue of the structure and function of social networking service (SNS) platforms, in our case FB, are able to realise possibilities for the subversion and creative appropriation of commercial content and structures for the purposes of progressive forms of affective remembering. For example, on one hand, user-generated content, interactivity with content and public modes of engagement online are available for use by corporations, advertisers, marketing organisations, but on the other hand, these processes and practices all contribute to textual instability, networked sense-making practices and the potential for pluralised meanings to be generated.
To tackle the dynamic relationship between creative agency and commercial exploitation in online nostalgic communities and move beyond a vacillation between the ‘utopian’ characterisation of nostalgic engagement as a creative reworking of the present and future, or to dismiss it as a crass or trivial commercial – sometimes political – use of the past, we have drawn inspiration from the recent call in memory studies to adopt analytical strategies which built on political economy (see, e.g. Reading, 2014). This approach encourages analytical attention to be focussed on the interacting conditions which create, structure and sustain contemporary socio-technical ecologies of memory and the ways in which these shape their discursive and symbolic affordances.