Andrew Hoskins – interviewed by Huw Halstead – discusses the tensions and paradoxes of memory and place in the connective era. Digital media liberate memory from the spatial archive, but they also create a connective compulsion and dependency, a disconnect from the present moment and a loss of control over memory. The overwhelming abundance and immediacy of digital data breed a placelessness of the digital traces of ourselves, an algorithmic narrowing of information, knowledge and life. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified this compulsion to record to such an extent that it may be considered a new memory boom, an obsessive desire to remember. Locative and mobile technology may seem to locate us in space more than ever before, but they do so in ways that are beyond our comprehension: our smartphones know more about our locatedness than we do, ushering in a ‘new grey’ in digital memory. Yet, it is critical to be aware of the variegated geography of connective memory – and of Memory Studies itself.

The Istanbul Greek migrant community resident in Greece exists in the space between two homelands and two identities, expressed in the dichotomy between the Hellenic and the Romaic. The migrants exploit this flexibility and ambivalence in Greek identity to contextually navigate a range of social pressures-diaspora, discrimination, alienation, and even financial collapse. At times they pursue assimilation with their host population as the most Hellenic of the Hellenes, whilst at other times they assume a Romaic identity to distinguish themselves from the mainland Greeks. Deploying an identity rooted in Byzantium, the Istanbul Greeks are able to be Greek but more than simply Hellenic.

Recent research has suggested that in the contemporary globalized and digitized world memories transcend national boundaries in a manner that might replace exclusive and antagonistic national histories with inclusive cosmopolitan solidarities. This article critically engages with such models by exploring transcultural cross-referencing in narratives about Greek-Turkish relationships in two different settings: print media produced by memory activists from the expatriated Greek minority of Turkey; and peer-to-peer debates in the "comments" section on YouTube. Whilst such transcultural discourses might indeed draw different victim communities closer together, they nevertheless also have the capacity to reinforce national histories and identities.

Digital memories have often been interpreted – both pejoratively and positively – as free-floating and placeless. On the one hand, digital technology is dismissed for creating a placeless sameness and meaninglessness: memories cut loose from the distinctive places in which they were formed and which gave them meaning. On the other hand, it is celebrated for creating a progressive placelessness in which memories may develop unencumbered by the restrictions, antagonisms and exclusivity of boundaries, borders and rootedness. Yet, an increasingly everted and pervasive 21st century Internet – and the rise of mobile and locative technologies – challenge the notion that place is significant to digital memory only in its absence. Digital memories are also personal and local memories, which are both marked by the contours of existing place politics and social geographies, and capable of reshaping these contours into new, heterogeneous and dynamic place-making. This is cyberplace: malleable, shifting, often disorientating; but also textured, uneven and located.

Oral testimonies from Greek Cypriots who lived through the Greek dictatorship’s 1974 coup d’état on Cyprus and the subsequent Turkish invasion frequently present the narrators as mere pawns in a macro-scale historical drama, having little to no control over or understanding of the broader events unfolding around them. On one level, this rings true, as individual soldiers and civilians were rarely if ever able to dictate or perceive the broader trajectories of the conflict in which they found themselves. Yet this perspective belies the subtler reality that even in chaotic conditions and under deeply restricted circumstances people exercise agency and create spaces, however small, in which to operate as autonomous agents and to shape their own personal trajectories. Whilst they could not leave the chessboard, these ‘pawns’ actively moved themselves here and there, performing microacts that locally refracted official diktats and ideologies in mutable ways. Moreover, in the construction of their testimonies they assert further agency, assembling these microacts into meaningful narratives by placing them within broader historical frameworks.