Symposium on Digital Media and Memory (Glasgow, April 17)

The notion of Memory in the digital age is at the core of the Living Archives project. On April 17, the Glasgow Memory Group hosts a symposium called Digital/Social Media and Memory.

They write:

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. The titles of the keynotes give a clue to what they will be about:

Archives in Transition: Tempor(e)alities of Media-Connected Memory, Wolfgang Ernst (Humboldt University, Berlin).

Of Queues and Traffic: Network Microtemporalities, Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art).

Interactivity, Immersion, and Historical Consciousness, Wulf Kansteiner (Binghamton SUNY).

Social media and the construction of personal memory: The case of Facebook’s
Timeline, José van Dijck (University of Amsterdam).

Mineralised Memory, Digital Memory: On the Political Economy of Digital Media and 
the ‘globital memory field’, Anna Reading (King’s College London).

Recording Technology: The Archaeology of Bodily Ritual, William Merrin (Swansea University).

You find all abstracts here and you register for the symposium here.

Read more about the Glasgow Memory Group. The symposium is sponsored by the SAGE Journal of Memory Studies.

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