Paper short abstract:

Taking into account the current digital and technological landscape, this communication will address the new social and cultural practices of inscription and mediation of memory, analysing the uses and appropriations of digital media as platforms of production, sharing and consumption of memories.

Paper long abstract:

There is a growing prominence of individual memory in the public sphere. The traditional family albums and personal diaries are becoming galleries of images and narratives open to wider communities. Now, private memories are also mediated through new technological platforms, becoming important to analyse the social and cultural practices in which people make use of the possibilities offered by digital media to materialize their biographical narratives in new social platforms, creating hybrid spaces of memory.

This presentation will draw on an ongoing PhD project, still at a preliminary stage, a research project that positions itself within the embodied, experiential and situated practices of everyday life. Interlacing voices and narratives to understand the meanings attributed to the experiences that emerge from the externalization and consumption of memory in digital format, and what kind of relations are established between what occurs through online mediation and the contexts of everyday life, this communication intends to examine the ways in which media are changing the communicative practices concerning individual and private memories. In the process, it will analyze how the use of new technologies has blurred the boundaries that traditionally separated the private and public spheres of memory and the role of technologically mediated memories in the construction of experiences. Departing from an ethnographic approach, in order to understand the relation between the private domestic sphere and public sphere, and the role of "memory technologies" within it, it also seeks to understand how digital technologies are reconfiguring how we remember and how we forget.