Digital media, networks and archives reimagine and revitalize individual, social and cultural memory but they also ensnare it, bringing it under new forms of control. Understanding these paradoxical conditions of remembering and forgetting through today’s technologies needs bold interdisciplinary interventions. Digital Memory Studies seizes this challenge and pioneers an agenda that interrogates concepts, theories and histories of media and memory studies, to map a holistic vision for the study of the digital remaking of memory. Through the lenses of connectivity, archaeology, economy, and archive, contributors illuminate the uses and abuses of the digital past via an array of media and topics, including television, videogames and social media, and memory institutions, network politics and the digital afterlife.

Andrew Hoskins: The restless past: an introduction to digital memory and media -- Connectivity. Martin Pogacar: Culture of the past: digital connectivity and dispotentiated futures -- Amanda Lagerkvist: The media end: digital afterlife agencies and techno-existential closure -- Andrew Hoskins: Memory of the multitude: the end of collective memory -- Wulf Kansteiner: The holocaust in the 21st century: digital anxiety, cosmopolitanism on steroids, and never again genocide without memory -- Archaeology. Wolfgang Ernst: Tempor(e)alities and archive-textures of media-connected memory -- Jussi Parikka: The underpinning time: from digital memory to network microtemporality -- Timothy Barker: Television in and out of time -- Matthew Allen: Memory in technoscience: biomedia and the wettability of mnemonic relations -- Economy. Joanne Garde-Hansen and Gilson Schwartz: Iconomy of memory: on remembering as digital, civic and corporate currency -- Anna Reading and Tanya Notley: "Globital"' memory capital: exploring digital memory economies -- Archive. Michael Moss: Memory institutions, the archive and digital disruption? -- Debra Ramsay: Tensions in the interface: the archive and the digital

Andrew Hoskins: The restless past: an introduction to digital memory and media -- Connectivity. Martin Pogacar: Culture of the past: digital connectivity and dispotentiated futures -- Amanda Lagerkvist: The media end: digital afterlife agencies and techno-existential closure -- Andrew Hoskins: Memory of the multitude: the end of collective memory -- Wulf Kansteiner: The holocaust in the 21st century: digital anxiety, cosmopolitanism on steroids, and never again genocide without memory -- Archaeology. Wolfgang Ernst: Tempor(e)alities and archive-textures of media-connected memory -- Jussi Parikka: The underpinning time: from digital memory to network microtemporality -- Timothy Barker: Television in and out of time -- Matthew Allen: Memory in technoscience: biomedia and the wettability of mnemonic relations -- Economy. Joanne Garde-Hansen and Gilson Schwartz: Iconomy of memory: on remembering as digital, civic and corporate currency -- Anna Reading and Tanya Notley: "Globital"' memory capital: exploring digital memory economies -- Archive. Michael Moss: Memory institutions, the archive and digital disruption? -- Debra Ramsay: Tensions in the interface: the archive and the digital

This groundbreaking and truly interdisciplinary collection of essays examines how digital media technologies require us to rethink established conceptualisations of human memory in terms of its discourses, forms and practices.

In the popular imagination, archives are remote, largely obsolete institutions: either antiquated, inevitably dusty libraries or sinister repositories of personal secrets maintained by police states. Yet the archive is now a ubiquitous feature of digital life. Rather than being deleted, e-mails and other computer files are archived. Media software and cloud storage allow for the instantaneous cataloging and preservation of data, from music, photographs, and videos to personal information gathered by social media sites. In this digital landscape, the archival-oriented media theories of Wolfgang Ernst are particularly relevant. Digital Memory and the Archive, the first English-language collection of the German media theorist’s work, brings together essays that present Ernst’s controversial materialist approach to media theory and history. His insights are central to the emerging field of media archaeology, which uncovers the role of specific technologies and mechanisms, rather than content, in shaping contemporary culture and society. Ernst’s interrelated ideas on the archive, machine time and microtemporality, and the new regimes of memory offer a new perspective on both current digital culture and the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. For Ernst, different forms of media systems—from library catalogs to sound recordings—have influenced the content and understanding of the archive and other institutions of memory. At the same time, digital archiving has become a contested site that is highly resistant to curation, thus complicating the creation and preservation of cultural memory and history.

This edited volume documents the current reflections on the 'Right to be Forgotten' and the interplay between the value of memory and citizen rights about memory. It provides a comprehensive analysis of problems associated with persistence of memory, the definition of identities (legal and social) and the issues arising for data management.

This collected volume is the first to study the interface between contemporary social movements, cultural memory and digital media. Establishing the digital memory work practices of social movements as an important area of research, it reveals how activists use digital media to lay claim to, circulate and curate cultural memories. Interdisciplinary in scope, its contributors address mobilizations of mediated remembrance in the USA, Germany, Sweden, Italy, India, Argentina, the UK and Russia.