The article proposes to interpret the web-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia as a global memory place. After presenting the core elements and basic characteristics of wikis and Wikipedia respectively, the article discusses four related issues of social memory studies: collective memory, communicative and cultural memory, `memory places' and the `floating gap'. In a third step, these theoretical premises are connected to the understanding of discourse as social cognition. Fourth, comparison is made between the potential of the World Wide Web as cyberspace for collective remembrance and the obstacles that stand in its way. On this basis, the article argues that Wikipedia presents a global memory place where memorable elements are negotiated. Its complex processes of discussion and article creation are a model of the discursive fabrication of memory. Thus, they can be viewed and analysed as the transition, the `floating gap' between communicative and collective frames of memory.
Internet governance is a difficult horse to catch. Far from being a coherent field of study, it presents itself as scattered across a range of disciplinary approaches that come with distinct theoretical, methodological and analytical preoccupations. In this paper, we critically review existing literatures on governance of, on and through the internet and draw attention to the ways in which they help perform the worlds in which they have their place. Retelling the case of the 'Twitter Joke Trial', we highlight the contingent and at times conflicting roles attributed to people, technologies and institutions, as well as the concerns that come with these. Rather than striving for a coherent definition of 'internet governance', we draw on recent work in science and technology studies to show that acknowledging the performativity and multiplicity of different modes of governance can open up a productive line of inquiry into the recursive relationship between governance research and practice.
How are mediated memories brought into being? In other words, how can we understand the ways personal and public memories are enacted in environments that have become increasingly digitally networked? Following this fundamental question for current interrogations of the entanglement of media and memory, we first develop a concept of mediated memory work. Instituting experiences and senses of the past, these time-and space-bound efforts interweave with arrangements of people and their social relations, cultural discourses, objects and media environments. Capitalizing on such an understanding of mediated memory work, the article demonstrates how and to what ends the enactment of memories can be empirically studied by using the example of the Cuban-American community in Miami. In particular, building on participant observation, in-depth interviews and media ethnography, we outline practices, cultural artefacts, communal bonds, compassionate relations and a media manifold that have been employed by different segments of a diasporic collective in shaping how the country of origin and the exile is to be remembered.
Imagining “big data” brings up a palette of concerns about their technological intricacies, political significance, commercial value, and cultural impact. We look at this emerging arena of public sense-making and consider the spectrum of press illustrations that are employed to show what big data are and what their consequences could be. We collected all images from big data-related articles published in the online editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post. As the first examination of the visual dimension of big data news reports to date, our study suggests that big data are predominantly illustrated with reference to their areas of application and the people and materials involved in data analytics. As such, they provide concrete physical form to abstract data. Rather than conceiving of potential ramifications that are more or less likely to materialize, the dominant mode of illustration draws on existing, though often trite, visual evidence.
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