Nostalgic Communities on YouTube: Towards Exploratory Netnography

As Svetlana Boym used to say, the XXth century began with revolutions and ended with nostalgia. Today we can say that nostalgia has long ago become one of the leading imperatives of cultural consumption, as evidenced by studies of television and the blogosphere. At the same time, there are not many studies that aim to analyze the nostalgic dimension in the context of the most relevant media, one of which is YouTube. There is also little research on the transformation of nostalgic affects and representations themselves under the influence of new practices of cultural consumption. In this study, the exploratory netnography of nostalgia has revealed the nostalgic dimension of YouTube. It shows that nostalgia on YouTube is not only produced by content creators, but also directly by community members highlighting the importance of participation culture in the YouTube space. In addition, due to the declining importance of television in the practices of video content consumption, the transformation of the nostalgic dimension in the direction from monolithic collective memory to localization within individual online communities is indicated. At the same time, the research results show that the very notion of nostalgia needs new operationalization due to transformations of both the objects of nostalgic experiences and the practices of nostalgic cultural consumption. We believe that this exploratory study can serve as a starting point for a more focused analysis of individual nostalgic phenomena.