Аннотация:This article examines how the capacities of smartphones to reshape memory practices are enacted and negotiated in personal life. It is argued that digital devices and networked media facilitate a vast production and circulation of persistent digital traces that are potential memories. An approach that privileges sociotechnical practices is used to empirically examine the roles of digital devices, software, and social media in reconfiguring personal memory. In-depth interviews with 30 individuals aged between 20 and 30 are used to examine the details of reflexive and routine modes of forgetting and remembering related to the prevalence of devices and the digital traces produced in quotidian use. The increasingly visual life of data of many kinds promotes a ‘continuously networked present’ (Hoskins, 2012), but this is highly differentiated and actively negotiated in complex ways that both reproduce and reconfigure established memory practices.
