The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life (The MIT Press) by Humphreys Lee

Author:Humphreys, Lee [Humphreys, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: diaries, socila media, cell phones, scrapbooks, Twitter, cataloguing, everyday life, the self, Facebook, media, photo albums, technology, journals, identity
ISBN: 9780262037853
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2018-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

Memory Work and Mediated Memories

Remembrancing is a form of what the memory scholar Annette Kuhn calls “memory work.”1 This is an active process of remembering that questions the implicit authenticity of objects that hold memories, like family photographs or souvenirs. Kuhn argues that memory work is a conscious process of staging memory. While memory might seem unconscious, memory work highlights the ways that people purposefully and strategically create media traces to help them remember events and experiences in their lives within particular narratives of the self, the social context (e.g., the family or romantic partner), and the broader cultural environment. Therefore, remembrancing as a form of media work intertwines the personal, the private, and the public.

Media play a vital role in memory work. The media scholar José van Dijck uses the term “mediated memories” to convey both “the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technologies, for creating and re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others.”2 Here media and memory are mutually shaped and constituted. Media technologies, like photo albums, scrapbooks, or Facebook are not merely memory objects that hold or store our memories for us. Instead these media actively shape our memories, for example, reminding us how birthdays and weddings should be captured and saved.

Christine Lohmeier and Christian Pentzold extend van Dijck’s understanding of mediated memories to argue that mediated memory work are “bundles of bodily and materially grounded practices to accomplish memories in and through media environments”.3 Mediated memory work is not just cognitive but somatic in nature. They argue it simultaneously helps people maintain a sense of individuality while connecting them to larger collectives and communities through both cognitive as well as emotional activities. Mediated memory work also has a materiality, whereby media technologies become the means through which people “work on and with memories”.4 Remembrancing is the mediated memory work of media accounting.

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