Conference/BOOKS (Polity Press): Live, die, remember, forget

Polity Press' was the last stall I visited during AoiR - the conference is now over, and I am slowing down to two last posts about book exhibits. This one is dedicated to two books which touch on different, but, I believe, closely related topics: death and mourning, and remembering and forgetting.

Mediated Death looks at digitally mediated practices of mourning and commemoration as well as spectatorship and ritualisation. The book looks at iconic deaths of famous individuals (politicians and celebrities) as well as what is often seen (and even more often discounted) as "ordinary" deaths - at the hand of political events, police brutality, and, most recently, also the pandemic. The book is raising key questions of how death is mediatised differently - sometimes visibilised as a spectacle, and sometimes hidden away from view; sometimes mourned collectively and sometimes accepted as inevitable.

Remember Me: Memory and Forgetting in the Digital Age covers a range of stories related to various digital practices of remembering and forgetting on social media and other platforms: from "looking back" at one's memories on Facebook and other social media, to digital archives and web-based encyclopedias of the last few decades, to textual and visual forms of remembering, to structures of feelings surrounding digital remembrance - and forgetting. One of the most interesting things about this book is the way it expands the timeline of digital memory beyond the most recent hype of social media platforms and their increasing role in mediating memory. What is missing - as is often the case in the field of digital memory studies -is an account of the deeply political nature of digital memory, when it is at the mercy of governments and ideologies, control, surveillance and erasure, and not merely a personal decision to forget.