A CRITICAL DEBATE ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DIGITAL MEMORY

Abstract

Digital technologies have transformed the conventions of preserving, recalling, and forgetting the past as they provide new digital tools and platforms to remember, to forget and to collect data for individuals, societies, and corporations. With the convergence of new media, memory gains a global aspect along with its personal and local characteristics and turns into the digitally mediated memory. These technologies enable digital memory to be indexed, archived, circulated, and processed infinitely in cyberspace. Therefore, the advancements in the Web and cloud computing technologies yield new dimensions for memory studies to be discussed from a political economy perspective since digitally mediated memory has some economic, political, societal, and cultural impacts on societies. This study conceptually scrutinizes the commodification processes of digital memory and analyzes its material and immaterial bases from a political economy perspective, and claims that they are fundamentally interwoven. The rare earths which are used to produce technological devices are considered as the material basis. Additionally, major technology corporations using these rare earths, and their data centers are taken as the extensions of its materiality. Digitally archived, managed, and retrieved memory is considered as data, which represent immaterial basis of digital memory. The materiality and immateriality of digital memory are not regarded as independent from the inherent power relations and ideologies of the current data economy. Thus, this study aims to discuss digital memory from a political economy perspective to reveal the flow between its materiality and immateriality and the inherent power relations in the data economy. It also poses the potential challenges, risks, and outcomes we may encounter in such an economic system.