Should We Trust our Digital Memories?

21- 22 February 2019
Hôtel de Lauzun, 17 Quai d’Anjou, Paris

This conference on digital memories brings together the most current research from various fields such as media design, cultural studies and philosophy, representing both theoretical and empirical approaches. We will especially focus on the concept of trust, and the many ways it is related to memory in online practices and interactions. With social media, digital archives and self-tracking apps being new means we use to create and share memories, it is important to ask how and why we tend to trust online platforms and digital devices as repositories of our past. Furthermore, do we tend to trust digital memory more than biological memory, considering it to be more objective and stable? As Victor Mayer-Schönberger assesses: “As digital remembering relentlessly exposes discrepancies between factual bits and our very own human recall, what we may lose in the process is the trust in the past as we remember it.”  What are the consequences of this potential shift for the way we make sense of ourselves through our past? How individuals and collectives deal with the increasing volume of their digital memories, as well as with new ways of remembering and forgetting through the use of technology, is a challenging question, the answer to which requires an interdisciplinary approach. Therefore, this conference’s aim is to gather contributions from variety of disciplines in order to further the discussion on this developing field of study.

Organized by Institut Jean Nicod / CNRS-ENS-EHESS

Organizing Commitee: Serena Ciranna (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris), Gloria Origgi (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris)

Scientific Committee:  Roberto Casati (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris), Serena Ciranna (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris), Jerôme Dokic (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris), José Van Dijck (Utrecht University), Gloria Origgi (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris), Judith Simon (Hamburg University)

Partners:  
DEC- Département d’Etudes Cognitives
EHESS - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Internet of Things Chair - ESCP Europe - Business School
IEA-Institut d’Etudes Avancées  

Registration

Programme (PDF)

February 21

Morning session

10.30 - 11 am
Introduction
Serena Ciranna (Institut Jean Nicod)

11.00 - 11.35 am
The Dying of my Mother on WhatsApp 
Joanne Garde - Hansen (University of Warwick) 

11.35 -12.10 pm
Design to support personal remembering practices using digital memory media
Elise van den Hoven (University of Sydney)

12.10 - 12.45 pm
Remembering A Data-Driven Life: Introducing a Quantified Past
Chris Elsden (Northumbria University)

12.45 -12.55 pm
Q&A 

1.pm - 2.pm  LUNCH 

Afternoon session

2.30 - 3.05 pm
On the creation of digital heirlooms
Daniela Petrelli (Sheffield Hallam University)

3.05 - 3.40 pm
Personal Memory Knowledge Graphs
Aldo Gangemi (University of Bologna) - Valentina Presutti (National Research Council, Rome)

3.40 - 3.50 pm
Q&A

3.50 - 4.20 pm
Coffee break 

4.20 - 5 pm 
Autistic (Dis) Trust:  How autistic people's uses of social media neuroqueers memory 
Anna Reading (Faculty of Arts and Humanities King’s College)

5.00 - 5.35 pm
Memory as the ‘Ghost in the Machine’. Machine logic and memory in the Digital Age
Yasmin Ibrahim (Queen Mary, University of London)

5.35 - 6.10 pm 
How can we forget? The Digitization of Autobiographical Narrative 
Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir (University of Iceland)

6.10 - 6.30 pm 
Q&A - Final comments 

February 22nd 

Morning session

09.30-10 am
Introduction
Gloria Origgi (Institut Jean Nicod)

10.00-10.35 am
Trust, Extended Memories and Social Media
Jacopo Domenicucci, Université Paris 1 Sorbonne

10.35 -11.10 am
Decentralised ID for Communities of Trust.
Remy Bourganel (Chief Innovation & Design Officer, Brickchain) 

11.10 - 11.20 am
Q&A

11.20 -11.50
Coffee break

11.50 - 12.25 pm
IoT – Internet of things or Internet of Trust ? Trust as a key success factor of IoT adoption
Sandrine Macé (ESCP Europe) - Violette Bouveret (ESCP Europe)

12.25 - 1 pm
From static records to predictive policing: the future of audiovisual evidence. 
Jean-François Blanchette (University of California, Los Angeles)

1.00 - 1.10 pm
Q&A

1.10 - 2 pm  LUNCH 

Afternoon session

2.15 - 2.50 pm
Memories of Intimacy
Stefana Broadbent (Politecnico di Milano)

