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Technologies of memory: practices of remembering in analogue and digital photography

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-06-26, 08:17 authored by Emily KeightleyEmily Keightley, Michael Pickering
This article demonstrates the need always to consider change against continuity and continuity against change in the analysis of mnemonic technologies. It does so by exploring what has happened in the move from analogue to digital photography, looking in particular at how this has affected the meanings of personal photographs and the practices of remembering associated with them. In contrast with technologically determinist perspectives which have been, however latently, manifest in writing on new media, the value of exploring vernacular photography as a specifically mnemonic practice is that it turns our attention to the ways in which photographic practices are bound up with longer-term social uses and cultural values. Our analysis focuses on changes in four key categories of photographic practice that relate to the analogue/digital shift: photo-taking; photo-storing; photo-viewing; photo-sharing – all of which have consequences for the uses of photography as a mnemonic resource. They have all been altered in varying degrees by the advent of digital technologies, but with people continually making comparative evaluations of old and new, drawing on the former as a key aspect of learning how to use the latter.

History

Published in

NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY

Volume

16

Issue

4

Pages

576 - 593 (18)

Citation

KEIGHTLEY, E. and PICKERING, M., 2014. Technologies of memory: practices of remembering in analogue and digital photography. New Media & Society, 16 (4), pp. 576 - 593

Publisher

SAGE © The Author(s)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014-05-15

Copyright date

2014

Notes

This article was published in the journal, New Media & Society [SAGE © The Author(s)] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444814532062

ISSN

1461-4448

eISSN

1461-7315

Language

  • en