Glasgow Memory Group

DIGITAL/SOCIAL MEDIA AND MEMORY:

THE SYMPOSIUM

Wednesday 17th April 2013

Programme 9.00am: Introduction: Andrew Hoskins, University of Glasgow 9.15: Wolfgang Ernst, Humboldt University, Berlin ‘Archives in Transition: Tempor(e)alities of Media-Connected Memory’ 10.20: Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art ‘Of Queues and Traffic: Network Microtemporalities’ 11.25: Coffee 11.55: Wulf Kansteiner, Binghamton SUNY ‘Interactivity, Immersion, and Historical Consciousness’ 1.00pm: Lunch (own arrangements) 2.00: José van Dijck, University of Amsterdam: ‘Social media and the construction of personal memory: The case of Facebook’s Timeline’ 3.05: Anna Reading, King’s College London ‘Mineralised Memory, Digital Memory: On the Political Economy of Digital Media and the ‘globital memory field” 4.10: Coffee 4.40: William Merrin, Swansea University ‘Recording Technology: The Archaeology of Bodily Ritual’ 5.50: Close

Speakers’ Biographies and Abstracts Wolfgang Ernst The Institute for Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. ‘Archives in Transition: Tempor(e)alities of Media-Connected Memory This talk deals with the need for a genuine theory of storage technologies. In order to fulfill that claim, first of all storage is being defined as media channel. On that basis the difference between technical and "social" memory can be articulated. Taking the media-archaeological point of view, the dynamics /within/ memory devices deserves close description in order to reveal its potential for a refreshed cultural terminology of "memory" and "time". Changing the point of view to the phenomenological perspective, we discuss how media time affects human temporal perception. With the present increasingly becoming a function of memory operations (both neurologically and digitally), the transformation of the traditional temp/aura/lity of archival storage needs to be observed. From archival space to archival time, the archival "field" gets into focus. Dynamic micro-media memories induce a shift of cultural emphasis from permanent storage to restless transfer. To decode the aesthetics of re:load, the affinity between the archival operation and cybernetics turns out, resulting in feedback memory and timeshifting. Having analyzed these transformations, suspended memory /versus/total recall is being defended - a plea for the /secret archive/. Wolfgang Ernst is Full Professor of Media Theories at the Institute for Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University, Berlin. He studied history, classics, and archeology. His academic interests once focused on historicism and museology, before changing to media-archaeological matters. His current research fields include time-based and time-critical technologies and their chronopoetic potentials. He is the author of several books: “Das Rumoren der Archive: Ordnung aus Unordnung“ (2002), “Medium Foucault. Weimarer Vorlesungen über Archive, Archäologie, Monumente und Medien“ (2000), “Im Namen von Geschichte: Sammeln, Speichern, (Er)zählen“ (2003), “Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses. Medien und Archive am Ende (des 20. Jahrhunderts)“ (2007); forthcoming: "Chronopoetik. Zeitweisen und Zeitgaben technischer Medien" and "Gleichursprünglichkeit. Zeitwesen und Zeitgegebenheit technischer Medien" (2012). Ernst is also co-editor of: “Computing in Russia. The history of computer devices and information technology revealed” (2001) and “Suchbilder. Visuelle Kultur zwischen Algorithmen und Archiven“ (2003).

Jussi Parikka Winchester School of Art Of Queues and Traffic: Network Microtemporalities Digital media is all about waning of temporality - at least this seems to be the case if one scans through the past decades of media theoretical debates about new technologies, networks and the internet. What this talk argues however is that network media actually multiplies modes of time and temporality; time and space have not disappeared anywhere, but embody now a more microtemporal (to use a term from Wolfgang Ernst) logic. Indeed, one can see how key notions of temporality are now negotiated on such a level that demands new vocabularies also for network politics. Hence questions of time and memory are also questions of network time and time management: such key situations of urban modernity as queuing, waiting and traffic are transposed as questions of network packets and protocols. Indeed, whereas media archaeology has been successful in elaborating new modes of temporality, such as recursive media historical time and the deep time research promoted by Siegfried Zielinski, we need to be able to attend to the engineered microtemporalities too. “All techniques for reproducing existing worlds and artificially creating new ones are, in a specific sense, time media”, argues Zielinski in a promising manner. Despite a shared interest in temporality, Zielinski’s notes takes us in another direction as for instance the fellow emdia archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst’s; for Zielinski, his critique of internet times as monomedium are revealed as ignoring technical multitemporalities, as for instance a closer look at the engineered temporalities of networks makes clear. Temporalities of flows, bursts, and various techniques and technologies of time management even on the level of packets is what characterises the specificity of reproducing existing worlds in network culture. This work of reproduction, and hence work of ideology, is approached in this perspective as one of management – management of time. Memory is then mobilized as a question of traffic engineering. Notions of real-time are deemed insufficient to grasp the specificity of this level of network time, and hence, we have to elaborate on two sides of media archaeology: the one that is historically interested in the conditions of existence of networks and the specific social actions they sustain, and the one that is about the material engineered layers in which an “under-the-hood” type of an hacktivist interest to networks, digital media and memory can emerge. Dr Jussi Parikka is a media theorist and Reader at the Winchester School of Art. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Digital Culture Theory at the University of Turku, Finland. Parikka’s books and publications have addressed network politics and acdidents (Digital Contagions, 2007 and The Spam Book, co-edited with Tony Sampson in 2009) as well as media archaeology (Media Archaeology, co-edited 2011 with Erkki Huhtamo , and What is Media Archaeology?, 2012). In addition, his 2010 published Insect Media won the SCMS Anne Friedberg Award in 2012 for Innovative Scholarship. Parikka is the editor of the first English collection of Wolfgang Ernst writings, just published by University of Minnesota Press. He blogs at http://jussiparikka.net