2.50 - 3.25 pm
Smartphone Memories of Displacement and Diaspora
Anne Gilliland (University of California, Los Angeles)

3.25 - 3.35 pm
Q&A

3.35 - 4.05 pm
Coffee break 

4.05 - 4.40 pm
Digital protest memories: charting disconnection as a site of political struggle
Anne Kaun (Södertörn University, Sweden)

4.40 - 5.15 pm
Collaborative cultural platforms: new repositories of a “common memory”?
Marta Severo, EA Dicen-IDF, Université Paris Nanterre; IUF junior member

5.15 - 5.30 pm
Q&A and final remarks 

5.30 - 6.30 pm 
Cocktail reception

 

Abstracts

The Dying of my Mother on WhatsApp
Joanne Garde-Hansen (University of Warwick)

This paper offers an academic reflection on the personal experience of online remembering and forgetting in the process of my mother’s end of her life, and the use of WhatsApp by family members in the face of changing parent-child relationships and in the context of reflections on gender, motherhood, personal identity and public/private intimacy of dying in hospital. The paper explores the impact of WhatsApp on three key areas: 1) the remembering of a single life through remediated photos (that acted as factual records) and the real-time use of the App to document the ending of a life through images, videos and text. 2) the socially-networked, co-operative, spontaneous and creative acts of recuperating an analogue mother through a digital and portable vigil. 3) the remembering and making visible to the WhatsApp group the intricacies of deep old age and women as mothers who continue to act as the ‘living memory’ of a family when they have dwindling biological memory capacity. The paper does not reproduce the biological and digital as ‘in tension’ but in tandem nor ‘factual bits’ and ‘human recall’ as discrepant but rather increasingly constructively aligned for the purposes of reconciliation. The issue is less one of trust but of the digital providing space for conflicting truths to be recalled, as well as providing a deeper understanding of the role of women in families and their representation through media.

Joanne Garde-Hansen is Director of the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick UK and currently working on a monograph Mediating Water: Communication, Culture and Perception. She has also published Media and Memory and co-produced Social Memory Technology (with Worcman) and Save As…Digital Memories (with Hoskins and Reading).

Design to support personal remembering practices using digital memory media
Elise van den Hoven (University of Sidney)

People do not have digital or online memories, memories are reconstructed in the brain and therefore by definition at least partially internal. However, the external world can influence the internal remembering process, such as personal digital media can serve as memory cues and thereby facilitating reconstruction. This process comes under several names, from distributed-scaffolding cognition, distributed cognition to external cognition.

The work presented in this talk will focus on the integration of the physical world in remembering practices using digital memory media. The Materialising Memories (MM) research program focuses on Autobiographical Memory (AM), which are the memories of events in someone's personal life. MM studies how to support AM remembering practices using a people-centred design approach in order to create future-proof remembering experiences. Several case studies will be presented that relate to online memory media: the 4Photos design uses personal photos uploaded onto Facebook to support phototalk while sharing a meal; the StoryShell design uses audio messages posted on Facebook to commemorate a lost loved one; and the work on Digital Decoupling studies how people deal with a variety of online media and digital possessions after a romantic relationship has ended.

Elise van den Hoven is a Professor in the Interaction Design Discipline, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Australia and Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. She has two honorary appointments: Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee, UK and Associate Investigator with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders.
Van den Hoven leads the international research program Materialising Memories (MM), expedited through a personal fellowship (NWO VIDI, 2012-2018). MM uses design research to study and support people in their everyday remembering practices.

Other research interests include human-computer interaction, interaction design, people-centred design and tangible and physical interaction. Van den Hoven has been involved in the International Conference Series on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) since its inception and on the Steering Committee since 2008.

On the creation of digital heirlooms
Daniela Petrelli, Sheffield Hallam University

My reflection on the future of our digital memories is rooted in two studies that compared material and digital culture in the home. I first looked at mementos’ and their role in defining individual and family memories: people choose and curate material objects while digital mementos are easily overlooked, rarely preserved and never curated. Materiality makes objects a constant presence in our lives and enables a process of meaning-making that transforms “things” into mementos. On the contrary, the digital is invisible inducing a fatalistic attitude toward our everyday digital often perceived as ephemeral, relevant only for the here-and-now. In the second study, when faced with the challenge of choosing what to pass to the next generation in a time capsule, families were at a loss on how to preserve their digital present. Cloud computing or social media do not address this issue as there is no guarantee of persistence over time.

