Media Times| The Flow of Nostalgia: Experiencing Television from the Past

Ekaterina Kalinina

Abstract


 

This article investigates the Nostal’giia channel, a channel reproducing the daily schedule of Soviet Tsentralnoe Televidenie (Central Television) of the 1970s–1980s. The broadcast day comprises a flow of program reruns and a number of newly produced talk shows and documentaries. Reruns provide content flow that creates a particular experience of time passing while viewers can relive the experience of watching television in the 1980s. Meanwhile, new productions serve as commentaries on this content and connect bits and pieces into a complete picture by interpreting and providing contextual information. By doing so, the producers of the channel aim to create the feeling of historical continuity. By applying autoethnography, I investigate the experience of watching the channel and the flow of nostalgic sentiments that emerge while experiencing mediated narrations of the past. The aim is to not only explore the channel content, but also come to terms with nostalgia as a subjective experience and the difficulties that appear in the process of researching it.

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Keywords


Soviet television, media nostalgia, mediated nostalgia, liveness, temporality, autoethnography

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