[Air-L] CFP: Digital Memories (panel) March 2011

[Aimée Morrison]

Digital Memories

3rd Global Conference

Monday 14th March – Wednesday 16th March 2011

Prague, Czech Republic

 

 

I am proposing a panel for this conference to fit one of the  general conference themes, “Digital Personal and Community Memory”:

 
“More ways to remember, fewer ways to forget: externalising memory in social media”

 

We are share significant amounts of personal information through social media. As time passes, it becomes clear that we are not simply publicising the activities of our daily lives for the immediate gratifcation of our networks of social contacts—we are also creating detailed, significant, and durable archives of the activities, images, and ideas of our daily lives, a kind of real-time autobiography that persists and accumulates. The repercussions of these practices are not entirely clear and this panel asks, from a variety of perspectives, “What happens when today’s status updates become tomorrow’s public, digital memoir?”

 

Topics might include: conflicts between personal and work life, searchability, how to ‘live down’ a prior Internet life, how memory is restructured by this kind of archiving, community-formation, and more.

 

I invite any interested researchers to send me 300 word abstracts for possible inclusion on this three-paper panel, via email addressed to ahm at uwaterloo.ca.

 

(My own paper will address the reconfiguration of memory prompted by personal diary-style blogs of long duration (>3 years) and the peculiar frisson writers can feel, being surprised by content drawn from their own archives, leading to exclamations like ‘I totally forgot that, but now I totally remember.’)

 

Full details about the conference itself can be found at the website:

http://bit.ly/r48ej

 

Aimée Morrison

Assistant Professor

Dept. of English Language and Literature

University of Waterloo

Waterloo, ON, CANADA