Born digital: The Black lives matter movement and memory after the digital turn

Abstract

The dominance of traditional, institutionalized archives and memory platforms has been more and more challenged by the emergence of digital networks and “peer-to-peer” memory practices. This article argues that memory practices on social media platforms provide minority groups with affordances that established archives do not. Therefore, I will analyze tweets, Tumblr posts and a YouTube video in relation to the Black Lives Matter movement in the USA. Social media platforms can act as alternative archives to institutionalized archives and related systems of knowledge and power. While traditional archives focus on the representation of events, memory practices on social media platforms can also stress structural and slow forms of violence and their embeddedness in the everyday, point to historical continuities and make memories travel, thus establishing transnational and transcultural networks of mnemonic entanglements.