Wulf Kansteiner Binghamton SUNY Interactivity, Immersion, and Historical Consciousness Two Generations of Digital Immigrants discuss the Virtues of Video Game Culture The paper stages a virtual dialogue between late enlightenment theories of historical consciousness and contemporary studies in video game culture. The two academic traditions are dominated by different political generations. The survivors of WWII, who took pride in building Europe’s postwar democratic culture, also reflected a great deal, in decidedly patriarchal fashion, about proper ways of narrating the past for the benefit of the future. Their large-scale didactic models were met with criticism and indifference by members of the postwar generations who took the digital revolution as an opportunity to follow their postmodern ludic inclinations. What do these traditions, developed by digital non-natives, tell us about the future of interactive historical cultures and how do they illuminate each other? Are video game cultures subject to such severe remediation effects and commercial pressures that the fears and hopes of the anti-Nazi philosophers still grasp the essence of contemporary historical culture? Or have cumulative collective experiences of digital immersion and interactive self-determination radically altered the politics of memory and the opportunities for truly self-reflexive encounters with the past? The triangular excursion seems to confirm the validity of narrative templates but raises interesting questions about the entities that do the remembering. Are they individuals remembering in collective settings or autonomous hybrids? And how does a ‘collectival’ develop a sense of self let alone a sense of self-criticism? For Wolfgang Ernst, our triangular excursion offers an (hopefully welcome) opportunity to meet old acquaintances, including his teacher Jörn Rüsen. Wulf Kansteiner is Associate Professor of European History at Binghamton University (SUNY). He has published widely in the fields of media history, memory studies, and historical theory. He is the author of In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (2006); co-editor of The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (2006), Historical Representation and Historical Truth (2009); and Den Holocaust erzählen: Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrativer Kreativität (2013) and co-founder and editor of the Sage Journal of Memory Studies (published since 2008).

José van Dijck University of Amsterdam Social media and the construction of personal memory: The case of Facebook’s Timeline. Social media are popular stages for what Manuel Castells has called “mass self-communication”. Social network sites (SNS) like Facebook, LinkedIn and GooglePLus offer users different platforms to construct their personal identities, by prompting them to store memories, upload pictures, initiate interactions and so on. Rather than facilitating online identity formation, SNSs are “sites of struggle” between users and platform owners to control online identities—a struggle played out most visibly at the level of the interface. In 2011, Facebook introduced Timeline, a new interface feature that implies a strategic overhaul of the site’s digital architecture. Like its competitors, Facebook implemented a uniform design for its members’ homepages based on the dual principles of connectivity and narrative. By imposing this format onto its members, users are forced to retrofit their lives by reassessing their page’s layout and by adjusting their privacy settings. In addition to Timeline, Facebook implemented Page Data Insights and promoted Facebook Memology, two features that translate individual data into aggregated trends and interests. The sum of individual input arguably leads to information about collective experiences and shared interests in social or cultural issues. The changing digital architectures form the necessary backdrop for asking critical questions about the nature of connective memory: How are identities and memories shaped through platform interfaces? How do platform features enable and constrain the sculpting of personal and professional persona? And what are the consequences of imposed connectivity and narrative uniformity on people’s online identities as “social” memories? José van Dijck is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research areas include media and science, digital media technologies, public debates in science and medicine, and television and culture. She is the author of five books, including Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Stanford University Press (2007). Her latest book is: The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media just published by Oxford University Press.