The way to make our digital present to last is not via online services, but by providing people with ways to engage with their digital objects of memories repeatedly over time. It is via this process of meaning-making that files become of value, something to care for and worth preserving for the future. Design and craft can play a significant role by giving a physical form that manifests the preciousness of the digital memories within. I will illustrate this point using examples from design and jewelry that created poetic containers for digital heirlooms.

IoT – Internet of things or Internet of Trust ? Trust as a key success factor of IoT adoption
Sandrine Macé (ESCP Europe) - Violette Bouveret (ESCP Europe)

This paper explores the drivers of IoT adoption by the user and more precisely, the reason why he accepts to share highly sensitive data with firms. The paper tackles the issue through a trust-based perspective, relying on justice theory applied to the device connectivity. This approach enables the identification of drivers of trust creation that can be used by academics and firms to rethink the relationship between brands and customers.  

Personal Memory Knowledge Graphs
Aldo Gangemi (University of Bologna), and Valentina Presutti (National Research Council, Rome)

Knowledge graphs are a core asset of current stakeholders of the Web. They support search, advertisement, network orchestration, social networking, recommendation, etc. They have been grown by combining sources of public data with logs, histories, and profiles of specific communities, organisations, and individual users.

Knowledge graphs, both as assets, and the technology to use them, are hardly available to final users, despite the promises of the Web as a global knowledge sharing platform.

We describe a practicable socio-technical world (just peeping out from the quagmire of Web and AI research), in which personal knowledge graphs accompany our lives as a support and an extension of our bodily memories, creating a “semantic memory economics” that might better serve humans.

Remembering A Data-Driven Life: Introducing a Quantified Past
Chris Elsden, Northumbria University

A ‘data-driven life’ (Wolf, 2010) has become an established feature of present and future technological visions. Smart homes, smart cities, an ‘Internet of Things’, and particularly the ‘Quantified Self’ movement are all premised on the pervasive datafication of many aspects of everyday life. Herein I argue that the perceived objectivity and proposed power of quantified data – ‘dataism’ (van Dijck, 2014) – challenges the practice and experience of remembering as an ‘imaginative reconstruction’ (Bartlett, 1932).

In this talk, I will reflect on a series of studies that conceptualise, investigate, and speculate about data-driven tools as new ‘technologies of memory’ (Sturken, 2008) that produce a uniquely quantified view of the past (Elsden et al. 2016a, 2016b, 2017). Through this work, I will outline several experiential qualities of a ‘quantified past’ that distinguish data-driven records from, for example, photographs, personal diaries and social media records.

I argue that in recognising the documentary potential of data-driven tools we can look beyond their use as instruments of efficiency and scientism, to consider their wider individual and societal meaning. As technologists we may consider the design of altogether more holistic and poetic relationships with quantified data. As scholars of memory, I propose the quantified past as a rich new frontier for memory studies.

Chris Elsden is a post-doctoral HCI researcher in the School of Design at Northumbria University. His research undertakes diverse, qualitative and often speculative engagements with participants to investigate emerging relationships with technology – particularly data-driven tools and blockchain technologies. At its heart, all of his work concerns the human  experience of a data-driven life. In his doctoral work at Newcastle University (2013-2017), Chris conceptualised, and undertook fieldwork and design for a ‘Quantified Past’ – considering self-tracking tools and personal informatics as new technologies of memory. His post-doctoral work has investigated applications of emerging blockchain technologies within charitable, civic and creative organisations, to consider data-driven tools as instruments of valuation and transactionalisation.

