This article investigates memory practices in connection with retrospective Facebook groups created for remembering specific aspects of the past. It focuses on how members of these groups experience and deal with how Facebook's interface and algorithms enable, shape, and interfere with memory practices. From this point of departure, the article discusses and nuances the idea that a ‘connective turn’ has brought with it an ontological shift in memory culture (Hoskins 2017a) and a ‘greying’ of memories (Hoskins and Halstead 2021). Theoretically, the article draws on Deborah Lupton's (2020) concept of ‘data selves’, which offers an account of how people interact with data and technology. This concept does not view data practices as immaterial but rather as material, corporeal, and affective, thus prompting an understanding of memory practices as hybrid processes where offline and online practices intersect (Gajjala 2019; Merrill forthcoming/2024). In this qualitative study, nine members of retrospective Facebook groups were chosen to participate in semi-structured interviews. The analysis explains the importance of viewing contemporary memory practices as hybrid, showing a greying effect within the affordances of Facebook that shapes both which memories are shared and how memories are shared. In addition, the analysis nuances the idea of an ontological shift in memory culture and the greying of memories by investigating how the interviewees’ deal and struggle with the affordances of the platform in their memory practices.

This article explores the nature and dynamics of mnemonic communities within the context of social media platforms and proposes to identify mnemonic communities using hashtag co-occurrence analysis. The article distinguishes between ‘explicit’ and ‘latent’ mnemonic communities, arguing that while some digital mnemonic communities may exhibit characteristics of offline communities, others exist latently as discursive spaces or semiospheres without direct awareness. On platforms like Instagram, hashtags function as semiotic markers, but also as user-chosen indexes to the content. As hashtags link the social and semantic aspects of community formation, hashtag co-occurrence analysis offers a robust framework for understanding and mapping these communities. This method allows to detect and analyse patterns of hashtag use that suggest the presence of networked community structures that may not be apparent or conscious to the social media users themselves. Additionally, a metric is introduced for determining the degree of ‘latentness’ of communities that quantifies the cohesion within communities compared to their external connections. The article demonstrates this approach by applying hashtag co-occurrence analysis to a dataset of Instagram posts tagged with #Juneteenth, a popular hashtag used to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. It identifies 87 mnemonic communities that reflect the diversity and complexity of how platforms facilitate memory-sharing practices and the role of semiotic markers in forming (latent) mnemonic networks.

The rise of digital technology has led to fundamental changes in how individual and collective perspectives on the past are transmitted and engaged. An immediate implication of these changes relates to the shift away from human communication as a single form of communication about memory towards multiple models which involve non-human (or robotic) agents. These non-human agents are primarily constituted by artificial intelligence (AI)-driven systems, such as search engines and conversational agents, which retrieve information about the past for human users and are increasingly used to generate memory-related content. To account for the growing complexity of memory-related digital communication, the article introduces three agency-based models of such communication: (1) human-to-human; (2) human-to-robot; and (3) robot-to-robot. It discusses examples of communication practices enabled by these models and scrutinises their implications for individual and collective memory transmission. The article concludes by outlining several directions for memory communication research increasingly shaped by non-human agents.

This article sets out some of the analytical moves that are necessary to developing a distinctive area of research called postcolonial memory studies. A key barrier to synthesising insights from postcolonial and memory studies has been a reductive approach to analogue and digital technologies which operate as vehicles for memory. Three analytical moves are needed to decentre, or at the very least de-naturalise the technological narratives and ecologies of Europe and the US. Media memory studies needs to draw more effectively on postcolonial studies to position mediated memory as inextricably connected to the legacies of colonialism and empire; develop a much broader account of media infrastructures emerging from what is increasingly characterised as ‘global media studies’; make an empirical and analytical shift away from the primacy of digital communications technologies and to explore technologies, not just as artefacts but as knowledge generating cultural practices. The combined value of these three shifts in approaches to media and communications technologies in memory studies research has considerable potential for developing postcolonial media memory studies research which offers a thorough and empirically grounded analysis of the complex ways in which the legacies of colonialism shape and structure the ways in which practices and performances of remembering are mediated in contemporary social life. This shift towards postcolonial memory studies can be seen as part of the wider project of what Anna (Amza) Reading has in this volume called ‘rewilding memory’ by rethinking ‘the underlying ecologies of knowledge within studies of memory’.