No 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.

The use of the term ‘memories’ by social media platforms is not neutral but puts forward a particular understanding of what memories are. I situate the algorithmic resurfacing of the past as ‘memories’ within the dynamic of data colonialism. Memory becomes another layer of human experience that is subjected to datafication and is part of the economic strategy of Facebook to foster increased feelings of intimacy and interdependence. In this paper, I focus on the overlap between the conceptualisations of memory and mnemonic processes by people and commercially driven social media platforms. Drawing on interviews, focus groups and digital traces shared by participants, I examine how gendered subjectivities are being reproduced and intensified by young women as they engage with memories on platforms. First, I address how participants describe their interactions with memory products, focusing on their expectations of typical encounters and entanglements between remembering and feeling. I argue their interpellation into happy remembering by the platform is consequential due to their positionality. Second, I focus on how participants positioned platforms as spaces for preserving and keeping memories beyond the ‘memories’ feature. Third, I look at the role of likes and the quantification of the past within understandings of memories for young women. By exploring intersections of memory, gender and data colonialism, I grapple with how specific groups experience and navigate social media platforms. Navigating gendered pressures and performing normative femininity is part of the cost of engaging with memories for young women.

A core understanding in memory studies is that memory is not formed by an individual in insolation. Instead, it is guided by social frameworks and enacted within a particular social context. This is articulated by van Dijck (2007) as an inseparability of mediated memories from culture. Accordingly, the active, purposeful creation of and re-engagement with digital traces of the past in the present on Instagram and Facebook by young women can be situated in the postfeminist, neoliberal environment. Significantly, the particular expectations and pressures on how young women should feel and act intersect with the performance of digital memory work. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the particular ‘feeling rules’ (Kanai, 2019) articulated by the young women and consider more broadly the role that emotion plays in shaping the performance of digital memory work on Instagram and Facebook. I draw on data gathered from semi-structured interviews with young women aged between 18 and 21 living in London, and ethnographic observations of their Instagram and Facebook profiles. This is complemented with a socioeconomic platform analysis (van Dijck, 2013) and a technical walkthrough (Light et al. 2016), carried out to examine how Instagram and Facebook encourage particular emotions to be expressed and the entanglement of memory and emotion in their memory product. The analysis explores the overlap between the encouragement by platforms and expectations of the postfeminist environment for happy moments to be shared with the way that different emotions influence what is shared by participants.

This article examines how young women conceptualize memories within their language use. Through a microanalysis of how the term ‘memories’ and related expressions are mobilized by participants in interviews and digital traces shared on platforms, the study offers insight into everyday articulations of memory. The term ‘memories’ not only denotes the selective reconstruction of the past in the present but also signals how certain experiences, moments and feelings are assessed as worth remembering. Talking about ‘memories’ becomes a way for young women to signify and anticipate the value of experience in the present and future. In making this argument, the article contributes to existing debates on metaphors of memory and the production of memories through mediated objects by demonstrating how mnemonic language is reconfigured within digital culture.