When is the right time to remember? Social media memories, temporality and the kairologic

Abstract

This article asks what impact temporality and timing have on the ways in which memories are felt and made to matter on social media. Drawing on Taina Bucher’s theorisation of the ‘kairologic’ of algorithmic media, I explore how digital memories are resurfaced or made visible to people at the ‘right time’ in the present. The article proposes the notion of ‘right-time memories’ to examine the ways in which social media platforms and timing performatively shape people’s engagement with the past. Drawing on interview and focus group data, I explore four ways that right-time memories are sociotechnically produced and felt in everyday life: through an anniversary logic, personalisation, rhythms, and tensions. Ultimately, it is argued that when memories are made to matter in the present is a crucial way to further examine the temporal politics of social media platforms and algorithms.

Algorithmically generated memories: automated remembrance through appropriated perception

“…But to be targeted by algorithmically generated content is not unique to algorithmically generated memories. The very temporality of social media, the rhetoric of how the world is formulated on the interface I behold is already composed for my eyes, or more specifically an assumption of who the one who sees is (Bucher 2020; Jacobsen 2022b). And this assumed I – the data double composed by all traces I have left online coupled with assumptions on what someone ‘like me’ ‘is like’ (Lury and Day 2019) – has its own ‘rhythm’ (Carmi 2020) which operates in tandem with my own duration and my own becoming.…”

“…Coeckelbergh (2021) points out that the very data points that are stored do not change in real-time as soon as they enter the data set: we can change the algorithm, but the data on the past is stored in data points, spatialised in an eternal present. But these data points are illegible to us, or to use Paglen's (2016) formulation – they are invisible to us – and the only way in which we can see them is through algorithms that evolve through time, showing us bits of our past when it is considered the ‘right-time’ (Bucher 2020; Jacobsen 2022b) to do so.…”

“…Initially, this article was motivated by a sense of intrusion that arises whenever algorithmically generated memories impose themselves on my present. In an article on users’ interactions with algorithmically generated memories, Jacobsen describes a common feeling of tension as users encounter these memories, a feeling marked by ‘an uncomfortable awareness of algorithms at work’ and ‘affective tensions of unpredictability’ (Jacobsen 2022b, 13). Although I am not alone in feeling unease, other users report feeling joy when interacting with algorithmically generated memories, especially when the feature allows them to customise the memories shown, thus providing a ‘sense of agency with regards to how memories are classified, ranked and targeted’ (Jacobsen and Beer 2021b, 82).…”