[Commlist] Call for Abstracts: Memories made for You! Remembering and forgetting by and through digital platforms

Call for Abstracts

Memories made for You! Remembering and forgetting by and through digital 
platforms
Special Collection of Memory, Mind & Media (open access, no payment from 
the authors will be required)

Special Collection Editors: Rik Smit (University of Groningen, The 
Netherlands), Benjamin Jacobsen (Durham University, UK), Taylor Annabell 
(King’s College London, UK)

NB. Next to traditional academic articles, this special collection also 
accepts critical design interventions, software, digital art, and design 
fictions. Also the journal facilitates photography and video content, 
such as video essays or collages.

Whether it is Facebook’s and Apple’s Memories, Spotify’s Wrapped, or 
Year on TikTok, commercial digital platforms interact with our past on a 
daily basis. Now that our lives increasingly take place on such 
platforms, we have come to depend on platforms for not only the storing 
and archiving of our photos, videos and posts, but they also 
automatically represent this mediated past for us. Moreover, platforms’ 
interest in our past is not altruistic; it is part of profitable 
business models. We are in the midst of a process of colonization of our 
personal and collective pasts for commercial benefit and an increased 
dependence on the colonizers to access our “memories”.

Platforms thus enable and shape new forms of remembering and forgetting. 
This is what Lewandowsky and Pomerantsev (2021) in their inaugural 
article for MMM call the “Jekyll and Hyde of the algorithm.” Platforms 
are not neutral intermediaries in the construction of memory, whether 
this is cultural memory through YouTube, or autobiographical memory 
through a diary app. Hence, both intimate personal memories and 
collective forms of memory depend on and are shaped by data companies 
and algorithmic systems. To remember is increasingly to remember in and 
through digital platforms.

This special collection invites contributions that examine the 
distribution of agency among humans and digital technologies within 
memory’s construction with, on and by platforms such as Facebook, 
Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and memory apps. Moreover, the 
special collection is open for contributions that are concerned with the 
affective, psychological and cognitive dimensions of remembering by and 
through digital platforms.

Additionally, the special collection is concerned with the question of 
how platforms contribute to the quantification, metrification, and 
datafication of memory, and thus how memory is both prepared for 
algorithmic processing and its product. Contributions that address how 
the economic, governmental and infrastructural logic of platforms 
extends into and affects digital memory are therefore welcomed.

As such, the special collection aims to bridge memory studies (in its 
broadest definition) with critical platform, app, and software studies, 
a much-needed epistemological step within the field. Besides traditional 
academic articles, this special collection also accepts interviews, 
commentaries, critical interventions, digital art, design fictions, 
photography and video essays.

Contributions could address but are not limited to the following themes:

Theoretical approaches to algorithmically generated memories and use of 
mnemonic language by platforms
Empirical investigations on individual and collective remembering and 
forgetting with, on and through platforms
The role of platforms in shaping public and social memories of events, 
places, peoples
Political-economic critiques of the platformization of memory
Experiences, imaginaries and contestations of algorithmically generated 
memories
Historical precedents and precursors to contemporary memory practices 
and technologies of memory
Emergent and counter-cultural memory practices
The cognitive implications of the platformization of memory
Relationship(s) between memory and quantification, metrification, 
datafication or colonization

Timeline and procedure

MMM has a rolling submission window. Special collections do not have a 
finite number of pages and/or contributions. Rather, contributions are 
accepted on the basis of relevance to the topic and quality. The special 
collection will not be published as a whole, but each contribution in 
the collection will flow through the peer review process as soon as 
possible. The collection will therefore emerge over a period of months 
and each contribution will be promoted separately.

500 to 700 word abstracts should be sent to p.h.smit[at]rug[dot]nl by 
December 2, 2022, or sooner (soft deadline, let the editors know if more 
time is required). The abstract should include: 1) the topic discussed 
and the research question(s) to be answered, 2) the methodological or 
critical framework used, 3) the expected findings or conclusions and, 4) 
academic and/or societal relevance.

Feel free to consult with the Special Collection Editors about your 
article ideas and potential angles or approaches. Decisions will be 
communicated to the authors by January 13, 2023. Invited paper 
submissions can be submitted directly to the submissions portal for 
Memory, Mind & Media: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mmm 
<https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mmm> where they will undergo peer 
review following the usual procedures of Memory, Mind & Media. The 
invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee acceptance into 
the Special Collection. The individual articles for this Special 
Collection will be published on a continuous basis as soon as they are 
fully accepted.

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