Memory in motion

Sociology has long had approaches to describing the ways in which social memory is enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions-phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how new media changes that equation is very much up in the air: How, in the age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is social memory created and enacted? This collection offers a set of essays that discuss the new technology of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social.