ABSTRACT
Creating and sharing personal memories with digital media is a mundane activity for young people across the globe. Fleeting personal moments are captured with smartphones, to be uploaded to social media or distributed through messenger services. These practices result in ever-growing personal memory archives that often encompass tens of thousands of digital memory objects. However, young people’s archives, which hold important memories of their formative years, also face infrastructural vulnerabilities that can result in the loss or damage of personal memory objects.
This contribution challenges the proposition that ‘the internet never forgets’ by looking at young people’s experiences of losing or damaging digital memory objects, for example when social media accounts are suspended or digital devices are damaged or lost. The contribution is based on 12 months of digital ethnographic research with young participants living in Germany and the United Kingdom. Drawing on assemblage theory, it examines young people’s memory practices and the challenges they face in maintaining personal digital memory objects. Furthermore, the chapter highlights the physical dimensions of digital remembering at a time when the fragility of digital infrastructures is highlighted by the environmental crisis and issues in energy supply.
