Srirachanikorn, R. (2025). Internet pitstops: YouTube as a place for reimagining social time with nostalgia. Time & Society, 0(0).

Abstract:

This essay introduces the concept of internet pitstops to explain how and why YouTube has become a popular site for social timekeeping and expression. It reframes the cultural narrative that prolonged engagement with YouTube and specific short-form media is a symptom of ‘brain rot’. Instead, YouTube serves as an internet pitstop where individuals take shelter from the narrative that time has to be spent productively. It is this prolonged engagement with YouTube and its videos that social institutions come to label as unproductive, or media that causes ‘brain rot’. The essay draws on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of a ‘present without presence’ by arguing that social institutions use social time to impose pretexts over the context of time as a relational process between local actants. YouTube internet pitstops promote a reconstitution of time with presence: human commenters, the media content, and the in-built mechanisms reconstitute the present using social time. Crucially, nostalgia is integral to this contextual time that also reimagines the past, present, and future. Internet pitstops can be a useful theoretical tool for time scholars, nostalgia researchers, and sociologists interested in digital culture, time expression, and everyday life.