Rose Tinted Screens and Ruined Dreams: Digital Decay and Nostalgia on Netflix

Abstract

In an exploration of digital video as a historically terrifying and oftentimes uncanny entity, this thesis delves into how the medium fairs in our current digital age, where nostalgic motifs and aesthetics seem to intensify as fiercely as technology is advancing. Contextualised within Svetlana Boym’s epoch of the “off-modern”, a journey is spun through affective, digital, and perceptual theories, updating the popularly discussed economic readings of nostalgia. This phenomenon is explored using the example of Netflix, by analysing its state as an interface, digital streaming platform, and producer of nostalgic original television; predominately the 2016 series, Stranger Things. Nostalgia is framed as an aesthetic technique that borrows the textures and properties of analogue screen pictures and earlier, obsolete technologies to disguise the uncanny user experiences we face within the digital. Finding that nostalgia arrives frequently in the form of decaying, breaking and dying media objects, the argument concludes in a speculation that the appeal for nostalgia in a digital age is the reminder of mortality in the media object and human body alike.