Memory in Motion

In today's media-saturated culture, networked systems of information and communication remediate the practices and the perceptions relevant to Memory and History. By highlighting a number of cultural shifts in how information, memory and history are produced today, this paper aims to offer a perspective on how our society is "remembering" via the new digital media that increasingly mediate our contemporary reality.

Colloquium of the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS), 2017

The structure of social memory is in a process of significant change as social operations of forgetting and remembering are increasingly written in IT and mediated in digital media. Based on an in-depth case study about the digitalization of memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums), the paper demonstrates the emergence of a digital social memory structure that stores data as a means of forgetting. Building on such a concept, we explain the shifting structure of social memory from pre-defined, taxonomic order to algorithmic computation of artefacts and ordering. Finally, we draw implications from our study with regards to core organizational concepts of institutions and platforms as well as broader categories of information infrastructures and a sociology of digital knowledge.

Handbuch Soziale Praktiken und Digitale Alltagswelten, (ed.) Heidrun Friese, Gala Rebane, Marcus Nolden, Miriam Schreiter, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 978-3-658-08460-8 (print), 978-3-658-08460-8 (online)., 2017

Abstract As digital media lead to a transformation of the experience of time and space, they evoke new questions for the field of both personal and collective memory and history. While the bonds that held groups together in pre-modern societies once guaranteed the sustainability of social memory, patterns of common belonging have changed in today’s computerized world. This chapter argues that digital communication technologies have given rise to new unique forms of collectivity through the opportunities they afford for bringing people together around the globe. Furthermore, digital media provide emplacement for collective and global memory. The chapter also raises the issue of whether digital records have the potential to oppose official historiographies with grassroots counterhistory.

The article discusses the potential of the internet and especially of the world wide web as a medium for collective remembrance. First, the theoretical ground is laid by outlining three concepts of memory. Here, the emphasis lies on how media are conceptualized in relation to cultural memory. In a second step, these theoretical premises are connected to an understanding of discourse as social cognition. As such, we argue, it forms the integral part of memory work and can also have its place in computer-mediated communication. On this basis, the web is viewed as a medium of and for memory work constituted by discursive practices which form cultural memory.

HyperCultura, 2014

A remembrance can be oral, written or visual and reflects the behavior of memory, which proceeds by associations, in "leaps and bounds", remembering what it wants to remember. If memory becomes a "documented culture" or a culture "organized in a social memory", then individual memory becomes historical and shared, it becomes a strong element of the identity in which it was imprisoned and evokes the memory of all those who lived the same historical period. If individual memory is important in order to live the present, collective memory is just as important, because it strengthens the sense of belonging and reawakens the past. In the current study, the meaning of being the same age and the significance of "generational" remembrance will be explored. Modern technologies provide great ways to remember, because they rekindle old memories and make us appreciate past events of our life. Perhaps the most widespread technology is television, which in ...

Kültür ve İletişim, 2017

Digital media that lead to a transformation of the experience of time and space also evokes new questions for the field of memory. The sustainability of social memory once guaranteed in traditional societies through the bonds and relations that held groups together. Today, in a computerized society, the patterns of common belonging have changed. Beyond categories of the traditional, cultural, and national, new sets of bonds are bringing people together, such as people becoming "relatives in sufferings." This study argues that digital media have created spaces for unique and quite different collectivities through the opportunities they afford for bringing people together around the world. Moreover, such media have become a space for global memory and even new identity projects. The argument also problematizes the issue of whether digital data has the potential to oppose the official histories aimed at the legitimation of official ideologies with a counterhistory through the digital platforms of Bak.

New social and spatial media and other modes of pervasive computing are altering ways of knowing, remembering, and engaging across time and space. This collection explores how the digital, interactive, and collaborative nature of these technologies contributes to transformations in the nature of knowledge and memory. In particular, the contributions focus on theorizing the collective or social subjectivities and impacts of these technologically mediated rememberings. What are the processes and relationships through which shared knowledge and memory can be transmitted and transformed across time and space? How does memory become socially and politically meaningful? The contributing authors consider how new social and spatial technologies transform space/time connections, reconfigure the forms and practices through which collective memory is transmitted or attention is paid, and impact social relations.

