ABSTRACT
The visibility and shareability of Google’s search page illustrations, known as Doodles, make them potent artifacts of collective memory. Doodles are used to commemorate dates, individuals, events, and things, and they have gotten increasingly complex, interactive, and politically charged. Further, Google as a company encourages memory of artists and explorers, and via its Doodles places itself squarely within that group. This research study identifies the types of Doodles used over time, comparing which subjects are emphasized and which are omitted. Collective memory research on visuals has tended to focus on photographic visuals, which was an appropriate choice in investigation of 20th-century one-to-many communication, but the more interactive, dynamic, and sharing-based nature of online communication has shown an increasing emphasis on graphical and photo/graphical hybrid imagery. This research illustrates the use of online images as a tool to influence social memory and awareness via examination of a globally visible set of graphical images.
