Session 2: Social Networking and its Impact on Memories

4th Global Conference

Thursday 15th March – Saturday 17th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic

Social and Technological Influences on Engagement with Personal Memory Objects: A Media Roles Perspective
Tim Fawns, Hamish Macleod and Ethel Quayle
University of Edinburgh, Scotland

The production and consumption of any media involves general roles that can be applied to personal memory artefacts such as photographs, home videos or diary entries. As our social context changes, these roles are renegotiated in relation to the people with whom we communicate and the tools we use to help us.

Focusing on personal photography, seven media roles were selected as a framework for examining changes in artefact-related memory practices due to shifting social-cultural contexts and technological affordances. These roles: Creator / Performer, Director, Archivist, Gatekeeper, Distributor, Consumer and Critic, were found to be useful in highlighting individual differences in capturing, organising, reviewing and sharing photographs amongst people with varying technological engagement in varying social groupings.

A pilot study combined a comparative content analysis of sets of photos taken by different participants at the same series of events with interviews that explored the phenomenological experience of engaging in memory practices connected to these photo sets. Preliminary findings suggest that technological affordances can change the social context of our communication as well as our personal goals of media production and consumption. The affordances of our media tools create subjective triggers and barriers for the adoption of roles. Through such affordances, some processes of media production or consumption become easier or more accessible to certain types of people while other processes may seem to become more complex or culturally inappropriate. This, in combination with a continuous reconfiguration of related cultural norms, affects the roles we take on and these roles directly affect our engagement with our memory items.

This paper forms part of a larger project that aims to explore how our changing engagement with technology is affecting our individual and collective memory practices.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Shaping Collective Memories Online: Facebook as a New Arena for the Bulgarian-Macedonian Conflict
Marta Marcheva
IESEG School of Management, Paris, France

Although at present Bulgarian-Macedonian relations are improving, the historical burden between the two states is still present as an important obstacle toward a cooperative coexistence. Both populations are tearing up by ideological, historical, linguistic and cultural battle aimed at the reaffirmation of one’s history and identity at the expense of the other. In this context, Bulgarian and Macedonian citizens have transferred their conflict online and have established a number of virtual strategies for collective memories interpretation, which found an excellent tool of expression: Facebook.

A Facebook search of nearly any nation will reveal various attempts at discursive manipulation of the past and present through the uncontrolled publishing of information. Facebook groups like “Macedonia is Bulgarian land and all Macedonians are brainwashed Bulgarians!”, “Macedonia is a Western Bulgaria” and “How close and how faraway are the nations of Bulgaria and Macedonia” confirm the power of Facebook in letting even small countries to digitalize their collective memories and express their interests on national issues.

This paper will attempt at a closer look of Bulgarian-Macedonian conflict mediation in the virtual space through the digital media. The rapid development of digital technologies has radically transformed ways of interpretation and preservation of memories. The Web 2.0 communication applications (such as social networking media, blogs, twits, wikis, etc.) provide their users a whole new set of opportunities and different modes of shaping individual and collective memories and producing new ones. Experientially, the practices of Bulgarian and Macedonian users on Facebook pages dedicated to the Bulgarian-Macedonian conflict are observed and their narratives in various groups and forums are analyzed. This paper will consider the following questions, among others: How are digital memories spread across Web 2.0? How are negotiations and coproductions of collective memory arrayed on Facebook? In short, how are digital memories crossroads experienced in the context of social media?

Social Network Connections as the Medium: Relations that tell Stories
Alexander Ronzhyn
Deusto University, Bilbao, Spain

One of the most important traits of online social networks is the presence and visibility of connections between social network’s members. While in conventional social networks links between actors can have properties and be of different value for the actors, they are still viewed as an auxiliary attribute for the social network participants. In the same time in online social networks such connections can contain a message. In social network services (SNS) that are so popular nowadays, connections are visible in the form of “friend list”, “circles” or ‘’followers list”. This lists do not only manifest the connections one has, they also convey a message for the owner of such lists. The message may vary from connection to connection, but in general SNS members have a particular idea or a memory mapped to particular link. Thus the list of friend links becomes rather a list of memories of friends.

Such change is most interesting in hospitality SNS or business networks where connections are generally much weaker and the digital manifestation of the connections (like users’ profile photos) may be the only viable bond to the person. The case of hospitality SNS (Couchsurfing being the prominent example) is the brightest one as these networks’ connections are usually formed after and on the basis of real-life interactions and thus most associations are formed among people who actually at least seeing each other. With the increase in complexity of member’s network, it becomes progressively more difficult to keep track of the connections. After some point such connections are replaced by memories based on the visible links in the social networks. This process is to be examined in the proposed paper along with examples from the members of several social networks, with special focus on the hospitality SNS as most interesting phenomenon.