Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media

It has long been believed that individual human memory has been strengthened by the storage, representational, reproductive, and connective capacities of technologies and media. However, such views of how memory works are being challenged amidst today's digital maelstrom. In particular, the Internet, and social media platforms, have profoundly transformed the ways individuals receive, store, share, and lose information. Memory has become more externalized, dialogical, and transactive, yet at the same time, unwieldy, opaque, and inaccessible.

In The Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media, Qi Wang and Andrew Hoskins have assembled scholars from cognitive psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and media and communication studies to synthesize emerging social and cognitive science research on the impact of the Internet and social media on remembering and forgetting. They probe whether human memory is being threatened by a shift from a healthy reliance to a dependency on digital media and technologies.

The book illuminates theoretical and empirical research which shows the consequences of human entanglements with the Internet and social media for memory representation, expression, and socialization in individuals and the implications for the family, community, and society.

Gathering the leading international scholars of Memory Studies together, this volume offers a new interdisciplinary agenda of inquiry into the digital remaking of individual, collective, and cultural memory.

Qi Wang is Joan K. and Irwin M. Jacobs Professor of Human Development, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at Cornell University. She is the author of The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture (Oxford 2013), and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Professor in Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. He is founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Journal of Memory, Mind & Media, founding Editor-in-Chief of the Sage Journal of Memory Studies, and founding Co-Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series Memory Studies.