Fever Dreaming on TikTok: A Conceptual Framework for Performative Nostalgia

Abstract

Digital media technologies afford multiple modalities of nostalgia as communicative practices. Recognizing nostalgia’s potential to do things in, through, and by media, this article offers a processual framework to define and study nostalgia as performance in socio-technical contexts. Using one of the most viewed videos linked to #nostalgia and the popular #nostalgiacore aesthetic on TikTok as a case study, this article asked how performative nostalgia takes shape in relation to the platform’s temporal, spatial, and affective affordances for meaning-making. Through a multimodal artifact analysis of this performance event, I show how TikTok opens up the temporality of a thick present, encouraging liminal performances of nostalgia in which people imaginatively construct nostalgic worlds. I argue that these performances suggested a kind of digital place-making that resisted 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.