Memory in Motion / edited by Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo, and Eivind Rossaak.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : rethinking social memory: archives, technology, and the social / Ina Blom. Oralities : "Electrified voices": non-human agencies of socio-cultural memory / Wolfgang Ernst -- Can languages be saved? Linguistic heritage and the moving archive / Sónia Matos. Softwares : Big diff, granularity, incoherence, and production in the Github software repository / Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Adrian Mackenzie, Richard Mills, and Stuart Sharples -- The post-archival constellation: the archive under the technical conditions of computational media / David M. Berry. Lives : Planetary goodbyes: post-history and future memories of an ecological past / Jussi Parikka -- Video water, video life, videosociality / Ina Blom -- FileLife: constant, Kurenniemi, and the question of living archives / Eivind Rossaak. Images : Mapping the world: Les Archives de la Planete and the mobilization of memory / Trond Lundemo -- Stills from a film that was never made: cinema, gesture, memory / Pai Väliaho -- The archival promise of the biometric passport / Liv Hausken. Socialites : A neomonadology of social (memory) production / Tiziana Terranova -- On the synthesis of social memories / Yuk Hui. Contributors -- Name index.

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How should we understand social memory in the age of new media? Classic sociology described the ways in which social memory was enacted through ritual, language art, architecture and institution - phenomena whose persistence over time and whose capacity for a shared storing of the past was contrasted with fleeting individual memory. Society is memory, Émile Durkheim stated. However, today's new time technologies compel us to rethink this concept of memory and its emphasis on a shared past. For in the age of digital computing, instant updating and transfer functions and interconnection through real time networks give an unprecedented priority to the present and the future, while challenging the very distinction between individual and collective memory. New media technologies raise the question of the temporalities of memory to a principle, challenging not just the classic description of social memory, but also the social ontology that it presupposes. 'Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and the Social' discusses the new technologies of memory from perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very conceptualization of the social.

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