Memory and Platformization

This chapter - which is dedicated and inspired by the work of Ann Rigney - asks: what are the new medial frameworks of remembering and how do they affect how we remember, and by extension, how we should be doing memory studies related to media? The answer, I contend, lies not so much in media’s various capacities and instances of overcoming time and space. This is not to deny that there is more media content than ever, coming from and circulating all over the world and entering our private and public spheres (Rigney 2005). Indeed, we live in media (Deuze 2011), in the sense that large parts of our very lives are mediated or stand in relation to media, even if we are not using them (cf. the ‘digital detox’). Therefore, critical scholars of memory should be engaging more with that which supports media content, with those structures that encompass and envelop the ‘medial frameworks,’ with the very real and material socio-technical assemblages that, to put it as a McLuhanesque pun, stand under media today. We should, in short, be talking about platforms, a problematic term I unpack in this chapter. I argue that platforms act as new ‘medial frameworks’ of memory that support – infrastructurally speaking – and shape new forms, dependencies, and power dynamics when it comes to the keeping and representation of the past.