Anna Reading King’s College London Mineralised Memory, Digital Memory: On the Political Economy of Digital Media and the ‘globital memory field’ Current research on digital memory in relation to social and mobile technologies emphasises the transition from collective (Halblachs) to ‘connective memory’ (Hoskins) as well as the ways in which social media are able to offer new forms of articulation for subaltern or marginalised memories (Garde-Hansen). Research is also showing how journalism is rapidly changing through digital media (Zelizer) through new forms of archiving (Van Dyke). A current concern, however, is signalling a return to the question of the significance of ‘mass media’ in relation to social and mobile media within digital memory (Hoskins). My own work has argued that what is developing with the combination of globalisation and digitisation is a ‘globital memory field’. Yet what this work, including my own, largely misses are the underlying political economies of materiality and technical infrastructure of digital media. Drawing on new research that is exploring mineralised memory, the paper examines the multiple topographies and economic commodity chains of the minerals and chemicals that enable the technical infrastructures and materialities of the globital memory field. It begins by exploring some of the continuities of mineralised memories within earlier human cultures before then showing some of the specificities of mineralised memories that are critical to digital memory. The paper explores the some of the globalised commodity chains involved in the industrial mining and processing necessary for 21st century digital memory: the extraction, production and processing of rare earths, such as Europium, which used to be defined as industrial waste but which are essential to the colour red in digital displays as well as state of the art microchip production and the production of hard-drives. The paper thus builds in a new dimension to the dynamics conceptualised for the ‘globital memory field’ examining some of the key political economies underlying digital memory. Anna Reading PhD is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at Kings College, University of London, UK. She was Professor of Communication at the University of Western Sydney, Australia between 2011-12 and founder and Director of the Centre for Media and Cultural Research, London South Bank University, 2009-11. Anna is the author and editor of a number of books and many articles on cultural and media memory, including the Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory and Save As… Digital Memories. She is Chair of the Board and joint editor of the journal Media, Culture and Society. Anna is also a playwright, with work engaged in social and political issues.

William Merrin Swansea University ‘Recording Technology: The Archaeology of Bodily Ritual’ By the 1960s cybernetics had became a maligned concept; one synonymous with computer technology and fears of a programmed and controlled humanity. What this missed was that cybernetics was never a theory about technology, it was about relationships, and especially the intimate, symbiotic and positive relationship of technology and humanity. Though many fields quickly dispensed with its ideas, it had a leading role to play in research in computer interfaces. This question of interfaces has implications for how we think about the relationship of media and memory. The obvious subject of investigation has always been about how our technologies capture, hold, store and return to us our information and memories, but there is another way of thinking about this. Here we consider how the human body captures, holds, stores and returns the memory of technologies. Technologies are actualized in their use and the rituals of our muscle memory and when media are no longer used, when their forms change, when their interfaces alter, the memory of their performance is lost. This paper explores the archaeology of our bodily memory of form and the recovery of technologies through the habits of their interface. It builds from an analysis of the ritual of tea in China and Japan to explore the new modes of digital interface and their own increasingly rapid passing. William Merrin is Senior Lecturer in Media at Swansea University. He is the author of Baudrillard and the Media (Polity, 2005), Media Studies 2.0 (Routledge, 2013) and Media Archaeology/Ecology (Routledge, forthcoming, with Andrew Hoskins). ________________________________________________________________________

Sponsors We are very grateful for support for this event from the following:

http://www.create.ac.uk CREATe is the RCUK centre for copyright and new business models in the creative economy. With an ambitious programme of 40 projects delivered by an interdisciplinary team of academics (law, cultural economics, management, computer science, sociology, psychology, ethnography and critical studies), CREATe is a pioneering academic initiative designed to help the UK cultural and creative industries thrive and become innovation leaders within the global digital economy.

The Economic History Society is a registered charity which supports research and teaching in economic and social history, broadly defined. The Society also acts as a pressure group working to influence government policy in the interests of history, alongside other societies. In addition, the Society regularly liaises with funding bodies such as HEFCE, SHEFC, the AHRC and the ESRC. http://www.ehs.org.uk

Memory Studies is an international peer reviewed journal. It affords recognition, form and direction to work in this nascent field, and provides a critical forum for dialogue and debate on the theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues central to a collaborative understanding of memory today. Memory Studies examines the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technological shifts affecting how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember, and forget. Impact Factor: 1.070

Ranked: 3rd out of 56 in History and 3rd out of 35 in Cultural Studies Source: 2011 Journal Citation Reports ® (Thomson Reuters, 2012)

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Glasgow Memory Group http://www.glasgowmemorygroup.net The Glasgow Memory Group is an interdisciplinary group dedicated to hosting, developing and promoting innovative research and events in Memory Studies.

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Invisible Film Melik Ohanian 2005 HD Video Projection 90 minutes Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris