Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory: Classification, Ranking, and Sorting of the Past

Abstract

How is social media archiving, filtering, and sorting the digital artifacts of our pasts? what do these algorithmic processes mean for our human conception of memory and memory practices in everyday life? Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory offers an expansive series of provocations in a compact volume, one of Bristol University Press’s “Shorts” Research publications. Ben Jacobsen and David Beer are well-placed to pose these questions as sociologists at the University of York, whose work on memory, metrics and techno-social transformations moors empirical research to critical theory and to emerging theories of data and the self. The book interweaves a comprehensive literature review with a short overview of empirical findings from a larger qualitative research project exploring people’s experiences and perceptions of algorithmic systems in their remem-brance of the past. Highlighting the algorithmic interaction of classification and ranking that work together to define and resurface “memories” on digital devices and platforms, the book introduces a useful vocabulary for making sense of our abounding, algorithmically mediated personal repositories of remembering stored in social media archives. The introduction sets out core preoccupation the authors – namely, titular production memory. this automation, memories identified, certain meanings values, then at that social media authors walter Benjamin an “digging,” active past. when ourselves, result algorithmic