Social media has transformed the mediascape in the last few years and plays a crucial role in the contemporary public sphere. This situation developed from technologically advanced societies (e.g., the US) in the late 2000s, and countries worldwide followed in the 2010s. In Greece, a country where computer use was limited in the 1990s and became common in the 2000s, Facebook became popular in the early 2010s, coinciding with the popularization of smartphones. Users employed Facebook to publish statuses in their walls, send messages, and upload photos (for details see Papathanassopoulos et al, 2015).
In the beginning, social media was considered to empower audiences without access to mainstream media, democratizing the mediascape; recent experiences show that audiences partially make use of this possibility, but they most often reproduce mainstream media discourses. Some scholars even see social media as a threat to democracy (Vaidhayanathan, 2018) On Facebook, communication is largely organized around the spread of visual stimuli. Facebook pages devoted to earlier lifestyles contribute to the multiplication of discussions on the (usually recent) past. Groups devoted to the recent past discuss experiences using visual (photos, videos, etc.) or audio (e.g., songs) stimuli, often through a nostalgic prism. Such Facebook communities form valuable informal archives (Mylonas, 2016). Of course, such archives, as all historical sources, require stipulations.
I used such material for my PhD project Lifestyles, Gender Identities and New Social Spaces in 1980s Athens and for subsequent publications. My doctoral project explored novel consumer trends in 1980s Athens in areas such as new technologies, entertainment, and so on. It was one of the first projects in Greece that employed virtual ethnography along with more established methods of historical research (intertextual analysis, oral history, etc.). However, this method was not particularly novel. Cultural historians have taken advantage of the Internet to gather testimonies since the 2000s. For example, Liisa Avelin (2009) employed a blog to accumulate testimonies on youth cultures in 1960s and 1970s Finland. Such projects show that social media contribute to the accumulation of information to be used by historians, especially by those working on the very recent past. However, historians are still reluctant to use such sources. I’ll provide two personal experiences. In 2014, I presented a paper on how historians could employ virtual ethnography along with oral history at the Greek Oral History Association conference. Several participants, established oral historians, disagreed with the use of virtual ethnography. In 2018, I published an article on online memories of 1980s–2000s lifestyle politics in Greece during the crisis (Zestanakis, 2018). This work draws exclusively on virtual ethnography findings (mostly discussions in fora). I proposed the paper to several historical journals. In two cases, the editors rejected the study because it was media-oriented and couldn’t be published in historical journals where robust methodology is key. In the end, the paper was published in the reputable interdisciplinary Journal of Consumer Culture.
My project benefitted from material uploaded in groups devoted to novel lifestyles in the 1980s. Such groups upload visual documents, giving visitors access to material that can be hardly found in other sources (e.g., mainstream media). For example, 1980s media often hosted tributes to rock culture or motorcycling. Photos accompanying such publications focused on moments such as concerts and impromptu races, criticizing participants in such lifestyles. In contrast, the material that members upload deals with personal moments (gatherings, holidays, etc.), offering alternatives to media images. Discussions take place below photos in which users reconstruct memories and debate about changes in their lives from then to now, often associating advancements with wider sociocultural developments. Such pages offer a stimulating viewpoint on how subjects encounter memories and relate them to other material having to do with historical developments.
Nostalgic Voices
Nostalgia is a crucial factor in contemporary mediascapes (Niemeyer, 2014; Reynolds, 2011). Nostalgic products flourish in the contemporary market and the cultural industry, intriguing audiences. The multiplication of nostalgia groups on Facebook is part of this process. These groups focus on pop culture (music, lifestyle, fashion, etc.). This is an international phenomenon with a significant impact in Greece, where nostalgic shops, cafes, etc. met with success in the 2010s. If anything makes Greece a special case, it is that the social media boom overlapped with the crisis. Online nostalgic discussions about the 1980s and 1990s (decades commented as prosperous, optimistic, and secure) flourished. This idealization reflects the pessimism of the crisis years, when many Greeks lost a significant portion of their income and felt threatened due to unemployment and generalized insecurity. Many youngsters immigrated as well. However, although the late 20th century was idealized, debates about the emergence of a frivolous culture at that time also flourished. Discussions on the past revolved around concepts such as simplicity or authenticity, namely the idea that this era was characterized by exciting lifestyles that don’t exist in the current pessimistic and technologically driven era.
In some groups, this orientation is obvious. Groups of bikers focus on the popularization of motorcycling, associating this lifestyle with the dissemination of feelings of freedom and the spread of a culture of youth rebellion in the “easygoing” 1980s. The examination of such dialogues without careful contextualization can lead to misinterpretations of the period’s climate. To provide an example, some lifestyles (such as motorcycling) became popular in the 1980s before they become part of the consumer mainstream in the 1990s. So, before the late 1980s, they were discussed as deviant. Debates in these social media groups may lead researchers to the conclusion that such choices were socially costless in the 1980s, while at that time, being a biker was a choice that could make a person an outcast.
In sum, such groups tend to highlight the positive aspects of their experiences in light of the pessimistic crisis era. This is a common characteristic of nostalgia, which is reproduced in media that favors such emotions. A deliberate examination of each group’s features, a consideration of developments between the production of the document(s) and the online discussion, and an evaluation of the moment when discussions take place are crucial.
References
Avelin, L. (2009). Oral history and e-research: Collecting memories of the 1960s and 1970s youth culture. In M. Kurkowska-Buzdan & K. Zamorski (Eds.), Oral History. The Challenges of Dialogue. Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins
Mylonas, Y. (2017) Witnessing absences: social media as archives and public spheres. Social Identities 23(3): 271-288.
Niemeyer K (ed.) (2014) Media and Nostalgia. Yearning for the Past, Present and Future. Houndmills: Palgrave.
Reynolds, S (2011) Retromania. Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber.
Papathanasopoulos, S. et al. (2015). Τα μέσα κοινωνικής δικτύωσης και οι Έλληνες. Η περίπτωση του Facebook [Social media and Greeks. The case of Facebook] Ζητήματα Επικοινωνίας [Communication Issues] 16-17: 20-45.
Vaidhayanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Zestanakis, P. (2018). Online Memories on 1980-2000s Lifestyle and Consumption Politics in Greece During the Current Economic Crisis, 2009-2015. Journal of Consumer Culture. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540517745708