Although the preponderance of collective memory research focuses on particular cultural repository sites, memorials, traumatic events, media channels, texts, or commemorative rituals as objects of study, this article fills a gap in literature by arguing that it is time to refresh established media-memory studies to now also consider how multimodal practices promise insight into the process of shared remembering in the new media ecology. The specific focus here is to propose a conceptual approach for how collective remembering can be observed, experienced, and researched in the digital ecosystem. In addition to a survey of collective memory and media memory studies, this article identifies specific ways to examine this issue by introducing the concepts of multimodal memory practices and platformed communities of memory, and by arguing that metadata analysis of digital practices should be considered a contemporary form of studying collective memory.

This study examines the discursive practice of mourning and commenting by netizens on the final social media post made by Dr Li Wenliang, regarding it as a form of political participation and competitive discursive politics enacted in cyberspace. Discourse theory is applied to conduct discourse analysis on 4000 comments. We identified two strategies that netizens used to establish an alternative space for discourse. The first involved hidden protests expressed through multi-semantic mourning, avoiding suppression by indirectly challenging official authorities. Second, through engagement with microblogs, netizens applied personalized narratives to form a collective memory and a counter-memory space that departed from the official normative narrative. Discursive activities enacted by netizens stimulated the political agenda of resilient adjustment on the part of the authorities, leading the government to accept and incorporate public demands into policies through strategic rectification. These findings help to better understand the significant power of disorganized connective action that is reliant on affective citizens and the further development of regime resilience on the part of the Chinese political system in response to digital activities.

This afterword addresses the complex temporal and global dynamics of the coronavirus pandemic. After considering some of the new social rhythms that have emerged in the wake of Covid-19 around the world, it turns to the role of collective memory before, during and after corona. The aim is to provide a basic grid for how the Covid-19 pandemic could be addressed using memory studies expertise and concepts such as premediation, memorability, memory (ab)use, national memory, colonial memory, racial stereotypes, the digital archive, generational memory, or Anthropocene time.

This study examines the relations between memory, social media experience, and testimony in the Eva Stories Instagram project. By conducting a combined visual and multimodal analysis of the stories, as well as a close analysis of the relations between social media experience and testimony, we claim that Eva Stories establishes a new responsive space for remembering the Holocaust. This space enables users to inscribe themselves into mediated Holocaust memory and to become media witnesses through the co-creation of socially mediated experiences. The self-inscription of the user is made possible by three interrelated modes of media witnessing, which continuously evoke user engagement. These new modes, we argue, indicate a new kind of agency in relation to media witnessing: the ability to testify on one’s own present social media engagement with mediated memory, and become a witness to it.

The 2005 London bombings is both marked by and is a marker of a post-scarcity memorial-media boom. There is a new contagion of the past driven by a memorial culture unstoppably equipped with the availability, portability and pervasiveness of digital devices, enabling the instant aggregation and archiving of everything. The ‘digital’, it can be said, insinuates itself in the past. In such circumstances, what are the prospects for the development and maintenance of individual memories? And, how can we consider such questions beyond the traditional dichotomous models of memory that assume memory as an orientation to something once complete and residual, and thus always already partial and in decline?

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.

Taking a screenshot, an exact duplication of the content on the screen of a device, is a taken-for-granted practice. Through an analysis of ethnographic data, this article considers the everyday use of screenshots among teenagers. I examine the taking, possession, and circulation of screenshots among teens to ask: What is screenshot? What function do they have? and How are screenshots significant beyond teens? The article draws attention to the ‘social life’ that screenshots have beyond their duplicative function. Screenshots were framed by teens as an everyday aspect of digital communication that are integral to negotiating hierarchies of friendship, power, and for establishing peer trust. This article takes screenshots seriously in their own right, drawing on existing insights from feminist media studies to demonstrate how the visibility afforded by screenshots is gendered in practice. This article explores screenshots as powerful communicative tools and as a socio-cultural phenomenon worthy of further interrogation.

Remembering the coronavirus pandemic represents an obligation to the present and the future. Illuminating the intersections between remembrance, documentary heritage, memory institutions and COVID-19, this article argues that libraries, archives and museums have a unique and urgent duty to document the coronavirus pandemic as it unfolds to help ensure that its associated recorded heritage is collected, preserved and archived for the present and future purposes of consultation, reference and remembrance. Explicit ‘duty to document the coronavirus pandemic’ policy provisions should be adopted by libraries, archives and museums to, first, strengthen their current COVID-19 documentary initiatives and, second, support other possible documentary initiatives related to this or future global health crises. By documenting COVID-19, it can be collectively remembered and future possible health crises can be better anticipated.

Most cultural theorists argue that time in the digital and globalized media era is accelerating, with the future and past collapsed into an extended present. This would seem to be the case with the 2005 London bombings: mobile witnessing through the use of mobile camera phones provided co-present personal communicative memory of the events by survivors and witnesses. This was rapidly transformed by mainstream media organizations into mediated witnessing which within days was being reassembled as part of a process of commemoration through online memorials. More than five years on from the terrorist attacks, however, there is an unevenness in the trajectories of mobile witnessing over time in what may be termed the ‘globital memory field’. As well as compression and speed, ‘globital time’ is folded to intersect with ‘slow’ and ‘long’ time that is very much part of each citizen’s lifeworld and subsequently is an important dimension within any process of commemoration, conflict resolution and justice.

With the pervasiveness of mobile technologies, witnesses have the opportunity to mediate up-close and seemingly truthful recordings of events. As such, “witness videos” have become prominent in news reports and serve as authoritative resources in the construction of memory. However, once they are uploaded to video-sharing sites and popular archives such as YouTube, they are being reassembled and remixed by distinct actors, along the lines of their own ideological agendas. Focusing on the chemical attack on Ghouta, Syria, this article investigates how witness videos are represented by uploaders (ranging from established media to activists) and structured by the affordances and sociotechnical practices associated with the platform. Hence, we argue, although the future memory of the attack is constituted by witness videos, it is powerfully shaped by various actors, both human and nonhuman. These mechanisms of memory construction are empirically explored by qualitative and quantitative analyses of meta-data and (remixed) content.

The world during the COVID-19 pandemic became more divided than united, both between states and among individuals. Opinions are polarized partly because, as I have observed in urban China, the public is simultaneously preoccupied by the very near (the self) and the very far (the imagined ‘world’), but neglect the space in between, and as a result fail to recognize how the social world is concretely constituted through interconnected differences. This article advocates a way of perceiving the world by taking ‘the nearby’ (fujin in Chinese) as a central scope. The nearby is a lived space where one encounters people with diverse backgrounds on a regular basis. The nearby brings different positions into one view, thus constituting a ‘scope’ of seeing. Such a scope enables nuanced understandings of reality and facilitates new social relations and actions. The nearby could form a line of resistance against the power of the state, capital and technology, that is turning local communities into units of administrative control and value extraction. This article calls for a ‘First Mile Movement’, in which artists, researchers and activists work together to help facilitate citizens with the construction of their nearby as a basis for reflecting upon life experiences, testing grand ideologies and engaging in public discussion.