Media play a crucial role in shaping people’s understanding of the world. They enable the preservation and communication of information and help us to envision the future as well as positioning ourselves in the present. The permeation of digital technologies into people’s everyday lives, has also affected the ways in which we remember. Traces of our online activities are constantly logged by technology companies and many people use digital technologies to record important moments and to share them with others. Never has the recording of each and every aspect of our lives been easier or more affordable.
At the same time, this flood of information challenges the important process of forgetting, which allows people to curate their remembrances by discarding unwanted or less significant memories. Questions of how digital media changes our remembering and forgetting, hence, are pressing: How do digital infrastructures reshape the mediation of remembering and forgetting? How does digital media change memory practices? What are the challenges of creating sustainable digital infrastructures for remembrance? Can we still distinguish between private and public memory or are the lines too blurred by now?
The institute’s colloquium will examine these questions from theoretical and empirical perspectives. The possibilities and challenges posed by digital memory will be discussed with guest speakers from academia and industry.
You can find the full programme of the colloquium “Digital Memory – (Re)Shaping Remembering and Forgetting in the Computer Age” in the summer term 2020 organized by POEM Fellow Jennifer Krueckeberg here.
