ABSTRACT

This introductory chapter maps the key concepts, issues and debates for a Digital Memory Studies. It places media and memory in a recent historical context of the two twentieth century ‘memory booms’ and sets out the character of today’s third boom in memory and the challenges for media and memory studies in responding to these transformations. I argue that a new holistic vision is needed of the hyperconnective relations in the present and between past and present to reveal the character and effects of remembering and forgetting through digital media, and to arrest our diminished consciousness of living through and in media, of these changes.