Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The dominance of traditional, institutionalized archives and memory platforms has been more and more challenged by the emergence of digital networks and “peer-to-peer” memory practices. This article argues that memory practices on social media platforms provide minority groups with affordances that established archives do not. Therefore, I will analyze tweets, Tumblr posts and a YouTube video in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA. Social media platforms can act as alternative archives to institutionalized archives and related systems of knowledge and power. While traditional archives focus on the representation of events, memory practices on social media platforms can also stress structural and slow forms of violence and their embeddedness in the everyday, point to historical continuities and make memories travel, thus establishing transnational and transcultural networks of mnemonic entanglements.

Keywords

archives Black lives matter digital memory memory activism social media structural violence

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alexander

(2012) The New Jim Crow. New York: New Press.

Alvarez

(2013). Defense in Trayvon Martin case raises questions about the victim’s character. The New York Times, 23 May, n. p. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/us/zimmermans-lawyers-release-text-messages-of-trayvon-martin.html (accessed 21 May 2019).

Benedictus

(2013) How skittles became a symbol of Trayvon Martin’s innocence. The Guardian, 15 July. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/jul/15/skittles-trayvon-martin-zimmerman-acquittal (accessed 21 May 2019).

Bennett

Segerberg

(2013) The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bidgood

Bloch

McCarthy

Stack

Andrews

(2017) From 2017: Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down Across the United States. Here’s a List. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/16/us/confederate-monuments-removed.html

Black Lives Matter. Available at: https://blacklivesmatter.com/ (accessed 21 May 2019).

Bloom

(2017) Introduction rethinking social memory: archives, technology, and the social. In: Bloom

Lundemo

Røssaak

(eds) Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology, and the Social. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 11–38.

Bond

(2015) Frames of Memory after 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bond

Craps

Vermeulen

(2017) Introduction: memory on the move. In: Bond

Craps

Vermeulen

(eds) Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–26.

10.

Bond

Rapson

(2014) The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory between and beyond Borders. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter.

11.

Bonilla

Rosa

(2015) #Ferguson: digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist: Journal of the American Ethnologist Society 42(1): 4–17.

12.

Brock

(2012) From the blackhand side: twitter as a cultural conversation. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56(4): 529–549.

13.

Butler

(2016/2010) Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso.

14.

Carrier

Kabalek

(2014) Cultural memory and transcultural memory – a conceptual analysis. In: Bond

Rapson

(eds) The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory between and beyond Borders. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 39–60.

15.

Caswell

(2016) ‘The archive’ is not an archives: on acknowledging the intellectual contributions of archival studies. Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 16(1).

16.

Chadwick

(2017) Archive. In: de Bloois

de Cauwer

Masschelein

(eds.) 50 Key Terms in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Pelckmans Pro, pp. 51–55.

17.

Christensen

(2011) Political activities on the Internet: slacktivism or political participation by other means? First Monday. U of Illinois at Chicago, 7 February. Available at: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3336/2767 (accessed 17 October 2019).

18.

Colleoni

Rozza

Arvidsson

(2014). Echo chamber or public sphere? Predicting political orientation and measuring political homophily in Twitter using big data. Journal of Communication 64(2): 317–332.

19.

Craps

(2013) Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

20.

De Kosnik

(2016) Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

21.

Drake

(2016) #ArchivesForBlackLives: building a community archives of police violence in cleveland. The Medium, 22 April. Available at: https://medium.com/on-archivy/archivesforblacklives-building-a-community-archives-of-police-violence-in-cleveland-93615d777289 (accessed 21 May 2019).

22.

Edrington

Lee

(2018) Tweeting a social movement: black lives matter and its use of twitter to share information, build community, and promote action. Journal of Public Interest Communications 2(2): 289–306.

23.

Engels

(2017) Racialized slacktivism: social media performances of white antiracism. In: Kenndy

Middleton

Ratcliffe

(eds) Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 92–111.

24.

Erll

(2011) Memory in Culture. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

25.

Gainous

Wagner

(2014) Tweeting to Power: The Social Media Revolution in American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

26.

Garde-Hansen

Hoskins

Reading

(2009) Save as: Digital Memories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

27.

Gladwell

(2010) Small change: why the revolution will not be tweeted. New Yorker, 4 October. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell (accessed 17 October 2019).

28.

Hesse

Hooker

(2017) Introduction: on black political thought inside global black protest. The South Atlantic Quarterly 116(3): 443–456.

29.

Highfield

(2016) Social Media and Everyday Politics. Cambridge: Polity.

30.

Hillstrom

(2018) Black Lives Matter: From a Moment to a Movement. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.

31.

Hodgkin

Radstone

(2003) Regimes of Memory. London: Routledge.

32.

Hon

(2015) Social media framing within the million hoodies movement for justice. Public Relations Review. Available at: https://instituteforpr.org/wp-content/uploads/PRR-Social-media-framing-within-the-Million-Hoodies-Movement-for-Justice.pdf (accessed 17 October 2019).

