The mobile family gallery? Gender, memory and the cameraphone

Abstract

This article suggests that the study of memory in the 21st century needs to be understood within a rapidly developing techno-social context that includes wearable and portable mobile technologies. Drawing on a pilot study involving depth interviews on camera phone use by women and men in London in 2006, the paper addresses how mobile camera phones are being used to capture and share personal image memories. The study suggests that mobile memories enable the articulation of complex gendered identities that traverse established boundaries of men and women's lifeworlds. This in turn has implications for the conceptualisation of the history of memory. Every day that we 'wear' a mobile phone our personal embodied memory is a multimedia networked gallery. It may seem the milieux de mémoire are dissolving into the lieux de mémoire of our own bodies, but if we look closely then every lieux is also a milieux.