Record and remember: Memory and meaning-making practices through mobile media

Abstract

Mobile media have the potential to affect how one remembers and exercises the past as they offer new and creative ways to record and document the current. These new ways of preserving the past could be in the form of sharing locational information (e.g., geotagging, camera phone photos, check-ins), which would remind our future selves where we come from and how we used to be. We sometimes consciously create our everyday life narratives intending to hang onto a moment, or simply because the technology automatically saves our experiences, we unconsciously preserve our pasts. Mobile media can contribute to the existing ways of narrating places and the self because locational information can communicate multiple and different aspects of places. Situating our analysis within the broader literature on memory and media, we draw on three different studies conducted in the UK and the US in order to analyze different uses of mobile media in remembering associations with places, past experiences, and creating a nostalgic sense of place. More specifically we draw on notions of memory work and mediated memories to explore the mutual shaping of media, place, and memory

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