Book Spotlight

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

Edited by Qi Wang and Andrew Hoskins

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.

Editors:

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.

Contributors:

Amanda J. Barnier, Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), and Department of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Dana-Lis Bittner, University of California, Santa Cruz
Shayla Dockery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Ullrich K. H. Ecker, School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Australia
Rebecca Egan, School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Ireland
Jennifer Evans, Carleton University
Tim Fawns, Monash University, Australia
Joanne Garde-Hansen, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Ciara M. Greene, School of Psychology, University College Dublin, Ireland
Emily Keightley, Loughborough University
Megan O. Kelly, University of Waterloo
Heather M. Kleider-Offutt, Georgia State University
Louis Klein, Department of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney Australia
Xinyi Lu, University of Waterloo
Samuel Merrill, DIGSUM, Umeå University
Gillian Murphy, School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Ireland
Katharina Niemeyer, Université du Québec à Montréal
April E. Pereira, University of Waterloo
Martin Pogacar, University of Nova Gorica
Suparna Rajaram, Stony Brook University
Brandon Rigato, Carleton University
Evan F. Risko, University of Waterloo
Rik Smit, University of Groningen
Beth B. Stevens, Georgia State University
Charles B. Stone, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Graduate Center, City University of New York
Benjamin C. Storm, University of California, Santa Cruz
Li Qian Tay, School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia, Australia
Noam Tirosh, Communication Studies, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Angelina N. Vasquez, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The New School for Social Research
Karen Worcman, Museu da Pessoa, Brazil
Jeremy K. Yamashiro, University of California, Santa Cruz