"Remember When?": How Emerging Adults Reflect On, Share, and Make Sense of Photos on Social Media

Current technology makes it possible for billions of photos to be taken and shared every day. Many of these photos will collect virtual dust, while others will become cherished digital mementos – objects kept in memory of a person or event. Photos are one of the most central artifacts for supporting reminiscence across the life course. People often keep memorable photos as nostalgic reminders of their past, share them with others to support collective reminiscence, and display them in their homes to reinforce family bonds and personal identities. However, photography has changed with the advent of Smartphones and social media, and we know relatively little about how people identify, manage, and share digital mementos at different stages in their life course with modern technologies, the functions they serve, and the types of content that people come to cherish out of their increasingly massive personal digital archives. One group of stakeholders that fall into a specific life stage, and who may benefit from access to digital mementos, is emerging adults. Emerging adulthood occurs between the ages of 18 and 25, and it has five defining features as identified by Arnett: identity exploration, instability, self-focus, possibilities, and feeling in-between. Since nostalgia and reminiscence serve important self-oriented, social, and adaptive functions across the life course, emerging adults may use and benefit from access to digital mementos during their transition to adulthood. In this dissertation, I explore the roles that photographic digital mementos serve in the lives of emerging adults in college in three phases, which include a descriptive survey on photo-sharing, interviews aided by virtual tours of social media, and a mixed-methods experimental survey. In the first phase of my research, I draw on my survey on photo-sharing with 138 participants, and 23 semi-structured interviews and virtual tours with college students, to examine how and why they reminisce about and share photographic digital mementos. I explore when and why participants reminisce, what kinds of photos become shareable mementos, how they are shared, and the functions these serve in the context of emerging adulthood. I find that the participants seek out digital mementos to buffer against feelings of loneliness and stress, share them to bond over shared experiences, affirm relationships, reconnect with others, and reveal information about themselves to new friends. Digital mementos are also valued because they support impression management and provide a positive resource for reflecting on and exploring identities. Perhaps most importantly, humorous photos are cherished for their social value – something rarely explored in the reminiscence literature – and ephemeral, chat-based sharing platforms like Snapchat have promoted new forms of collective reminiscence and joking that enable people to build and maintain relationships as well as feel like they belong to a group. In the second phase of my research, I conducted a mixed-methods, experimental survey with 132 first and second year college students to explore the narratives that emerging adults develop when writing and reflecting on nostalgic photos, to understand what kinds of photos prompt nostalgia and how emerging adults make sense of them. In this survey, I identify whether reflecting on such photos promotes social and psychological well-being in the forms of increased perceptions of social capital and self-continuity. The third phase of my research explores the roles that digital mementos and nostalgia play in the transition to college and adulthood by synthesizing findings across my interviews. My findings suggest that nostalgia and digital mementos play an important role in the transition to adulthood because they are used to socially, emotionally, and cognitively navigate changing relationships and identities during this life stage. My research expands our understanding of nostalgia in the context of emerging adulthood and digital technologies, identifies different ways that social media affordances influence how young adults collectively and personally engage with their past content, and suggests how design can support meaningful social and personal engagement with digital mementos.Ph.D., Information Studies -- Drexel University, 201