227 / 658
225
Friday, November 11
0 9 : 0 0 – 1 0 : 3 0
DCC10
Online Communities of Nostalgia in Between Agency, Exploitation andHome-Seeking
E. Keightley
1
1
Loughborough University, Social Sciences, Loughborough, United Kingdom
Embedded in the transformations and acceleration of social, cultural and political life after the end of the ColdWar, nostalgia remains very close to what it
used to be: a longing for a home and an identity that can be turned into an emancipatory practice and mobilized for the present and the future by re-en‑
gaging in a prospective and creative way with the past. This positive potential of nostalgia and its relation to memory and media has been explored by
various recent studies, pointing out its different social and historical meanings.This work has identified the potential of media content and media devices to
trigger nostalgia, their tendency to encode nostalgia in their representational content and by providing opportunities for nostalgic modes of engaging with
the past through their use. At the same time this body of literature has increasingly moved away from a straightforward notion of either media or their users
‘being nostalgic’to a sense of howmedia and their users are intertwined in a performative process of‘nostalgizing’. Despite this move towards an examina‑
tion of the processual dimensions of nostalgia, the identification and exploration of ‘online communities of nostalgia’as their hybrid relations to home and
identity making has not yet been undertaken. We do not yet have an adequate explanation for why people engage in nostalgic remembering of shared and
controversial pasts online. It is not clear whether nostalgia is a common framework or mode of engagement which leads to the creation of online groups and
communities, nor whether members of these communities, although geographically separated, negotiate the meaning of their various pasts using nostal‑
gia as a common, shared mode of connecting the past to the present, in the sense of a universal feeling and practice. This kind of remembering practice at
once seems to involve the pleasurable processes of cultural consumption associated with mediated nostalgia 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. This panel aims to explore the extent to which performing these negotiations online offers opportunities for and imposes limita‑
tions on these processes. Across the five papers the methodological footings for the analysis of nostalgia are explored, current conceptual and theoretical
frameworks are challenged and reworked for online contexts, and a range of media modalities that comprise online nostalgia, from popular music to
advertisements are considered. The panel goes beyond the textual representation of nostalgia to explore the role of online nostalgia in the performance
of community online. It addresses the similarities and differences concerning the structure, function and uses of diverse nostalgic online communities and
the range of motivations, interests and reasons for which the consumers (and producers of nostalgia) participate in online nostalgic platforms. In dialogue
with one-another, the papers give an insight into the extent to which nostalgic web groups and sites offer tools for constructing new kinds of communal
identity and new modes of social engagement.
We submitted for the Digital Culture and Communication Section, but Communication History is also very close, so feel free to include us in the latter if this
is more convenient for you. The panel balances in between both.
PN 188
Between Exploitation and Agency: Towards a Political Economy of Nostalgia
E. Keightley
2
1
University Paris 2, Media and communication, Paris, France
2
Loughborough University, Social Sciences, Loughborough, United Kingdom
Emily Keightley, Loughborough University There has been a burgeoning of theorisation and a small but nevertheless increasing body of empirical work on
nostalgia as a mode of mnemonic engagement with the past in the last ten years. This research has rehabilitated the concept of nostalgia as a critical tool
for the analysis of a particular kind of remembering which is bound up with the cultural politics of consumption and in many cases these analyses have
served to rehabilitate nostalgia from a conservative rejection of the present and a sentimental longing for the past, as a potentially progressive way of using
the past in the present for orientating oneself to the future. While there has been considerable discussion of how we should conceptualise nostalgia this
has not, to date, been accompanied by an equally concerted methodological reflection. This has made research which utilises the welcome conceptual
reappraisal of nostalgia somewhat (and perhaps inevitably) piecemeal in its approach and limited in its explanatory power. Textual studies of nostalgic
cultural content have provided compelling insights into the representation of the past as an object of desire, and in some cases this has been combined with
an analysis of the practices, the processes of their production and circulation and (much more rarely) an analysis of audience engagement and reception
of them. What is largely missing from this body of research however, is a sense of the political economic dimensions of their production: what relationships
between the state, capital and civil society are implicated in any given instance of mediated nostalgia? In failing to address this it has become possible for
nostalgia theorists to vacillate between utopian characterisations of nostalgic engagement as a creative reworking of the present and future, or to dismiss it
as a crass or trivial commercial use of the past. The question left unanswered is how do we methodologically account for both faces of nostalgia when they
are simultaneously in play? In an online environment where the production, textual content and reception of nostalgic culture has become increasingly
intertwined this is even more difficult to answer. This paper argues for the addition of a political economic approach to empirical explorations of nostalgia
and suggests that it will invite us to confront the contradiction between exploitation and agency which are intrinsic to nostalgic remembering and to find
ways of accounting for them. If we are to understand how nostalgic cultural forms can offer us tools for the construction of communal identities and the ar‑
ticulation of social relationships online, this is essential. Emily Keightley is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at the Centre for Research
in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University. She is author and editor of several books that focus on media, memory and time in everyday life
and she is Associate Editor of Media, Culture and Society. Her most recent book, Photography, Music and Memory: Pieces of the Past in Everyday Life which
she co-authored with Professor Mike Pickering was published in autumn 2015.