Digitalization, especially of media, as a social process can be seen as one of the most important processes for the transformation of contemporary societies. It changes the ways, individuals get access to the world, it also changes the forms of communications, and it changes the (social) forms of recollecting the past. In a first step I will outline the basic principles of a sociology of memory. This is done starting from a phenomenological and Schutzian concept of memory, that is transferred to the social. Memory is conceived as an operation that informs present processes with the remnants of past processes (knowledge). Therefore, the repeated pragmatic and situational performance with its activated subjective and social horizons is the starting point for analysis. In a second step the process of digitalization on different levels of the social is described. I will conclude, that the concept of social memory can lay out the foundations for a description of the massive changes induced with digital media. Toward a sociology of memory In the past decade a new variation of sociological theory and research has developed: a sociology of memory, which (reintroduces s the concept of memory into sociology (see for example Sebald & Wagle 2015, Dimbath & Heinlein 2015). Memory is used as a fundamental term for theoretical descriptions and empirical analyses of social phenomena. The focus is on references to the past actualized in current social processes as well as on references to the future, the experiential background [Erfahrungshintergrund] and the anticipational horizon [Erwartungshorizont] (Koselleck 1979). Therefore, this kind of reconstructive analysis centers around temporal relations, temporal orders and concatenations, selective actualizations out of a horizon of possibilities (which also means forgetting), social change and transformation. Common sense takes memory as an individual psychic ability. Recollection is taken as an intentional and conscious search for the past as it once was. Instead I would propose to define memory in leaning on Schütz process of meaning constitution as a double operation supplying present courses of experiences with remnants of the past (types and schemes of experience) and generating such remnants out of present experiences. Both modes of memory operation take place in the present and only in the present. Accordingly, recollection is every present reference to our use of the past, irrespective of intentions or motives which could trigger such a reference. Recollection, even of the most vivid kind, is always a reconstruction of the past; there is no way of grasping the past as it has been.

The focus of my contribute is on the relation between individual and collective memory and social media. Social media are taken into account not only as communication realm but also as memory places, where individuals construct their memories and select what will be remembered or erased. Secondly, we can suppose that in social media individual and collective memories can be constructed in a more participated way, thank to connection and contents sharing technologies. Starting from the hypothesis of a mutual shaping of memory and media and that the users are able to shape technologies of memory in order to construct a meaningful world, the paper intend reflect on potential and actual capacities of social technologies to generate new pattern of remembrance and forgetting. I attempt to inquire about this question through the analysis of some case studies. We can indeed observe many new technologies of memory at work and many different kind of memory practices in the WWW: while Wikipedi...

This paper discusses the social context of remembering, arguing that remembering, though performed individually, cannot be conceived without the society that surrounds the remembrancer. It discusses various theories on memory, the act of remembering, its context, and attempts to reach a synthesis.

2017

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique

Considering digital cultural heritage as the digitalized assets from memory institutions and digital born art, this paper aims to build on its current normative definitions. This first notion addresses the subtle, yet complex relationship between technology and culture. In addition, we consider the criteria set for defining heritage in memory theorization. By doing so, we want to challenge the lack of uniform standards and approaches in dealing with digital cultural heritage and to give Aleida and Jan Assmann's Theory of Cultural Memory a normative dimension. Can there be a cultural memory of the digital age?

The paper starts from a qualitative research, carried out through 50 in-depth interviews, on memory and its evolutions in connection with digital tools and networked environments. The aim was to investigate how new generations build their individual memory and more specifically which things, mementos and interfaces of memory they use; which are their practices to create and to socialize memory, how and in which measure they transform it in cultural capital. The role of interactive media for memory production, storage and communication will be outlined; furthermore, the web and social media will be analysed as cultural interfaces through which people approach their past. The analysis will explore how digital environments for writing, publishing, showing personal experience are changing the subjective criteria to distinguish past and present, private and public dimensions of memory. The productive dimension of 2.0 web environments is indeed giving result to a new diffused subjectivity in which, on the one hand people are stimulated to enlarge the virtual audience of their subjective memories, whilst on the other hand, they transform and mediate their subjectivity in order to fit it in a global language and circuit.

Journal of Physical Development and Human Activity, 2011

This paper offers some reflections on the role and significance of the media in the formation and construction of both individual and collective memory. Initially, a brief outline of the emergence of 'memory studies' as a field of inquiry will be offered before focusing on the notion 'collective memory' as a distinctive conceptualisation of the ways in which memories and remembering function in society and culture. The formation of collective memory has arguably undergone something of a transitional shift in late modern societies wherein media and communication technologies and systems are powerfully implicated in the construction and negotiation of what cultures collectively remember and forget. Recent debates concerning the ways in which developments in new (digital) media technologies play a potentially transformative role in terms of reconfiguring the ways in which collective memories are formed, stored and transmitted are also considered. In concluding, it is proposed that whilst the phenomenon of collective memory is not simply reducible to media and communication technologies it is certainly the case that the media play a key but not determining cultural role in ongoing reconstructions of collective memory.