Assembled Remembering: Youth and Digital Memory Practices

Abstract

With growing digital saturation questions of how digital technologies mediate memory and how they change people’s ways of remembering and collective understandings of the past, have gained great attention. However, despite the large number of works discussing the relationship between youth and digital media little has been researched about young people’s role in digital memory making. Young people’s lives are intrinsically intertwined with digital technologies; particularly the smartphone has become an important companion to fulfilling everyday tasks, spending time on social media, communicating with peers, gathering information and crafting online personas. Thus, large parts of young people’s personal memories are made, recorded and shared digitally. Nevertheless, young people’s unique contributions to collective memory, their memory practices and how these practices are informed by youth’s specific relationship to digital media remain little discussed. Against this backdrop, the thesis investigates how digital media is used by young people to create, share, access and maintain memory.

This study is based on 12 months of digital ethnography working with a heterogeneous group of young people aged between 13 and 27 living in London and several German cities. The work presents emerging memory assemblages involved in contemporary memory making, revealing that non-human actors like algorithms play a crucial role in how young people’s memory making is shaped. It further highlights, that digital media is neither a neutral tool for creating, sharing and maintaining memory nor does it determine how memory is made. Instead, I argue that digital media and young people co-create memory. This co-creation is marked by friction between young people’s needs and the interests of large technology companies to create profitable products. The research findings illustrate this complex relationship, which is also reflected in young people’s memory practices.