The new grey of memory
Abstract
Andrew Hoskins – interviewed by Huw Halstead – discusses the tensions and paradoxes of memory and place in the connective era. Digital media liberate memory from the spatial archive, but they also create a connective compulsion and dependency, a disconnect from the present moment and a loss of control over memory. The overwhelming abundance and immediacy of digital data breed a placelessness of the digital traces of ourselves, an algorithmic narrowing of information, knowledge and life. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified this compulsion to record to such an extent that it may be considered a new memory boom, an obsessive desire to remember. Locative and mobile technology may seem to locate us in space more than ever before, but they do so in ways that are beyond our comprehension: our smartphones know more about our locatedness than we do, ushering in a ‘new grey’ in digital memory. Yet, it is critical to be aware of the variegated geography of connective memory – and of Memory Studies itself.
Citation
Hoskins , A & Halstead , H Y 2021 , ' The new grey of memory ' , Memory Studies , vol. 14 , no. 3 , pp. 675-685 . https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980211010936
Publication
Memory Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1750-6980Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages.
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.