Digital/Social Media and Memory: A Symposium

Does promiscuous media make for promiscuous memory? Even the sciences-of-the-mind increasingly search for cognition – the mental process of awareness, perception, remembering – outside of the head, extended and distributed across digital/social worlds. Memory is breaking out of the archive, the organization, the institution, increasingly diffused across brains, bodies, and personal and public lives. Has the digital leached away scarcity, trust, obligation, and much of memory’s former faithful companions? ‘Memory’ today seems different, strange, but which has also acquired (paradoxically) new force and new uncertainties.

Is connectivity irresistible? Is memory lost to the machine? Is the archive broken?

Six leading experts in the fields of media archaeology, media studies and memory studies assess the emergent forces of remembering and forgetting in the new media ecology:

Wolfgang Ernst

Jussi Parikka

Wulf Kansteiner

José van Dijck

Anna Reading

William Merrin

This event is sponsored by:

The Economic History Society
www.ehs.org.uk

CREATe
www.create.ac.uk/

and the SAGE Journal of Memory Studies
http://mss.sagepub.com

Twitter @memorystudies