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four - The Reception of Targeted Memories in Everyday Life: Classificatory Struggles and the Tensions of Remembering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2022

Ben Jacobsen
Affiliation:
University of York
David Beer
Affiliation:
University of York
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Summary

The kind of automatic production and targeting of memories that we have described in the previous chapters is still relatively new. Yet it is already widespread and deeply embedded in how people relate to their past through social media content. As we have shown, processes of classification and ranking are central to how people encounter past social media content as memories. What this will mean for collective and individual memory will take some time to fully understand. However, in this chapter we would like to turn to a project that was recently completed by the first-named author in order to begin to think through and explore what these changes might mean, examining how people might come to respond and react to these packaged and targeted memories. The previous chapters showcase how the memorable is partitioned and promoted. In this chapter, we will reflect more directly on the reception of the classified and ranked memories with which users are presented. Given the scope of the issues, this is not a complete endeavour, but it begins to give glimpses into the variegated reception of automatically sorted memories that might then be pursued further. It will indicate the types of direction that memory making may be taking in the context of social media and mobile devices. In short, this chapter begins to explore something that is well- established but little understood as of yet. As discussed in Chapter One, we may know some of what happens when digital memories or mediated memories become integrated, but this particular chapter is about how people react to targeted memories. Partitioning and promoting the memorable through processes of classification and ranking assumes that the memory categories produced are fixed and distinct (Mackenzie, 2015). Yet, as we shall show, the processes of classification and ranking do not necessarily mean that memories fit neatly into those fixed grids of Facebook's taxonomy; nor are the reactions entirely in keeping with those imagined in the rhetorical ideals of the social media providers and coders. As this chapter shows, the reception of targeted memories in everyday life emphasizes the various nuances and tensions generated by the dual process of classification and ranking.

Type
Chapter
Information
Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory
Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past
, pp. 57 - 90
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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