ECREA16-Abstract

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Friday, November 11

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DCC14

Technologies, Histories andMemory

PP 508

”Click Like if You Remember This”: Social Memory and Technonostalgia on Facebook

L. Klastrup

IT University at Copenhagen, Culture and Communication, Copenhagen S, Denmark

There are still few studies of how older generations use Facebook and for which purposes (see however Nef et al 2013, Bowe and Wohn 2015). In order to

remedy this lack, this paper will present a research project which examines how the generation of nowmiddle-aged adults, who grew up in the late 1970's

and 1980's, use Facebook to socially share and reminiscence on now outdated technological artefacts. I will refer to this practice as“technonostalgia”, a con‑

cept previously introduced by Svetlana Boym (2001), but used in another sense here, in that it describes a nostalgic shared “longing for” past technology,

and not the recreation of the past through technology (Boym’s conceptualisation). Examples of digital technonostalgic artefacts are photos of analogue

media devices and storage formats, such as cassette tapes, cassette tape holders, floppy discs, public pay phones etc., and when shared often presented with

catchy text overlaid on the photos. By focusing on the networked sharing of a pretty long gone past, this paper connects to the conference theme, in that it

points to the fact that adults also use social network services to share mundane memories, which are not connected to political or historical events. Rather

in this case memorising serve the function of simple entertainment and of allowing fleeting social bonding across personal networks, by letting people“re‑

member together”(Simon 2012).Thus technonostalgia describes the practice of tapping into a shared past media repertoire, which includes media technol‑

ogies which are now obsolete. In this context, it is important to emphasise that temporal nostalgia is not used here in the more negative sense of“a search

for ontological security in the past”, but as a “desire for engagement with difference”, which is also a reflection on a present now (Pickering and Keightley,

2006, 921), in which our own children can no longer relate to the media technologies which were such an important part of our own adolescence. In order

to understand the technonostalgic sharing practices at work, the final paper will draw on studies of cultural memories and popular culture (such as van der

Hoeven 2015), social media and public memory (Zerubavel 2006, Simon 2012) and modern conceptualisations of nostalgia (Pickering and Keightley 2006,

Boym 2007), in combination with literature focusing on onine sharing practices and motivations (f.i. Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013, Alhabash and McAlister

2015). In terms of data, the project will analyse comments and shares related to three particular photos, shared between December 2015 and February

2016, in total comprising more than 350 comments, and 3000 shares. In addition, it will draw on findings from an explorative survey to be distributed in

March 2016, in order to to examine more closely the rationale behind the sharing of these artefacts and the memories related to them.

PP 509

The Epic Life of the Web : An Examination of the Mythical Narratives on the History of the World Wide Web and Its Inventor

P. Bory

, S. Natale

USI Università della Svizzera italiana, IMeG Institute of Media and Journalism, Lugano, Switzerland

Loughborough University, Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough, United Kingdom

The narratives about the emergence of the World Wide Web have become key components of the way we imagine and conceptualize its impact on our

societies and cultures. Scholars in media and technology studies have showed that ideas and cultural representations inform not only how technologies

are imagined, but also how they are designed and adopted (Flichy, 2007; Mosco, 2004; Nye, 1994). In the case of the Web, narratives about its “birth”and

development have played a paramount role in orienting the public’s imagination towards positive elements such as plurality, openness, and creativity,

which in turn facilitated its insertion into broader narratives of political, social and cultural change (Lesage & Rinfret, 2015). This paper employs the notion

of biography of media (Natale 2016) in the analysis of the history of the Web, claiming that both the biographies of Tim Berners-Lee and its invention

follow a specific narrative structure. Indeed, narratives regarding the invention, the diffusion and the institutionalization of theWeb can be framed through

the hero “monomyth”, as described by Joseph Campbell in his seminal book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Drawing on Campbell’s model, the analysis

of the biographies of Tim Berners-Lee and the Web are compared with three specific phases of the hero’s journey (Vogler 2007). 1)The departure or call

to adventure that coincides with the first period of Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva which is represented as the ideal context in which the new technology

could take shape. 2)The initiation stage that coincides with the invention and the first promotional phase of the WWW. This stage includes the hero over‑

coming several trials and finally completing his quest, for which he might receive a reward. Translating this pattern into the biography of Berners-Lee, this

phase corresponds to the invention of theWorldWideWeb and the initially uncertain pattern of institutionalization and diffusion for the new invention. 3)

The last phase is the return and reintegration with society. In Berners-Lee’s biographical narrative, the foundation and governance of the World Wide Web

Consortium corresponds to the return stage in Campbell’s monomyth. Once theWeb has spread globally new responsibilities and trials emerge as the hero

struggles to protect his invention from new powers threatening the public domain of his invention, as well as to preserve the message that theWeb conveys

through the mythological narrative inscribed in its biographical path. Following familiar narrative patterns such as Campbell’s monomyth, the authors

argue that biographies of media provide a trajectory through which we represent and imagine the impact of media in our societies and everyday lives. In

this respect the imaginary associated to the biographies of theWeb actively contributes to the shaping and institutionalization of the role of specific media

in our society.