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understanding of (the production and maintenance of) a collectivity in DME as proposed by Arjun
Appadurai: ―Where natural social collectivities build connectivity out of memory, virtual
communities build memory out of connectivity.‖ 100 This statement (with its questionable use of
natural) brings into play three important aspects: collectivity, connectivity and memory which are
essential for the reproduction and sustenance of any community. Such conceptualisation enables
grasping the changing condition of remembering and see it, as Hoskins proposes in his
conceptualisation of the ‗connective turn‘ as ―the massively increased abundance, pervasiveness
and accessibility of digital technologies, devices and media, shaping an ongoing re-calibration of
time, space (and place) and memory by people as they connect with, inhabit and constitute
increasingly both dense and diffused social networks.‖ 101
Collectivity, memory and connectivity can be understood as the basic building blocks of any
socio-cultural constellation. They enable establishment, maintenance and reproduction of
interpersonal, social, cultural, national and international relations. It is essential for a collectivity,
if it is to persist over time, that its members be connected to each other and their collectivity
beyond the limits of space (territory/state) and time (temporality/history, heritage). It is through
the interactions between individual, collective and institutional mediation of memory that a shared
interpretation of the past may be created. Yet, for memories to be comprehensible beyond an
individual mind, i.e. in order for them to work, representations of memories must not only be
communicable and ‗universally‘ accepted, but their creation and management must be able to
continually recontextualise and renarrate them in the present for the possible futures.
Territoriality and Temporality
Remembering after the connectivity turn thus entails communities dispersed in both space and
time, which are no longer exclusively based on territorial/national stories and histories, where ―the
moment of connection is the moment of memory.‖ 102 The territorial principle of community
formation is in many ways questioned and challenged by the principles of forming communities
communications, including ‗messaging‘, be these peer-to-peer, one-to-many, or more complex and diffused
connections within and between groups, ‗crowds‘, or networks, and facilitated through mobile media and social
networking technologies and other internet-based services.‖ See also Jose van Dijck ―Flickr and the Culture of
connectivity: Sharing views experiences, memories,‖ Memory Studies, October 2010 (published online before print),
accessed 2 November 2010.
100 Arjun Appadurai, ―Archive and Aspiration,‖ in Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (eds.), Information is Alive,
V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers, Rotterdam, 2003, 17, italics added.
101 Andrew Hoskins, ―7/7 and connective memory: Interactional trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture,‖
Memory Studies 4(3), 2011, 269–280, 271.
102 Ibid., 278.
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