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This article investigates the memory work concerning Michael Jackson on Reddit. By means of their posts, comments, and replies, people contributing to this site – Redditors – enter into a process we call mnemonic stabilization. This is a collaborative process in which networked individuals share their memories about, in this case, Michael Jackson. We argue that this process resembles Jackson’s dance technique called moonwalking: Redditors seem to go back in time, but they continually alter how Jackson is remembered and forgotten, depending on the (personal) context of the present and an imagined future. These theoretical observations are assessed empirically by a content analysis of comments and replies ( N = 917) posted on the subreddit /r/MichaelJackson between June 25, 2009, and December 31, 2018. This revealed that most posts with a mnemonic dimension focus on personal memories of Michael Jackson’s music, performances, and (perceived) positive characteristics, rather than on how he should be remembered. These findings can be partially explained by Reddit’s socio-technical infrastructure.

This paper investigates the memory work concerning Michael Jackson on the social content aggregation site Reddit. By means of their posts, comments and replies, people contributing to this site—Redditors—enter into a process we call the dynamics of mnemonic stabilization. This is a collaborative process in which networked individuals share their memories about, in this case, Michael Jackson. This process resembles Jackson’s dance technique called moonwalking: Redditors seem to go back in time, but they continually alter how Jackson is remembered and forgotten, depending on the (personal) context of the present and an imagined future. These theoretical observations are empirically assessed by a content analysis of mnemonic comments and replies (N=917) posted on the subreddit /r/MichaelJackson between June 25, 2009, and December 31, 2018. This revealed that most posts with a mnemonic dimension focus on personal memories of Michael Jackson’s music, performances and (perceived) positive characteristics

This article analyzes the Facebook page Justice for Mike Brown—set up during the 2014 Ferguson protests—in order to rethink the role of memory work within contemporary digital activism. We argue that, as a particular type of discursive practice, memory work on the page bridged personal and collective action frames. This occurred in four overlapping ways. First, the page allowed for affective commemorative engagement that helped shape Brown’s public image. Second, Brown’s death was contextualized as part of systematic injustice against African Americans. Third, the past was used to legitimize present action, wherein the present was continually connected to the past and future. And fourth, particular discursive units became recognizable symbolic markers during the protests and for future recall. Based on this typology, we show that memory work, although multidirectional and in flux, is stabilized by the interactions between the page administrator, users, and Facebook’s operational logic.

With the pervasiveness of mobile technologies, witnesses have the opportunity to mediate up-close and seemingly truthful recordings of events. As such, “witness videos” have become prominent in news reports and serve as authoritative resources in the construction of memory. However, once they are uploaded to video-sharing sites and popular archives such as YouTube, they are being reassembled and remixed by distinct actors, along the lines of their own ideological agendas. Focusing on the chemical attack on Ghouta, Syria, this article investigates how witness videos are represented by uploaders (ranging from established media to activists) and structured by the affordances and sociotechnical practices associated with the platform. Hence, we argue, although the future memory of the attack is constituted by witness videos, it is powerfully shaped by various actors, both human and nonhuman. These mechanisms of memory construction are empirically explored by qualitative and quantitative analyses of meta-data and (remixed) content.

In this chapter, we outline the path of personal to personalized memory to explicate how memories render a self networked. As practices of autobiographical memory are gradually embedded in platforms, in ways that suggest or, in the case of Facebook, remind us of past memories or moments, we take a closer look at industries created around the business of organizing our memories for us. The practice of using technics to create records of memories is not new, and such forms of tertiary retention enabled through photographs, for instance, have been studied as mnemotechnics. We distinguish these practices from those afforded by mnemotechnologies to explain how control of one’s memories is ceded to an industry, which makes a profit from the business of connecting one to one’s past. For the self, practices like composing a diary or a collection of photographs constitute part of sustaining a sense of self, and enabling the storytelling project of the self. As we argue, by composing these diaries, we are also composing ourselves. By contrast, Facebook’s structure of offering reminders mimics the intimacy of a diary, but also suggests an already rendered composition for the networked self: “the writer of the diary is also the reader, but more importantly, the encoder is also the decoder.” Through these automated processes of personalization, we choose from sets of remediated memories of our own making presented via technologies that premediate, or anticipate our need for memorialization.

Book review of John Durham Peters. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media The University of Chicago Press, 2015, 410 pp. ISBN 9780226421353.