Start where you are: Building cairns of collaborative memory

Abstract

Digital mediums have changed how we collect, store, process, and share memories. The following article considers how social media status updates inform individual and collective memory by envisioning them as instances when personal narrative coalesces with communal narrative in the memory-making process. Building on the principle of collaborative memory, the author seeks to emphasize the inherent collaborative nature of the remembering process by presenting three exemplary status updates from a post-9/11 amputee war veteran who locates himself within an emerging, yet malleable public narrative (or lack thereof) about US led missions in Afghanistan.