Social Memory and the Digital Domain: The Canonization of Digital Cultural Artefacts (original) (raw)
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The study of social memory has emerged as a rich field of research closely linked to cultural artefacts, communication media and institutions as carriers of a past that transcends the horizon of the individual’s lifetime. Within this domain of research, the dissertation focuses on memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums) and the shifts they are undergoing as the outcome of digitization and the diffusion of online media. Very little is currently known about the impact that digitality and computation may have on social memory institutions, specifically, and social memory, more generally – an area of study that would benefit from but, so far, has been mostly overlooked by information systems research. The dissertation finds its point of departure in the conceptualization of information as an event that occurs through the interaction between an observer and the observed – an event that cannot be stored as information but merely as data. In this context, memory is conceived as an operation that filters, thus forgets, the singular details of an information event by making it comparable to other events according to abstract classification criteria. Against this backdrop, memory institutions are institutions of forgetting as they select, order and preserve a canon of cultural heritage artefacts. Supported by evidence from a case study on the Europeana initiative (a digitization project of European libraries, archives and museums), the dissertation reveals a fundamental shift in the field of memory institutions. The case study demonstrates the disintegration of 1) the cultural heritage artefact, 2) its standard modes of description and 3) the catalogue as such into a steadily accruing assemblage of data and metadata. Dismembered into bits and bytes, cultural heritage needs to be re-membered through the emulation of recognizable cultural heritage artefacts and momentary renditions of order. In other words, memory institutions forget as binary-based data and remember through computational information.
Colloquium of the Latin American and European Meeting on Organization Studies (LAEMOS), 2010
The societal shift from writing to printing to information and communication technologies has been accompanied by a shift in the structure of social memory that seems to threaten our capability to remember. Within this context, a preliminary analysis is offered on the impact of the digitization of cultural heritage on the ways social memory is being organized by memory institutions (archives, libraries and museums) attempting to bring their repositories online. Informed by the work of Niklas Luhmann and Elena Esposito, the paper addresses the problem of an ICT driven organization of cultural heritage transforming information objects into autological, self-describing digital information objects. The research aims to contribute the notion of memory as a counter-concept to the discussion on information and its technologies in the information systems field and related domains such as organization studies and the social study of ICT. It also advocates the necessity to focus more on the implications of ICT on the ways social memory is structured.
When Forgetting Becomes Digital: Social Memory in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Colloquium of the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS), 2017
The structure of social memory is in a process of significant change as social operations of forgetting and remembering are increasingly written in IT and mediated in digital media. Based on an in-depth case study about the digitalization of memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums), the paper demonstrates the emergence of a digital social memory structure that stores data as a means of forgetting. Building on such a concept, we explain the shifting structure of social memory from pre-defined, taxonomic order to algorithmic computation of artefacts and ordering. Finally, we draw implications from our study with regards to core organizational concepts of institutions and platforms as well as broader categories of information infrastructures and a sociology of digital knowledge.
A Cultural Memory of the Digital Age?
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique
Considering digital cultural heritage as the digitalized assets from memory institutions and digital born art, this paper aims to build on its current normative definitions. This first notion addresses the subtle, yet complex relationship between technology and culture. In addition, we consider the criteria set for defining heritage in memory theorization. By doing so, we want to challenge the lack of uniform standards and approaches in dealing with digital cultural heritage and to give Aleida and Jan Assmann's Theory of Cultural Memory a normative dimension. Can there be a cultural memory of the digital age?
Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and the Social
How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions ? phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very much up in the air. The essays in this collection discuss the new technologies of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social. Contributors: David Berry, Ina Blom, Wolfgang Ernst, Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Liv Hausken, Yuk Hui, Trond Lundemo, Adrian Mackenzie, Sónia Matos, Richard Mills, Jussi Parikka, Eivind Røssaak, Stuart Sharples, Tiziana Terranova, Pasi Väliaho.
Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social (2017). (Preview: Contents and Introduction)
Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social Edited by Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo and Eivind Røssaak. Amsterdam University Press, 2016, 332 pages, 39 b/w illustrations. ISBN:9789462982147 How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions, phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very much up in the air. The essays in this collection discuss the new technologies of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social. Contributors: David Berry, Ina Blom, Wolfgang Ernst, Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Liv Hausken, Yuk Hui, Trond Lundemo, Adrian Mackenzie, Sónia Matos, Richard Mills, Jussi Parikka, Eivind Røssaak, Stuart Sharples, Tiziana Terranova, Pasi Väliaho. Full book available for download in Open Access: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=619950;keyword=memory%20in%20motion
Transacting Memory in the Digital Age: Modernity, Fluidity and Immateriality
Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences
The incessant flow of content and data through digital platforms implicates humanity to immaterial modes of transacting identity and memory. Through the image of the ''Napalm Girl'' this paper traces the ways in which iconic images and memory can be remediated through social media platforms and algorithms. The re-contextualisation of history and memory through a technological gaze implicates us within new forms of vulnerabilities. By reviewing the politics of looking and watching online in digital platforms, the paper invites us to ponder over the flattening of memory and history through algorithms and a ''digital morality'' and ''mortality'' encoded through ''user agreements'' and ''community standards''. The repressing of this moral gaze weaves us into a social media economy where morality and ethics are refashioned through a viral economy where images are circulated, altered and reframed through digital technologies. The wider implications of this ''virality'' for humanity, memory making and historicity are explored.
Representing the absent: The limits and possibilities of digital memory and preservation
Filozofija I Drustvo, 2022
Digital preservation has significantly expanded over the past few decades, renewing old and creating new challenges related to provenance, integrity, completeness, and context in memory and preservation practices. In this paper we explore how, perhaps counterintuitively, a more extensive digital historical record offers greater opportunities to misrepresent reality. We first review a set of concepts and socio-cultural approaches to memory and preservation. We then focus on the multiplicity of digital memory and preservation practices today, examining their limits, possibilities, and tensions; specifically, we explore the challenges of decontextualized data, personal versus institutional preservation, and "outsider" digital collections that are willingly and/or forcibly excluded from official accounts. Through these discussions, we review examples of what we consider good digital memory and preservation practices that take new approaches to context and collaboration. Lastly, we explore the optimism inherent in seeking to preserve human knowledge over the long term and to make it accessible to all.
Museum Management and Curatorship, 27:4, 413-429, 2012
In Australia and internationally, museums, libraries and archives are often described as ‘memory institutions’ in discussions about their possible convergence in the digital and physical realms. Yet a wider variety of organisations, such as schools, universities, media corporations, government or religious bodies could also legitimately be ascribed this title. In what special ways do museums, libraries and archives engage with the concept of ‘memory’? Do the roles of these organisations in shaping ‘memory’ align sufficiently for this concept to form the basis on which to ground arguments in favour of convergence? This paper interrogates the idea of ‘memory institutions’ and proposes that such a generic concept is not especially productive in facilitating the thorough, critical analysis necessary to highlight both the synergies and discords in the history and memory-making techniques of museums, libraries and archives.