From technology to practice: Rethinking the archive

A recurring motif throughout this collection is the reorientation of memory studies from a focus on (media) technologies as static containers to an emphasis on the dynamic, communicative acts through which memory is enacted. Our opening editorial challenged the tendency to sideline communication amidst a “turn to technology,” and the collection’s contributions rise to this challenge in concrete ways. The contributions do not abandon the archive but illustrate how its meaning, function, and accessibility are being reshaped in digital environments. Archives become spaces of negotiation, remediation, and affective encounter – no longer static repositories, but sites of memory work in flux.

For example, Marselis’s (Reference Marselis2024) exploration of Sámi visual repatriation through colorized photography shows how grassroots, creative practices by Indigenous individuals and communities not only remediate colonial archives but also actively reclaim and transform collective memory into a living, collaborative project. By foregrounding affiliative postmemory and affective engagement, her study pushes us to see memory not as passive inheritance but as participatory co-creation, involving networks of expertise, kinship, digital media affordances, and cultural politics.

Lyall’s (Reference Lyall2024) discussion of digital self-tracking similarly complicates the notion of memory as mere data or record. Instead, he demonstrates that self-tracking practices act as scaffolds for biographical storytelling with “numbers becoming narrative,” and the quantification of everyday life is repurposed not just for surveillance or self-discipline, but for collective storytelling, meaning-making, and resilience. The mnemonic value of such practices is deeply intertwined with identity, community, and the politics of visibility.

Mnemonic power, play, and contestation in networked environments

A distinguishing feature of the digital present is the emergence of new actors and genres. In addition to institutions, we see individuals, AI systems, activist collectives, and even bots exerting agency in what and how we remember. Necessarily, who this ‘we’ is becomes a matter of association and boundary work itself. Articles in this collection scrutinize how memory, particularly on digital platforms, is performed, contested, and sometimes gamified.

Henig et al.’s (Reference Henig, Ventura and Ebbrecht-Hartmann2024) concept of “playful images,” for instance, asks us to confront the potentials and limits of playfulness in commemorative contexts like Holocaust memory. They show that digital media can recontextualize archival images in ways that are interactive or even irreverent. This, in turn raises the stakes for both empathy and ethical boundaries in mnemonic work.

Annabell’s (Reference Annabell2023) investigation into young women’s “digital memory work” on Instagram explores how users creatively remediate older mnemonic practices such as scrapbooks, diaries, and postcards. At the same time, her work shows how they are caught within the postfeminist politics of the ‘highlight reel’, where what is shareable and therefore memorable is carefully curated to align with cultural expectations of positivity and success. Here, digital memory is both a space of agency and vulnerability.

Decentering old dichotomies: Communicative remembering and non-human agency

A major conceptual advance in this collection is the movement beyond static binaries like communicative versus cultural memory and human versus non-human agency. Pentzold et al. (Reference Pentzold, Lohmeier and Birkner2024) advocate for treating modes of remembering not as oppositional, but as overlapping repertoires: the digital, networked present erodes rigid divides, allowing for more nuanced analyses of memory as a practice deeply enmeshed in technological affordances, algorithmic logics, and shifting social formations.

Crucially, Makhortykh (Reference Makhortykh2024) addresses the rise of ‘robotic memory agents’, including AI systems, bots, and algorithmic curators, and maps out agency-based models of memory communication such as human-to-human, human-to-robot, and robot-to-robot interactions. His intervention is urgent. As AI increasingly shapes how memories are findable, distributable, and even generatable, questions of responsibility, transparency, and mnemonic power must come to the fore.

Where do we go from here? Futures for memory studies

What, then, has changed, and what does this collection contribute to the evolving landscape of memory studies? Several key shifts emerge across the contributions, offering signposts for future inquiry.

Building on a long-standing recognition in memory studies that remembering is an active and situated practice, this collection further underscores memory as something memory agents, that is, humans and increasingly machines, do rather than something they simply possess. Across the contributions, memory emerges as contested, creative, and shaped through practices such as visual remediation, data narration, platform navigation, and affective labour. These enactments invite analytical attention not only to the tools and media involved, but also to the politics and ethics that inform how remembering unfolds.

Second, the notion of agency has expanded. Across the collection, it becomes clear that the boundaries between individual, institutional, governmental, and algorithmic actors are increasingly porous. Non-human entities such as AI systems, bots, and recommendation engines now participate in how memory is made findable, shareable, and even generatable. This development requires advances in conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches that can account for hybrid forms of mnemonic agency.

Third, communicative remembering is not a stable category. It is best understood as a situated and contingent practice. Instead of relying on fixed mnemonic positions, such as public or private or cognitive or social, we are encouraged to focus on patterns of enactment. These patterns reflect the dynamic ways in which memory is mediated through narrative, platform design, affect, and embodied experience. Communicative memory, in this sense, is emergent and processual.

