Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition

by Andrew Hoskins (Editor)

Digital media, networks and archives reimagine and revitalize individual, social and cultural memory but they also ensnare it, bringing it under new forms of control. Understanding these paradoxical conditions of remembering and forgetting through today’s technologies needs bold interdisciplinary interventions.

Digital Memory Studies seizes this challenge and pioneers an agenda that interrogates concepts, theories and histories of media and memory studies, to map a holistic vision for the study of the digital remaking of memory.

Through the lenses of connectivity, archaeology, economy, and archive, contributors illuminate the uses and abuses of the digital past via an array of media and topics, including television, videogames and social media, and memory institutions, network politics and the digital afterlife.

325 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 27, 2017

About the author

Andrew is a software engineer and author whose mission is to live in a society that is empathetic and connected. That mission has threaded through his past work at Facebook, as well as his current work at Oculus VR and his book, Amnesium.

He wrote Amnesium, in part, as a reaction the heavily partisan and politicized national discourse in America today. He drew up several interesting, far-flung characters who would be ideologically opposed, gave them a gripping situation that brought them together, and saw what happened.

Virtual Reality also has the potential to bring far-flung people together in deep, surprising ways. Enabling people to have consistently good experiences with strangers online, and in some cases form lasting connections with them, is one of the biggest challenges facing the VR industry. He’s excited to be pursuing this goal at Oculus VR.

He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he hones his storytelling skills playing pen-and-paper role-playing games. You can follow him at www.facebook.com/AndrewHoskinsAuthor.

Reviews

[Ed Summers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this very much, particularly the chapter by Debra Ramsey at the end, Tensions in the Interface: the archive and the digital, which draws on Hedstrom's Archives Memory and Interfaces with the Past. The introduction by Hoskins is also a great overview of this field that has been emerging for the past decade, partly in the pages of the journal Memory Studies.

[Giovanni Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

A variegated and stimulating collection. Aside from Michael Moss' utter mess, the articles contained therein amount to a more than nice introduction to the field.