Fever Dreaming on TikTok: A Conceptual Framework for Performative Nostalgia

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.