ABSTRACT
Through a case study of the Copenhagen-based activist television channel TV Stop (1987–2005), this chapter examines how social media are used as archives in ways that seek to facilitate connective memory between past, present and future protest movements. Drawing on in-depth key informant interviews and a thematic analysis of the online spaces former activists appropriate to store, organize and reinvigorate the historical video material, the case of TV Stop is used to reflect upon memory, archival activism and media time/temporalities in relation to social media materialities. The chapter is concerned with materiality in the specific context of video and television production and the pre-digital properties of the media landscape in which the channel first operated. It follows a shift in the cultural form that the channel uses to express itself along with a general transition from analogue to digital video materiality, which involve different forms of temporality, storage and memory. The analysis shows how the relaunch of TV Stop in social media can usefully be understood as driven by three interlaced incentives: to store and preserve time, to catch up with time and, as impelled by the urge to remember times passed, reminding people of the value of remembering and making connections between past and present struggles.
