[Air-L] CfA Memories made for You! Remembering and forgetting by and through digital platforms SI / Memory, Mind & Media

[Annabell, Taylor]

Call for Abstracts: Special Collection of Memory, Mind & Media “Memories made for You! Remembering and forgetting by and through digital platforms”

Special Collection Editors: Rik Smit (University of Groningen, The Netherlands), Benjamin Jacobsen (Durham University, UK), Taylor Annabell (King’s College London, UK)

Whether it is Facebook’s and Apple’s Memories, Spotify’s Wrapped, or Year on TikTok, commercial digital platforms interact with our past on a daily basis. Now that our lives increasingly take place on such platforms, we have come to depend on platforms for not only the storing and archiving of our photos, videos and posts, but they also automatically represent this mediated past for us. Moreover, platforms’ interest in our past is not altruistic; it is part of profitable business models. We are in the midst of a process of colonization of our personal and collective pasts for commercial benefit and an increased dependence on the colonizers to access our “memories”.

Platforms thus enable and shape new forms of remembering and forgetting. This is what Lewandowsky and Pomerantsev (2021) in their inaugural article for MMM call the “Jekyll and Hyde of the algorithm.” Platforms are not neutral intermediaries in the construction of memory, whether this is cultural memory through YouTube, or autobiographical memory through a diary app. Hence, both intimate personal memories and collective forms of memory depend on and are shaped by data companies and algorithmic systems. To remember is increasingly to remember in and through digital platforms.

This special collection invites contributions that examine the distribution of agency among humans and digital technologies within memory’s construction with, on and by platforms such as Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and memory apps. Moreover, the special collection is open for contributions that are concerned with the affective, psychological and cognitive dimensions of remembering by and through digital platforms.

Additionally, the special collection is concerned with the question of how platforms contribute to the quantification, metrification, and datafication of memory, and thus how memory is both prepared for algorithmic processing and its product. Contributions that address how the economic, governmental and infrastructural logic of platforms extends into and affects digital memory are therefore welcomed.

As such, the special collection aims to bridge memory studies (in its broadest definition) with critical platform, app, and software studies, a much-needed epistemological step within the field. Besides traditional academic articles, this special collection also accepts interviews, commentaries, critical interventions, digital art, design fictions, photography and video essays.

Contributions could address but are not limited to the following themes:

  *   Theoretical approaches to algorithmically generated memories and use of mnemonic language by platforms
  *   Empirical investigations on individual and collective remembering and forgetting with, on and through platforms
  *   The role of platforms in shaping public and social memories of events, places, peoples
  *   Political-economic critiques of the platformization of memory
  *   Experiences, imaginaries and contestations of algorithmically generated memories
  *   Historical precedents and precursors to contemporary memory practices and technologies of memory
  *   Emergent and counter-cultural memory practices
  *   The cognitive implications of the platformization of memory
  *   Relationship(s) between memory and quantification, metrification, datafication or colonization

Timeline and procedure
MMM has a rolling submission window. Special collections do not have a finite number of pages and/or contributions. Rather, contributions are accepted on the basis of relevance to the topic and quality. The special collection will not be published as a whole, but each contribution in the collection will flow through the peer review process as soon as possible. The collection will therefore emerge over a period of months and each contribution will be promoted separately.

500 to 700 word abstracts should be sent to p.h.smit at rug.nl<mailto:p.h.smit at rug.nl><mailto:p.h.smit at rug.nl<mailto:p.h.smit at rug.nl>> by December 2, 2022, or sooner. The abstract should include: 1) the topic discussed and the research question(s) to be answered, 2) the methodological or critical framework used, 3) the expected findings or conclusions and, 4) academic and/or societal relevance.

Next to traditional academic articles, this special collection also accepts critical design interventions, software, digital art, and design fictions. Also the journal facilitates photography and video content, such as video essays or collages.

Feel free to consult with the Special Collection Editors about your article ideas and potential angles or approaches. Decisions will be communicated to the authors by January 13, 2023. Invited paper submissions can be submitted directly to the submissions portal for Memory, Mind & Media: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mmm where they will undergo peer review following the usual procedures of Memory, Mind & Media. The invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee acceptance into the Special Collection. The individual articles for this Special Collection will be published on a continuous basis as soon as they are fully accepted.



Taylor Annabell
PhD Candidate, Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King’s College London