Sharing ‘memories’ on Instagram

Abstract

This article examines the performance of remembered experience within sharing in-the-moment carried out by young women on Instagram. I propose that the small stories analytical framework provides a way to examine at a micro level sharing of ‘memories’ online by addressing practices of selecting the past, showing and telling the past and interacting with the past in digital traces. For digital memory studies, this moves beyond a focus on affordances and infrastructure transformed memory and the examination of how people engage with memories that have been predefined. The analysis demonstrates how the performance of remembered experience is displayed and positioned across the interplay of past, present and future. Young women’s sharing in-the-moment reconfigures the function and meanings of ‘memories’ beyond the platform’s mobilisation of the term. It is part of how they express feelings and experiences about their unfolding lives.

Communicative remembering: Revisiting a basic mnemonic concept

“…Today's Big Five (Alphabet-Google, Meta-Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft) and their Chinese counterparts Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, and JD.com provide a comprehensive infrastructure through which many communications and transactions take place. Yet their mnemonic potential lies in the permanent recording, accumulation, and perpetual evaluation and reorganisation of data (Annabell 2022; Corry 2023; Kang et al 2023; Kidd and McAvoy 2023). Invoking a distinction made by Garde-Hansen (2011, 72), we can say that digital media first create archives of past activities.…”

Why do people post when they or others are under risk or threat? Sociological and psychological reasons

“…Some findings of this study can serve as a guide for future studies. In the literature, there are many data on the purposes for which social media is used [such as sharing stories, fake news or misinformation ( Apuke and Omar, 2020 , 2021 ; Duffy et al, 2020 ; Sihombing and Aninda, 2022 ; Annabell, 2023 ; Talwar et.al, 2020)]. However, there are no psychological studies addressing the background of the reasons for why people record dangerous occurrences where they or other people are under risk or threat and post these recordings on social media.…”

The multiplicities of platformed remembering

“…The example above illustrates that digital technologies, smartphone devices, and social media platforms do not only provide a space where mediated memories (Van Dijck 2007) can be stored, edited, and revisited; they also shape the ways in which these memories are (automatically) produced, collated, and how they come to matter to people in everyday life (Annabell 2023). As such, there are inevitable overlaps, disjoints, and mismatches between what a platform or digital technology provider calls a 'memory' and what people experience as their memories.…”