At the same time, digital environments introduce new forms of ambivalence and precarity into memory work. While they enable plural and participatory modes of remembering, they also raise critical questions about visibility, governance, and permanence. Who controls the archive? Who is granted the power to forget? Whose memories are amplified, and whose are rendered illegible? These are not peripheral concerns; they are central to how memory unfolds in platformed societies. At the same time, forgetting demands renewed scholarly attention. Whether through algorithmic omission, platform decay, or deliberate acts of erasure, forgetting is not simply the absence of memory but an active and consequential process that shapes what remains knowable and shareable over time.

Finally, the collection reinforces the need for interdisciplinarity, ethics, and methodological renewal. Interdisciplinary collaboration is not merely desirable but essential for addressing the complex questions raised in our call for papers and, more broadly, within research at the intersection of memory, mind, and media. Understanding the entangled roles of technological systems, affective dynamics, cognitive processes, and communicative practices requires the insights and methodological tools of multiple disciplines. Approaches from media studies, psychology, anthropology, digital humanities, and related fields each contribute vital perspectives to an increasingly intricate landscape of memory work.

At the same time, such interdisciplinarity is not without its obstacles: institutional support can be uneven, and the integration of divergent epistemologies and research practices remains a substantial challenge. Nonetheless, the contributions to this collection exemplify the richness and necessity of boundary-crossing scholarship; they also highlight both the promise and the ongoing complexities of genuinely interdisciplinary memory studies.

Moving forward, memory research must remain open to conceptual engagement with media studies, science and technology studies, anthropology, psychology, and political science, as well as computer and life sciences. It must also address emerging empirical challenges. How do we study ephemeral, platform-bound practices? How can we account for opacity, bias, or infrastructural erasure? And how might we imagine memory-sensitive design principles in the development of future technological systems? These developments also pose methodological challenges. As memory practices increasingly unfold through ephemeral, visual, and algorithmically shaped media environments, traditional approaches to studying memory may fall short. Researchers are called to adapt, combine, or invent methods that can account for platform logics, shifting publics, and the uneven visibility of memory traces. This includes finding ways to ethically engage with content that is transient, affectively charged, or deeply personal. While this collection does not focus directly on methodological innovation, it gestures toward the need for reflexive, flexible, and practice-sensitive approaches.

Taken together, the contributions in this collection revisit and expand the three propositions introduced at the outset. First, they affirm that media do not simply transmit memory but actively shape its conditions, rhythms, and forms. Second, they underscore the diverse and creative ways in which people engage with media technologies to make meaning, contest narratives, and reclaim agency. Third, they draw critical attention to the uneven terrain of memory work, where questions of visibility, control, and exclusion are ever more pressing. In doing so, this collection champions a more relational, situated, and politically attuned understanding of what remembering entails in the digital age.

The articles gathered in this collection powerfully respond to several of the future directions outlined by Wertsch and Roediger (Reference Wertsch and Roediger2022). Collectively, they reaffirm the centrality of narrative in memory work, showing how digital and communicative practices both sustain established storylines and open space for new, contested forms of storytelling. They also speak to the role of self-centredness in remembering, highlighting how memory is often framed through personal, generational, or national lenses. This dynamic both reflects and reshapes broader social currents. At the same time, in line with the call for further research, the theme of collective future thinking remains more peripheral. While narrative and egocentrism are richly explored here, the empirical and theoretical examination of how communities imagine, anticipate, or mobilize around the future continues to represent an open horizon. A forthcoming special collection in Memory, Mind & Media on Collective Future Thinking at Times of War and Conflict is set to tackle some of these questions directly. In this, as in the study of forgetting, the contributions in this collection not only advance current conversations but also sharpen our sense of the questions that remain pressing for the field.

Continuing the conversation

In sum, this collection offers a provocation – a call to grapple with the mutable, networked, sometimes confounding configuration of memory in the digital age. The field faces formidable challenges: algorithmic curation and bias, memory’s commodification and gamification, persistent inequalities of visibility and voice, and the fragility and unpredictability of the digital trace.

Yet there is also cause for optimism: new forms of agency, creative imagination, collaborative repair, and counternarrative are emerging as mnemonic actors multiply and methods diversify. As we continue this conversation, perhaps the central question now is not only ‘How will we remember together?’ but also:

• • Who, or what, will do the remembering and forgetting in a world of proliferating agents?

• • Who can intervene, and how, to define the contours, uses, and ethics of memory work in networked environments?

• • How do we cultivate memory practices that are just, inclusive, critical – and alive to the possibilities of becoming otherwise?

At the heart of this collection lie three overlapping concerns: practice, platforms, and possibilities. Practice reminds us that memory is not a static possession but an activity shaped through doing, sharing, and contesting. Platforms matter not only as technical infrastructures, but as environments that govern visibility, participation, and affective resonance. Possibilities signal that memory work, even when precarious or uneven, carries the potential for intervention, reimagining, and repair. Together, these concerns illuminate how memory is enacted, where it is mediated, and what futures it might help bring into view. At the same time, they unsettle what counts as memory, who performs it, and where and when it might emerge, and be used.

In this spirit, the pieces gathered here offer not closure, but openings: to renewed inquiry, critical reflection, creative praxis, and ethical responsibility. The future of communicating memory matters.