Memory and Social Media: New Forms of Remembering and Forgetting

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 Wikipedia can be observed as an objectification of a participate cultural memory, the web logs emerge as places of construction of individual memory and identity and Flickr as a shared archive of personal visual memories. Concurrently, new forms of participate social archive about historical events are rising and so on. The aim is to design a first phenomenology of grassroots memories in connection to social media and to reflect about the “social media memory”, that is characterized by new problems and new possibilities related both to remembrance and to oblivion.