Memory as the ‘Ghost in the Machine’. Machine logic and memory in the Digital Ag
Yasmin Ibrahim - Queen Mary, University of London

The ubiquitous imaging of our everyday lives through mobile devices in the age of convergence has created a fluidity between our visuality and our modes of production online. As we capture and upload images pervasively through mobile technologies, we are forming new intimacies with immateriality in modernity through digital platforms. This fluidity and the binding of immateriality are also entwined with the production of social memory through people’s repositories which sit alongside media memory and the institutionalised memory of the archives or official projects of memory. The accumulation of image repositories through people’s transactions of the immaterial on digital platforms is consequential in the digital age. Unlike material tangible artefacts like photographs, our relationship with the immaterial online world is about a fluid world where uploads, downloads, storage of memory through mobile devices and cloud systems and the ability to curate images disembedded from its context or origins creates a close intimacy with the immateriality of the digital world. If industrialisation centred a world of materiality, mobility and acceleration, the digital and virtual world presses immateriality as a dominant form where virtuality and invisible labour and consumption can accrue, displacing the material mode as a central aspect of the social reality of production, consumption and asset formation online. The virtual world then stands for a new social world where there is interface between the user and its immateriality. Derrida positions those immaterial beings as those that haunt the living yet are excluded from them. As ghosts have the ability to upset the natural order of things because of their possession of knowledge that surpasses the living, the virtual, when acknowledged as integral to the constitution of knowledge about the real, similarly has the potential to destabilize what we understand about it (Kim 2013: 3). In destabilizing the assumption that the real is the locus of activity and meaning, Derrida emphasises that the vitality of the immaterial forces of new media is increasingly central to the formation of the real. He implicates the virtual to our experience and conception of the real and how the virtual constitutes our understanding of the real,  but is overlooked in our perceptions of it (see Kim 2013: 3). The virtual as ineradicable and viral, circulating yet stripped of meaning, portends a new ethereal world where mortality can be re-imagined and morality can be reconfigured through the workings of a host of processes such as algorithms, community standards, lack of editorial oversight and remediation of the moral through new standards of taste and decency. The projects of memory and forgetting online become a complex interplay of machine logic, architecture of the internet and memory as a form of circulation and storage where it is amenable to new forms of governance, control and gaze, and also human vulnerabilities.

Yasmin Ibrahim is a Reader in International Business and Communications at Queen Mary, University of London. Her ongoing research on new media technologies explores the cultural dimensions and social implications of the appropriation of ICTs in different contexts. Beyond new media and digital technologies she writes on political communication and political mobilisation from cultural perspectives. Her other research interests include globalization, Islam, visual culture and memory studies.

How can we forget? The Digitization of Autobiographical Narrative
Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir (University of Iceland)

Social media has now become one of the ways we tell, share, and record the story of our lives, one of the tools we use to serve the autobiographical impulse. The proliferation and global spread of social media has taken place in a very short space of time, in just over a decade, and this swift and dramatic change in self-expression deserves our attention. The stories we tell of our lives and selves are based on a complex interaction between self, identity, remembrance, forgetting, and narrative. The way we express these stories on social media, must inevitably affect our sense of our own past, this sense which is a deciding component of our identity, our sense of self. These stories are not only the result of natural or physical processes but are always heavily circumscribed by the world around us. This includes narrative traditions, social conventions, a shared sense of what is appropriate, and the rules and rituals applied to such interaction, according to the traditions of each genre, be it autobiography, diary, or letter, and not least the available technology. This paper addresses some of the issues relevant to our understanding of the form these types of narratives of self-expression take, for instance the significance of the interplay between image and text, and how they can demonstrate the intervention of recent technology in our memory processes – the mediatization of our memories – not least how they shift and interrupt common patterns of forgetting.

Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir received her PhD from the University of London in 2000 and is now Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Iceland in the Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies. Her research interests include life writing, memory studies, and contemporary literature. She focuses in particular on the politics of public and private memory in literature and culture. She has published widely on these issues including her two books, Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern and Life Writing (Rodopi 2003) and Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan 2017).

Trust, Extended Memories and Social Media
Jacopo Domenicucci, Université Paris 1 Sorbonne

How does trust evolve in a context where our interactions and conversations are increasingly mediated by digital technologies? Here I focus on how ICTs impact our social memories. Changes in the memory properties of our environments of interaction are put forward to understand the evolution of trust in a connected society. A research framework is proposed to spell out the impact of digitally extended memories on trust. This framework is applied to the case of interpersonal trust powered by social media.

