Understanding Nostalgia in Facebook's "Memories of Old Manila"

Abstract

Espiridion, M. E. (2019) Remembering the Past through Memory-enabling Spaces: Understanding Nostalgia in Facebook’s “Memories of Old Manila”, Unpublished Undergraduate Thesis, University of the Philippines Diliman College of Mass Communication

This thesis looked into the communication process of memory making by looking into the insights of the members of the Facebook group Memories of Old Manila. The study aimed to document how individuals perform nostalgia in order to create a collective memory in the mentioned online community. Using the concepts in the Memory Acts theory (De Saint-Laurent, 2018) and the factors of Online Identity Expression (Marwick, 2013) of the members to find how is nostalgia performed. This research utilized an interpretivist research design to look into the discursive nature of the identity of the members when it comes to sharing nostalgia and to understand the general collective memory making process. Through interviews and the textual analyses, the study found factors of online expression in Facebook that help define the memory making process. The findings also revealed that the creation of memory making and the factors affecting online identity expression resulted to different manifestations of identity. Collective memory in Memories of Old Manila is about sharing nostalgia about the Filipino experience. In conclusion, the nostalgia performed in the Facebook group is constructed differently for each member of the community but is collectively woven into a memory.

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