Analog Desires: On <i>Stranger Things</i> and the Logics of Nostalgia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the relation between Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016–) and the omnipresence of nostalgic tropes within current mediascapes. Nostalgia for the 1980s is already a well-examined subject within film and media studies, yet there remains much to say about the ties between nostalgia and desire. As with any desire considered from a psychoanalytic standpoint, nostalgia is focused on an impossible object that is conceived in retrospect. After comparing the object of nostalgia with the functioning of the object-cause of desire as it is conceptualized in psychoanalytic thought, this paper argues that the nostalgic desire expressed within the series is situated around the very shift from the analog to the digital. It is argued that nostalgia within Stranger Things emerges from the remediation of analog media and technologies, and that its relation to desire emanates from the very lack that is retrospectively situated at the heart of digital media.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".