
what is déjà vu
feel familiar?
what is déjà vu?
a neurological glitch, a false sense of familiarity.
Déjà vu is a neurological glitch, a false sense of familiarity. On social media, this is magnified into a constant re-encountering of moments out of context, a looping of emotional and temporal experiences that feel familiar but rootless. Social media platforms fracture our temporal continuity. We scroll between the present, the distant past, and algorithmic futures, often without noticing.
This mimics the disorienting feeling of being in multiple timelines at once. This parallels the experience of third, fourth, and fifth culture individuals who exist between cultural narratives, languages, histories. Their temporal and cultural continuity is fragmented, often stitched together from mediated memories.
In a digitized, dislocated, and culturally fluid world, memory becomes the primary site of identity and belonging, but it, too, is fragmented. Mediated by photography, disrupted by AI, and destabilized by social media's temporal logic. As objective anchors dissolve (home, truth, origin, the photograph), we retreat into internal archives, and yet even those are shaped by the same forces. We live in a loop of déjà vu, curating identities from pieces of unstable pasts.