Description
Developments in media technologies have a complex relationship to memory and nostalgia, which are mediated by and directed towards digital and analogue media objects, texts, and genres. As levels of public trust in social media platforms have declined in recent years, amidst a landscape marked by controversy, corporatisation, and misinformation, ‘social media nostalgia’ (Jungselius and Weilenmann 2023) often centres an imagined past of social media prior to the ascendancy of Big Tech and its concomitant crises. This aligns with sociological accounts which emphasise the relationship between nostalgia, crisis, and insecurity (Jacobsen 2023).Nostalgic discourses of temporal loss have long infused the imaginary surrounding the microblogging platform Tumblr, whose obsolescence has enabled it to accrue value amongst users as a symbol of a supposedly simpler era within social media history (Tiidenberg, Hendry, and Abidin 2021). In turn, the platform has made discursive moves to engage with and co-opt popular articulations of social media nostalgia in order to position itself as a foil for the contemporary platform economy. In this paper, I will conduct a critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock 2018) of the Tumblr platform, paying particular attention to its newsroom from 2019-2024, to consider how Tumblr has platformed popular anxieties about platform capitalism and sociotechnical change. This is sociologically consequential not only with regards to the commercialisation of ‘digital nostalgias’ (Niemeyer 2024), but also because this represents an attempt to discursively reshape the criteria by which social media technologies are valued and interpreted in broader moments of crisis and change.
| Period | 25 Apr 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | British Sociological Association Conference |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Manchester, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- platforms
- social media
- technology
- nostalgia