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When is the right time to remember?: Social media memories, temporality and the kairologic

Jacobsen, Benjamin N

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Abstract

This article asks what impact temporality and timing have on the ways in which memories are felt and made to matter on social media. Drawing on Taina Bucher’s theorisation of the ‘kairologic’ of algorithmic media, I explore how digital memories are resurfaced or made visible to people at the ‘right time’ in the present. The article proposes the notion of ‘right-time memories’ to examine the ways in which social media platforms and timing performatively shape people’s engagement with the past. Drawing on interview and focus group data, I explore four ways that right-time memories are sociotechnically produced and felt in everyday life: through an anniversary logic, personalisation, rhythms, and tensions. Ultimately, it is argued that when memories are made to matter in the present is a crucial way to further examine the temporal politics of social media platforms and algorithms.

Citation

Jacobsen, B. N. (2022). When is the right time to remember?: Social media memories, temporality and the kairologic. New Media and Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221096768

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Jun 3, 2022
Publication Date Jun 3, 2022
Deposit Date Jul 19, 2022
Publicly Available Date Jul 19, 2022
Journal New Media & Society
Print ISSN 1461-4448
Electronic ISSN 1461-7315
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221096768
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1197210

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).




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