Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Digital media dissolves boundaries, blending virtual and physical, where memory flows in fluid, nonlinear currents. Through a three-year ethnography with Turkish students, this research maps the interplay of proximity, transitions, and shifting narratives reframing collective memory.

Paper long abstract

The shift from traditional media into digital media brings into question how collective memory will be shaped in the digital environment. Social media platforms, as spaces where people meet and interact, become not only vehicles of communication but also vehicles for recognition, with the transformative power to easily change traditional ways of communication and help shape collective remembering.These exchanges flow fluidly, traversing the digital and seamlessly spilling into the physical, continuously relating and reshaping both individual and collective memory. This is a nonlinear, ongoing process that blurs the boundaries between the virtual and corporeal to facilitate an unceasing re-territorialization of memory, estranging all static contiguity points. Memory, in this sense, emerges as multiplicity perpetually in motion and flux. Personal narratives with transitional layers are deeply connected to other narratives such as family histories, news, politics, and sports. These interactions form dynamic compositions, with nuanced rhythms and patterns on multiple levels. Continuously interacting, these parts create fluid mixes that reflect the interconnectedness of lived experiences shaped by a future-oriented present and past events through ongoing processes of forgetting and remembering.

This research positions social media as spaces of interaction—new agoras and public spheres where memory is shaped, contested, and negotiated. Using a map enriched with visuals from a three-year collaborative ethnography with Turkish university students aged 18 to 23, this study explores collective memory through the lenses of proximity, relationships, and transitions. By examining digital platforms as counter-mapping domains, it raises new questions about their role in shaping collective narratives. https://themapofmemories.com/