Whereas the growing body of research into algorithmic memory technologies and the platformisation of memory has a media-centric approach, this article engages with the question of how users experience and make sense of such omnipresent technologies. By means of a questionnaire and follow-up qualitative interviews with young adults (born between 1997 and 2005) and a Grounded Theory approach, we empirically examine an object of study that has been mainly explored theoretically. Our study found four major experiences associated with algorithmic memory technologies: intrusive, dissonant, nostalgic, and practical. Connected to these experiences, we found four sets of practices and strategies of use: avoidance and non-use; curating and training; reminiscing; and cognitive offloading and managing identity through memory. Our results show that our participants’ use and awareness of algorithmic memory technologies are diverse and, at times, contradictory, and shape their attitudes towards their memories, whether they are mediated or not. Hence, our study offers nuances and new perspectives to extant research into algorithmic memory technologies, which often assumes particular users and uses.

The ubiquity of social media platforms allows individuals to easily share and curate their personal lives with friends, family, and the world. The selective nature of sharing one’s personal life may reinforce the memories and details of the shared experiences while simultaneously inducing the forgetting of related, unshared memories/experiences. This is a well-established psychological phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF, Anderson et al.). To examine this phenomenon in the context of social media, two experiments were conducted using an adapted version of the RIF paradigm in which participants either shared experimenter-contrived (Study 1) or personal photographs (Study 2) on social media platforms. Study 1 revealed that participants had more accurate recall of the details surrounding the shared photographs as well as enhanced recognition of the shared photographs. Study 2 revealed that participants had more consistent recall of event details captured in the shared photographs than details captured or uncaptured in the unshared photographs. These results suggest that selectively sharing photographs on social media may specifically enhance the recollection of event details associated with the shared photographs. The novel and ecologically embedded methods provide fodder for future research to better understand the important role of social media in shaping how individuals remember their personal experiences.

The pervasive use of media at current-day festivals thoroughly impacts how these live events are experienced, anticipated, and remembered. This empirical study examined eventgoers’ live media practices – taking photos, making videos, and in-the-moment sharing of content on social media platforms – at three large cultural events in the Netherlands. Taking a practice approach (Ahva 2017; Couldry 2004), the author studied online and offline event environments through extensive ethnographic fieldwork: online and offline observations, and interviews with 379 eventgoers. Analysis of this research material shows that through their live media practices eventgoers are continuously involved in mediated memory work (Lohmeier and Pentzold 2014; Van Dijck 2007), a form of live storytelling that revolves around how they want to remember the event. The article focuses on the impact of mediated memory work on the live experience in the present. It distinguishes two types of mediatised experience of live events: live as future memory and the experiential live. The author argues that memory is increasingly incorporated into the live experience in the present, so much so that, for many eventgoers, mediated memory-making is crucial to having a full live event experience. The article shows how empirical research in media studies can shed new light on key questions within memory studies.

Within Holocaust studies, there has been an increasingly uncritical acceptance that by engaging with social media, Holocaust memory has shifted from the ‘era of the witness’ to the ‘era of the user’ (Hogervorst 2020). This paper starts by problematising this proposition. This claim to a paradigmatic shift implies that (1) the user somehow replaces the witness as an authority of memory, which neglects the wealth of digital recordings of witnesses now circulating in digital spaces and (2) agency online is solely human-centric, a position that ignores the complex negotiations between corporations, individuals, and computational logics that shape our digital experiences. This article proposes instead that we take a posthumanist approach to understanding Holocaust memory on, and with, social media. Adapting Barad's (2007) work on entanglement to memory studies, we analyse two case studies on TikTok: the #WeRemember campaign and the docuseries How To: Never Forget to demonstrate: (1) the usefulness of reading Holocaust memory on social media through the lens of entanglement which offers a methodology that accounts for the complex network of human and non-human actants involved in the production of this phenomenon which are simultaneously being shaped by it. (2) That professional memory institutions and organisations are increasingly acknowledging the use of social media for the sake of Holocaust memory. Nevertheless, we observe that in practice the significance of technical actancy is still undervalued in this context.

This article investigates memory practices in connection with retrospective Facebook groups created for remembering specific aspects of the past. It focuses on how members of these groups experience and deal with how Facebook's interface and algorithms enable, shape, and interfere with memory practices. From this point of departure, the article discusses and nuances the idea that a ‘connective turn’ has brought with it an ontological shift in memory culture (Hoskins 2017a) and a ‘greying’ of memories (Hoskins and Halstead 2021). Theoretically, the article draws on Deborah Lupton's (2020) concept of ‘data selves’, which offers an account of how people interact with data and technology. This concept does not view data practices as immaterial but rather as material, corporeal, and affective, thus prompting an understanding of memory practices as hybrid processes where offline and online practices intersect (Gajjala 2019; Merrill forthcoming/2024). In this qualitative study, nine members of retrospective Facebook groups were chosen to participate in semi-structured interviews. The analysis explains the importance of viewing contemporary memory practices as hybrid, showing a greying effect within the affordances of Facebook that shapes both which memories are shared and how memories are shared. In addition, the analysis nuances the idea of an ontological shift in memory culture and the greying of memories by investigating how the interviewees’ deal and struggle with the affordances of the platform in their memory practices.

Digital media have changed the ways people mobilise and act collectively in times of crisis. During the Russian aggression against Ukraine, they have been at the forefront of war coverage giving users the possibility to share experiences of wartime reality. To critically engage in the mediatisation of the current war in the context of war witnessing, this article aims at studying the war diaries shared on media during the Russo-Ukrainian war. More precisely, this study focuses on the analysis of Facebook and MyWar platform digital war diaries that were triggered by Russia's full-fledged invasion of Ukraine 2022. The article seeks to understand the main tools for experiencing and constructing wartime reality and war trauma. The experimental work presented here provides one of the first investigations into how wartime witnessing of Russian aggression is happening and how it is shared in the contemporary space of digital media and fosters intellectual discussion about the dynamics of digital participation while witnessing and narrating war experiences.

This article explores the nature and dynamics of mnemonic communities within the context of social media platforms and proposes to identify mnemonic communities using hashtag co-occurrence analysis. The article distinguishes between ‘explicit’ and ‘latent’ mnemonic communities, arguing that while some digital mnemonic communities may exhibit characteristics of offline communities, others exist latently as discursive spaces or semiospheres without direct awareness. On platforms like Instagram, hashtags function as semiotic markers, but also as user-chosen indexes to the content. As hashtags link the social and semantic aspects of community formation, hashtag co-occurrence analysis offers a robust framework for understanding and mapping these communities. This method allows to detect and analyse patterns of hashtag use that suggest the presence of networked community structures that may not be apparent or conscious to the social media users themselves. Additionally, a metric is introduced for determining the degree of ‘latentness’ of communities that quantifies the cohesion within communities compared to their external connections. The article demonstrates this approach by applying hashtag co-occurrence analysis to a dataset of Instagram posts tagged with #Juneteenth, a popular hashtag used to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. It identifies 87 mnemonic communities that reflect the diversity and complexity of how platforms facilitate memory-sharing practices and the role of semiotic markers in forming (latent) mnemonic networks.

Services offered by genealogy companies are increasingly underpinned by computational remediation and algorithmic power. Users are encouraged to employ a variety of mobile web and app plug-ins to create progressively more sophisticated forms of synthetic media featuring their (often deceased) ancestors. As the promotion of deepfake and voice-synthesizing technologies intensifies within genealogical contexts – aggrandised as mechanisms for ‘bringing people back to life’ – we argue it is crucial that we critically examine these processes and the socio-technical infrastructures that underpin them, as well as their mnemonic impacts. In this article, we present a study of two AI-enabled services released by the genealogy company MyHeritage: Deep Nostalgia (launched 2020), and DeepStory (2022). We carry out a close critical reading of these services and the outputs they produce which we understand as examples of ‘remediated memory’ (Kidd and Nieto McAvoy 2023) shaped by corporate interests. We examine the distribution of agency where the promotion by these platforms of unique and personalised experiences comes into tension with the propensity of algorithms to homogenise. The analysis intersects with nascent ethical debates about the exploitative and extractive qualities machine learning. Our research unpacks the social and (techno-)material implications of these technologies, demonstrating an enduring individual and collective need to connect with our past(s), and to test and extend our memories and recollections through increasingly intense and proximate new media formats.

