[Commlist] cfp: "Sociologia della Comunicazione" - "Mediatization of Memory and the Digital Turn"

*Call for papers: Special Issue of the Journal “Sociologia della 
Comunicazione” n. 72, 2026*
*Deadline for abstract: 29 January 2026 (600-750 characters)*

Mediatization of Memory and the Digital Turn: platforms, actors, practices.

Edited by Roberta Bartoletti (University of Bologna) and Elisabetta 
Zurovac (University of Urbino Carlo Bo)

Memory is necessarily an interdisciplinary field of study (Erll and 
Nuenning 2008; Tota and Hagen 2016), particularly fertile when observed 
at the intersection between cultural sociology and media studies. 
Despite the growing intertwining of digital media and memory, internet 
studies have long neglected this relationship (Bartoletti, 2011; 
Pogačar, 2010; Garde-Hansen, Hoskins, and Reading 2009; Jungselius and 
Weilenmann, 2023), just as memory studies have been slow to recognize 
its relevance (Bartoletti, 2007; Zierold, 2008). Furthermore, since the 
media impact how, what, and why individuals and social groups remember 
and forget, the fertile categories of mediation and remediation do not 
fully account for the complexity of this relationship (Erll 2008, 
Hoskins 2009).

In fact, placing ourselves in the theoretical perspective of 
mediatization, which recognizes the complex, inextricable, and profound 
interconnections between media and society (Couldry and Hepp 2013, 2017, 
Boccia Artieri 2015, 2025), we believe that the media represent the most 
powerful mechanism in the formation of memory in its many forms - 
individual, collective, and social (Esposito 2001, Bartoletti 2007) -, 
especially today. While the transformative role of the media in relation 
to memory can be traced back to the invention of writing, through 
printing and electronic media, today we are faced with complex and 
heterogeneous media ecosystems, which must be analyzed in terms of their 
specificities and dynamic interconnections, within the context of a 
process of co-evolution
between media and society. Attention must therefore be turned to the 
logic of digital media and algorithmic platforms that are the 
protagonists of the current media ecosystem, and to the functionalities 
and affordances that shape the forms of identity and social relations, 
the experience of time, and the memory of users (Kaun and Stiernstedt 
2014; Migowski and Fernandes Araújo 2019).

With the evolution of digital environments, the focus has shifted from 
self-expression within a social network (and therefore from networked 
memories: Bartoletti 2011) to connections between content mediated by 
algorithms, to the promotion of the self aimed at transforming social 
value into economic value, in the context of the platform society (Van 
Dijk 2013, 2017; Van Dijck et al. 2018). Connectivity, datafication, and 
quantification of memories (Jacobsen and Beer, 2021), programmability, 
and autonomy of content from context (“content without context”: 
Bhandari and Bimo 2022) are among the platform logics (Van Dijck, Poell 
2013) that increasingly influence the work of users' memory.

But while platforms today are predominantly algorithmic, we also know 
that algorithms cannot be considered tout court as actors of memory. 
Digital or algorithmic memory can be conceived as the ability to process 
information independently of meaning (Esposito 2017), a link that 
characterizes human memory. Thus, for example, photos curated 
algorithmically and suggested to users by an application are not 
equivalent to human memories (Lee, 2020), and it is also inappropriate 
to define them as “automated memories,” as in the case of Facebook's 
affordance of the same name (Jacobsen and Beer 2021). Algorithms, being 
incapable of abstraction and only performing operations on data, ‘do not 
properly remember and do not properly forget’ (Esposito 2017, p. 6), 
just as algorithmic memory reconfigures the very relationship between 
remembering and forgetting as we know it. As is often the case in memory 
studies, metaphors are evocative but sometimes risk producing misleading 
effects if not treated with the necessary caution.

If the logics of algorithmic platforms enable and shape contemporary 
forms of remembering and forgetting, we believe it is essential to avoid 
any form of technological determinism that would obscure our 
understanding of the present behind new presumed socio-technical 
automatisms. Instead, research on memory in digital media must focus on 
‘memory in practice’, which emerges from the interaction and negotiation 
between users and platforms — with their logics, functionalities, and 
affordances — where algorithmic mediations and recent developments in AI 
play an increasingly prominent role (Boccia Artieri and Bartoletti 2023; 
Jungselius and Weilenmann 2023). Such environments not only condition 
the hierarchies of visibility but also favor (sometimes in unexpected 
ways) the emergence of marginalized or forgotten stories, offering them 
new opportunities for circulation, recognition, and collective 
appropriation. An openness to the postcolonial and decolonial 
perspective, in fact, allows us to highlight how the governance of 
memory is also a question of epistemic justice and access to collective 
memory.

