Recursions
archives, technology, and the social
Recursions
archives, technology, and the social
Sociology has long had approaches to describing the ways in which social memory is enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions-phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory.
Sociology has long had approaches to describing the ways in which social memory is enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions-phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how new media changes that equation is very much up in the air: How, in the age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is social memory created and enacted? This collection offers a set of essays that discuss the new technology of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social.