This article is on algorithmically generated memories: data on past events that are stored and automatically ranked and classified by digital platforms, before they are presented to the user as memories. By mobilising Henri Bergson's philosophy, I centre my analysis on three of their aspects: the spatialisation and calculation of time in algorithmic systems, algorithmic remembrance, and algorithmic perception. I argue that algorithmically generated memories are a form of automated remembrance best understood as perception, and not recollection. Perception never captures the totality of our surroundings but is partial and the parts of the world we perceive are the parts that are of interest to us. When conscious beings perceive, our perception is always coupled with memory, which allows us to transcend the immediate needs of our body. I argue that algorithmic systems based on machine learning can perceive, but that they cannot remember. As such, their perception operates only in the present. The present they perceive in is characterised by immense amounts of data that are beyond human perceptive capabilities. I argue that perception relates to a capacity to act as an extended field of perception involves a greater power to act within what one perceives. As such, our memories are increasingly governed by a perception that operates in a present beyond human perceptual capacities, motivated by interests and needs that lie somewhat beyond interests of needs formulated by humans. Algorithmically generated memories are not only trying to remember for us, but they are also perceiving for us.

In April 2022, journalists at the tech website 9to5Mac discovered that photographs taken at sites related to the Holocaust would no longer appear in the Memories feature of Apple's Photos app. This article examines how news of this decision was received by the public through analysis of the comment section that followed the original 9to5Mac post. The perspectives on display in this public forum provide insight into the evolving public perception of automated memory technologies and the potential consequences of their use. Through this analysis, several interrelated areas of public concern emerge. These include the boundaries of platform intervention for governing access to content, the subjective qualities of personal photographs, and the metrics upon which algorithmic memory systems operate. Though opinions vary, this comment section captures an illustrative range of sentiment towards Apple Memories and this intervention into the memories of its users. This range demonstrates a degree of scepticism, alarm, and dissatisfaction rising among users who are increasingly aware of how algorithms are influencing their memories.

This article aims to track and tackle the #ŠtoTeNema hashtag to analyse the meanings generated by Twitter end-users who employed #ŠtoTeNema together with other hashtags, texts, visuals, hyperlinks, and metadata. ŠTO TE NEMA (Why are you not here?) first appeared as an alternative commemorative practice (in 2006) to remember the victims of the Srebrenica genocide (1995). In 2012, the #ŠtoTeNema hashtag emerged to commemorate human loss on Twitter and provide even more comprehensive access to this space of memory and suffering. Using multimodal discourse analysis, I examine how Aida Šehović, the artist behind ŠTO TE NEMA, with her team and Twitter's end-users, portrayed the Srebrenica genocide by employing #ŠtoTeNema. I argue that ŠTO TE NEMA has become an influential and recognisable representation of the Srebrenica genocide not only on-site but also online. This research concludes that #ŠtoTeNema gained momentum during the global pandemic peak (2020), creating inclusive access to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the genocide locally, regionally, and transnationally.

This paper is based on research conducted in February–April 2022. It describes and illuminates what was happening with tech-savvy educated people between 20 and 40 years old in Russia, while their usual digital tools and places for the autobiographical process were changing in the spring of 2022. Facing censorship of platforms, surveillance, and the inability to pay for services, people who were keeping important memories of their lives online were deleting their profiles, migrating to other platforms, censoring themselves, and creating archives of autobiographically meaningful materials. The paper examines these disruptions as a case that illuminates the role of online platforms in autobiographical memory and expands some concepts within autobiographical memory studies, such as evocative objects and autotopography.

A pioneering book on an important novel subject, Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict presents a thorough and detailed overview of memory activism in Serbia over the last 20 years, across two generations. First of all, the book traces the transition from anti-war and human rights activism to ‘first-generation memory activism’, by examining the trajectory of the NGO Women in Black created in the 1990s to protest against Serbian nationalism, Milošević's war policy and Serb war crimes in the Yugoslav wars. The turn to what could be defined as memory activism grew organically out of this initial anti-nationalist and anti-war struggle, gaining traction following the deep disappointment felt by many in the Serbian alternative with the continuities in Serbia's institutions and social structures after the fall of Milošević in 2000, the official silence and denial of war crimes, and the unfulfilled promises of transitional justice in the region.