Digital media and the precarity of memory

Hoskins, A. (2017) Digital media and the precarity of memory. In: Collaborative Remembering: Theories, Research, and Applications. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, pp. 371-385. ISBN 9780198737865 (doi: 10.1093/oso/9780198737865.003.0021)

Abstract

Memory, tired of its metaphors of media that gave it substance, strength, and vitality in the world, has embraced the new radical uncertainty of this era. Digital media have unmoored memory, messing with its traditional constraints (brains, groups, archives) to send it off in trajectories with unpredictable finitude and effects. As our attention is held by screens and smartphones, it is lost to memory. But what are the prospects of ever arresting the new gray media’s rendering of remembering beyond human focus? This chapter takes digital media as memory’s most radical collaborator and argues that recognition is needed of the emergent risks from the digital underlayer to twenty-first century living that is pushing remembering out of focus and out of human control.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Hoskins, Professor Andrew
• Authors: Hoskins, A.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• ISBN: 9780198737865

Related URLs

• University of Glasgow Library Catalogue