Persistent traces, potential memories: Smartphones and the negotiation of visual, locative, and textual data in personal life. (June 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hand, Martin
• Is Part Of: Convergence. Volume 22:Number 3(2016)
• Page Start: 269
• Page End: 286
• Publication Date: 2016-06
• Subjects: Archives -- digital traces -- memory objects -- memory practices -- smartphones -- temporality -- visual data; Mass media -- Technological innovations -- Periodicals; Telecommunication -- Periodicals; Mass media and technology -- Periodicals; 621.3897
• DOI: 10.1177/1354856514546094
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1354-8565

Abstract

This article examines how the capacities of smartphones to reshape memory practices are enacted and negotiated in personal life. It is argued that digital devices and networked media facilitate a vast production and circulation of persistent digital traces that are potential memories. An approach that privileges sociotechnical practices is used to empirically examine the roles of digital devices, software, and social media in reconfiguring personal memory. In-depth interviews with 30 individuals aged between 20 and 30 are used to examine the details of reflexive and routine modes of forgetting and remembering related to the prevalence of devices and the digital traces produced in quotidian use. The increasingly visual life of data of many kinds promotes a 'continuously networked present' (Hoskins, 2012), but this is highly differentiated and actively negotiated in complex ways that both reproduce and reconfigure established memory practices.