Jacopo Domenicucci, normalien (Ecole normale supérieure, Paris) and professeur agrégé de philosophie, studies trust since 2014 and digital trust since 2015. On trust, he published “Trust as a two-place relation” (Oxford University Press 2017), co-authored with Richard Holton, and “Trust, Agency and Discrimination” (Rivista di Estetica 2017). On digital trust, he published “Trust, Extended Memories and Social Media” (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) and edited La confiance à l'ère numérique (Berger-Levrault and Rue d'Ulm 2018) with Milad Doueihi. His research was presented at the University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, University of Cambridge, University of Manchester, University of Minho, University of Turin, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), FMSH, and CEM (Paris).

From static records to predictive policing: the future of audiovisual evidence.
Jean-François Blanchette (University of California, Los Angeles)

In recent years, body worn cameras (BWCs) have found themselves hailed as the possible solution to one of the thorniest problems in American society: excessive use of force by police officers. By providing a potentially more detailed and ‘objective’ account of violent encounters, bodycams could provide crucial evidence in trials that often fail to convict police offers (e.g., Rodney King), while simultaneously bringing down the costs of expensive lawsuits that  police forces settle every year.

At the same time, industry leaders are keen to sell not only cameras, but also store footage on their servers to as to develop new AI-based services through computational analysis of massive amounts of footage. They see bodycam footage not just as static records but rather, as vast stores of data, ripe for further mining. As stated by Rick Smith, CEO and co-founder of TASER/Axon, the overarching vision is that “it's time for video data to move to the center of public safety records systems, with far richer and more transparent information than historic text-only systems.”

This presentation analyses the current socio-technical context of audiovisual evidence to probe its future reliability, including the impact of machine learning, the shift to industry custodians, new kinds of metadata, and correlation of multiple sources with different provenance.

Memories of Intimacy
Stefana Broadbent, Politecnico di Milano

Digital communication technologies have been redefining some of the characteristics of intimacy both in the relational sphere and in the performance of identity. The loci of intimate exchanges have been extended into spaces from which they had been long banned as digital devices are allowing for relational work to happen outside the gaze and control of the people in physical proximity.  At the same time, every exchange is being captured, stored and potentially analysed. A new tension arises between the potential for secrecy from a proximal social world and a total disclosure to a less known institutional sphere of data collecting organisations.

Conversely intimate states are also being made public intentionally via channels of social distribution. Social media offer a medium but more importantly formats, languages and genres of expression for representing the intimate. Boredom and anxiety for instance can be publicly performed in widely shared and understandable formats of self-representation.

The standardisation of the modalities of the affective work carried out on digital media is manifest in phenomena such as digital parenting of migrant parents, teenager construction of public selves, sexting, online dating and hooking up. All the above have rapidly found formats to perform intimacy. Intimacy is not only the mode and content but the currency of the medium.

Finally, the legal, philosophical debates about internet and data privacy are providing the fundamental arguments supporting the valuing of intimacy as the main currency of online relations. The tightly fought battles around the legal boundaries of the private sphere provide the ultimate justification for the monetization of digital intimacy.

Stefana Broadbent is Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Milano in the School of Design. She is the cofounder of Cleanweb which operates IYWTO, an organisation which uses the web to simplify the transition to sustainable ways of living. Between 2014 and 2016 she was Head of Collective Intelligence at Nesta. Previously Stefana was a lecturer in Digital Anthropology at University College London. Her recent publications include work on sustainability and collective action Sustainability, chapters in in the The Onlife Manifesto (2015) and Digital Anthropology (2012) and her book Intimacy at Work (Routledge 2016) Stefana holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh, and a degree in Psychology from the Université de Genève.

Autistic (Dis) Trust:  How autistic people's uses of social media neuroqueers memory
Anna Reading (Faculty of Arts and Humanities King’s College)

Trust is a social and cultural construct, which is articulated personally and impersonally through various systems including the system of language and the system of on-line technologies. Communication technologies and their uses are simultaneously socially constructed in ways that mean that they are often over trusted when they are scarce and then distrusted as they become ubiquitous. This paper explores these unstable dynamics through an examination of the increasing use of digital technologies by autistic people who, historically, have had few affordances to produce memories for themselves. I explore the ways in which autistic people have used social media to articulate and provide a record of their inner voice. The paper draws on a published memoir Carly’s Voice which includes, as part of its narrative, the tweets and social media posts by the non-verbal autistic teenager Carly Fleishman.  In addition, I draw on the publicly available work of other autistic people who have told their stories through you tube videos and vlogs. Life-stories by autistic people afforded by social media, I argue, both consolidate and destabilise autobiographical and digital memory in new ways. One way of conceptualising this, I argue, which can also then be extended to our understanding of trust and digital technologies more broadly, is that the neurotypical culture of normalcy that provides a basis for trust in memory and trust in digital technologies are productively ‘neuroqueered’ through neurodivergent voices.