33.

Hoskins

(2011) Media, memory, metaphor: remembering the connective turn. Parallax 17(4): 19–31.

34.

Hoskins

Tulloch

(2016) Introduction. In: Hoskins

Tulloch

(eds) Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–19.

35.

Hoskins

(2018a) The restless past: an introduction to digital memory and media. In: Hoskins

(ed) Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–24.

36.

Hoskins

(2018b) Memory of the multitude: the end of collective memory. In: Hoskins

(ed) Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. New York: Routledge, pp. 85–109.

37.

Howard

(2017) Linked fates: social media as a framing, tactical and witnessing tool in the black lives matter movement. In: Steiner

Waisbord

(eds) News of Baltimore: Race, Rage and the City. New York/London: Routledge, pp. 120–138.

38.

Jackson

(2006) Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media. Albany: State University of New York Press.

39.

Kansteiner

(2002) Finding meaning in memory: a methodological critique of collective memory studies. History and Theory 41(2): 179–197.

40.

Khan-Cullors

Bandele

Davis

(2018) When they Call you a Terrorist: a Black Lives Matter Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

41.

Kuo

(2016) Racial justice activist hashtags: counterpublics and discourse circulation. New Media and Society 20(2): 1–20.

42.

Leach

Allen

(2017) The social psychology of the black lives matter meme and movement. Current Directions in Psychological Science 26(6): 543–547.

43.

Linscott

(2017) Close-up: #black lives matter and media: all lives (don’t) matter: the internet meets afro-pessimism and black optimism. Black Camera: An International Film Journal 8(2): 104–119.

44.

Mckesson

(2018) On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope. New York: New York Viking.

45.

Nelson

(2016) The longue durée of Black Lives Matter. American Journal of Public Health 106(10): 1734–1737.

46.

Nixon

(2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

47.

Noble

(2014) Trayvon, race, media and the politics of spectacle. The Black Scholar 44(1): 12–29.

48.

Parker

McIlwain

(2016) #Blacklivesmatter and the power and limits of social media. Medium, 2 December. Available at: https://medium.com/@emilydparker/how-blacklivesmatter-resembles-activism-in-the-authoritarian-world-24d1200864f6. (accessed 17 October 2019).

49.

Phillips

(2019) Protests erupt in Brazil after death of black teenager who was restrained. The Guardian, 17 February. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/17/brazil-protests-restraint-death-black-teenager-rio-de-janeiro (accessed 21 May 2019).

50.

Polletta

Jasper

(2001) Collective identity and social movements. Annual Review of Sociology 27(1): 283–305.

51.

Prendergast

(2017) Reflection: before #BlackLivesMatter. In: Kenndy

Middleton

Ratcliffe

(eds) Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 89–91.

52.

Rambukkana

(2015) From #racefail to #ferguson: the digital intimacies of race-activist hashtag publics. In Rambukkana

(ed) #HashtagPublics: The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 29–46.

53.

Rankine

(2016) The condition of black life is one of mourning. In Ward

(ed) The Fire this Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race. New York: Scribner, pp. 145–155.

54.

Reading

Notley

(2018) Globital memory capital: theorizing digital memory economies. In: Hoskins

(ed) Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. New York: Routledge, pp. 234–249.

55.

Roediger

(2016) Making solidarity uneasy: cautions on a keyword from black lives matter to the past. American Quarterly 68(2): 223–248.

56.

Rosenbaum

(2017) Constructing Digital Cultures: Tweets, Trends, Race, and Gender. Lanham: Lexington Books.

57.

Rothberg

(2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

58.

Schradie

(2019) The Revolution that Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

59.

Schwartz

Cook

(2002) Archives, records, and power: the making of modern memory. Archival Science 2(1–2): 1–19.

60.

Smit

Heinrich

Broersma

(2017) Activating the past in the ferguson protests: memory work, digital activism and the politics of platforms. New Media & Society 20(9): 3119–3139.

61.

Sodaro

(2018) Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

62.

Sutherland

(2017) Archival amnesty: in search of black American transitional and restorative justice. In: Caswell

Punzalan

Sangwand

T-K

(eds) Critical Archival Studies. Special Issue. Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1(2). Available at: https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/42 (accessed 21 May 2019).

63.

Thimm

Nehls

(2017) Sharing grief and mourning on instagram: digital patterns of familiy memory. Communications 42(3): 327–349.

64.

Van Dijck

(2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

65.

Ward

(2017) Fire this Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race. Riverside: Scribner Book Company.

66.

Weller

(2014) Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang.

67.

Wortham

(2016) Black tweets matter: How the tumultuous, hilarious, wide-ranging chat party on Twitter changed the face of activism in America. Smithsonian Magazine, September. Available at: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/black-tweets-matter-180960117/ (accessed 21 May 2019).

Born digital: The Black lives matter movement and memory after the digital turn

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References