MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook

Abstract

Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook could pose serious challenges to the hegemony of the historical imagination that has dominated Western thought in the last century. They should not be dismissed as frivolous, time-consuming, dangerous, addictive or as the claiming of a bit of cyberspace for the marketing of a youthful self. As Foucault makes clear in a prophetic statement that imagines the networking of individuals constructing geographies of human interaction, such sites appear to re-animate ‘a spatialization of thought and experience’ (Soja, 1999, p. 114). If memory and identity can be seen as coterminous and SNSs involve literally digitising ones’ self into being (Sundén, 2003, p. 3) then what is at stake when memories and identities are practised on Facebook? This chapter will not focus upon the actual digital artefacts that Facebook users produce on their sites: their profiles, messages, photographs and ‘friends’. It goes without saying that the allure of the site is in its drawing together in one place memory practices: creating photograph albums, sharing photographs, messaging, joining groups and alumni memberships, making ‘friends’ and staying in touch with family. Previous chapters in this collection have drawn attention to these practices as stretching and integrating memory in personal and collective ways.