Smartphone Memories of Displacement and Diaspora
Anne Gilliland, University of California, Los Angeles

One of the many tragic legacies for survivors of genocides, violent conflicts and persecution is how few, if any, personal documents in non-digital forms may survive and the resulting loss of personal, family and community memory. Photographs, letters, video and sound recordings are often erased together with the individuals and locations that held them. Or they may be lost, abandoned or removed from people as they sought refuge elsewhere. Today, a smartphone can be a lifeline for the forcibly displaced and other migrants. It also facilitates intimate links across space and time between them and their loved ones, and documents homes and landscapes left behind that may subsequently be irrevocably changed or even obliterated by actions that are often denied by perpetrators. It is simultaneously the immediate device to which many displaced individuals have entrusted digital images of photographs and voices from their past, and the mechanism for documenting their route and experiences in the present. As such, it witnesses displacement, diaspora and erasure in ways not previously possible. Drawing on the work of the Refugee Rights in Records Project, this paper considers how displaced persons may create and carry their digital memories using smartphones in ways that do not increase personal vulnerability, yet preserve them for future generations and have the capacity to serve as authoritative evidence of abuses perpetrated against them and their communities.

Collaborative cultural platforms: new repositories of a “common memory”?
Marta Severo, EA Dicen-IDF, Université Paris Nanterre; IUF junior member

In recent years, the development of digital technologies has given a new importance to the figure of the “amateur”, especially in the field of culture. Coping with this new context, several institutions have launched cultural collaborative platforms, to allow amateurs, or more generally citizens, to participate in the construction of knowledge related to their cultural heritage objects. This phenomenon does not only concern platforms created and managed by an institution, but also spontaneous and self-organized initiatives that can rely on existing participatory tools such as Wikipedia or even on social media.

From the Pci-Lab project that allows citizens to define their intangible cultural heritage through Wikipedia, to the Twitter challenge 1 Jour 1 Poilu, thanks to which hundreds of volunteers have indexed a million and a half records of soldiers “Dead for the France” during the World War I, these new platforms become repositories of collective memories and individual stories. This communication aims to question the role of these digital spaces as a place of the construction of a “common memory”.

Marta Severo is Associate Professor in Communication at the University of Paris Nanterre and a junior member of Institut Universitaire de France. She is a member  and Deputy Director of the Dicen Laboratory. Beside these institutional commitments, since 2012, she coordinates the theme Media and territories of the International College of Territorial Sciences (CIST) in Paris. Her research focuses on action research in social sciences through web-based data. Her research activities focus on two thematic areas: (i) the collaborative construction of cultural heritage and memories on the web and (ii) the digital representations of place and space. She counts several publications in national and international journals. She has obtained several funding (H2020, ANR, Labex, CNRS, ESPON ..), in particular a starting project funded by the French research agency ANR for studying cultural collaborative platforms.  She has recently edited the books Patrimoine culturel immatériel et numérique (2017) et Traces numériques et territoires (2015).

Digital protest memories: charting disconnection as a site of political struggle
Anne Kaun, Södertörn University, Sweden

There is a renewed interest in how political protest is remembered, archived and historicized. In that context, digital media have been heralded as fundamentally changing the opportunities for protest memories, both in terms of the extent to which memories can be preserved, but also concerning the process of archiving itself. It has been argued that digital media allow for a democratization and inclusiveness of archiving practices of social movements. Instead of exploring the ways in which digital media allow for the preservation of protest memories, this talk turns to practices of disconnection and forgetting as important features of political struggle. In an era in which we potentially can archive everything, it is fundamental to actively reflect on what to preserve and what to forget. Not only to allow for a safe continuation of political organizing in the present, but also to be able to develop convincing and hopeful visions for the future. The talk brings together my research on histories of protest movements and their media technologies with studies of disconnection and non-use of digital media as a site of political struggle.