The Frontstage Never Ends: Affective Self-Revisitation on Instagram as Recursive Impression Management among Dutch Young Adults

Authors: Aaron de Bruijn & Kelsey Alspeer

Abstract:

Happiness in contemporary Western societies has increasingly become a cultural imperative, shaping how individuals display and manage emotion on social media. While prior research has examined how users curate positive self-presentations, little is known about how people later return to these curated memories or how such revisitations shape emotional experience and possibly self-understanding. This study addresses this gap by naming and examining affective self-revisitation (ASR): the practice of revisiting one’s own previously posted Instagram content, whether intentionally or not, in ways that become emotionally or narratively meaningful. Based on four semi-structured interviews with Dutch young adults, analysed through thematic coding, we show that ASR is rarely a conscious mood-regulation strategy. Instead, it emerges as an incidental, emotionally ambivalent, and temporally layered encounter with a previously performed self. Participants’ revisitations were shaped by platform-specific feeling rules through which a platform-specific positivity norm, rooted in broader cultural happiness imperatives, gets enacted, resulting in memory archives that are selectively filtered before they are revisited. We argue that ASR constitutes a form of narrative identity work structured by emotional norms, revealing how digital platforms mediate not only the presentation of the self but also the ways individuals return to and reinterpret their past. The study opens pathways for future research into the emotional and temporal dynamics of digital memory.

De Bruijn and Alspeer_2026_The Frontstage Never Ends.pdf

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