This redefines both the boundaries of oblivion and those of shared 
memory, expanding and pluralizing the sources and methods through which 
social memory is constructed in the digital ecosystem. Here, memory is 
not only stored, but actively co-constructed, contested, and manipulated 
through creative practices by users (Reading, 2011), new spaces, and new 
actors: user-generated content (UGC), user-generated games (UGG), online 
communities, and content creators foster interpretative and 
representative processes of the past that give rise to contested 
memories, alternative reinterpretations of historical events, but also 
phenomena of manipulation and rewriting of memory that begin to 
circulate on the internet and in the collective imagination. These forms 
of digital memory work raise new questions about the veracity, 
authority, and plurality of remembrance.

Rather than perpetuating new apocalyptic discourses on the crisis or end 
of memory, whether individual and/or collective, we believe it is 
increasingly urgent to conduct careful research into the multiple and 
specific mediated contexts in which memory work is carried out today, to 
contribute to a deeper understanding of the challenge of the digital 
turn in memory studies (Mandolessi 2023). For these reasons, a 
‘digitally aware’ perspective, capable of enhancing the specificity of 
different socio-technical environments and the practices developed 
within them, is now essential for advancing the theoretical and 
methodological debate on memory. In this context, we propose to focus on 
the complexity of the current media ecosystem (articulated in social 
media, algorithmic platforms, video game worlds, and emerging forms of 
generative artificial intelligence) to explore new socio-technical forms 
of remembering and forgetting. The focus is on the practices of memory 
that develop at the intersection between the individual and collective 
dimensions, where personal biographies and shared histories intertwine. 
In these digital spaces, both private memories (Pasquali, Bartoletti, 
and Giannini, 2022) and public memories (Tota and Hagen, 2016; Tota, 
Lucchetti, and Hagen, 2018; Zurovac, 2023) take shape and circulate.

In line with this perspective, authors are invited to submit original 
articles based on critical theoretical reflections and empirical 
approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, on the following topics 
of priority, though not exclusive, of interest to the issue:
- practices of remembrance and forgetting in digital environments 
(social media, algorithmic platforms, video games, generative AI, etc.);
- algorithmic memories “in practice”: negotiation, domestication, or 
rejection of affordances and algorithmic selection logics;
- historicization of the relationship between memory and digital media; 
native memories and genealogies of the network;
- nostalgia for and in social media;
- crisis, dissolution, or reconfiguration of generational memories in 
algorithmic platforms;
- memory governance: powers, rules, and infrastructures that shape 
remembering and
forgetting in digital media;
- postcolonial and decolonial perspectives: diasporic memories, marginal 
memories, and
memory activism;
- beyond algorithmic memories: digital visual cultures and the memory of 
artificial intelligence;
- video games, digital worlds, and social media as contemporary lieux de 
mémoire;
- remix, appropriation, and creative forms of digital memory work.

*Submission details*
29 January 2026: deadline for abstract (600-750 characters). Authors 
will be notified of acceptance by 2 Feb. Please note that such 
preliminary feedback does not imply publication. Articles will be 
double-blind refereed, and publication will be subject to the outcome of 
the evaluation.

20 April 2026: deadline for article submission (up to 45000 characters, 
including spaces, including references). Authors are invited to send an 
original article, in English or Italian, to the editors of the issue at 
(roberta.bartoletti2 /at/ unibo.it) <mailto:(roberta.bartoletti2 /at/ unibo.it)> and 
(elisabetta.zurovac /at/ uniurb.it) <mailto:(elisabetta.zurovac /at/ uniurb.it)>, and 
to the editorial staff of the Journal (Stefania Antonioni: 
(stefania.antonioni /at/ uniurb.it) <mailto:(stefania.antonioni /at/ uniurb.it)>). 
Articles must be concurrently uploaded to the Journal’s platform, along 
with an abstract in Italian and English of 600-750 characters and an 
author profile of 300-500 characters.
No payment from the authors will be required.

The Special Issue is expected to be published by the end of 2026.

For editorial guidelines, please refer to the section “Author 
Guidelines” on the Journal's website: 
https://www.francoangeli.it/riviste/sommario.aspx?IDRivista=52&lingua=EN 
<https://www.francoangeli.it/riviste/sommario.aspx?IDRivista=52&lingua=EN>

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