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Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural

Studies
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Remembering digitally: new media and

the communicating of new memories
a a a
Kai Khiun Liew , Natalie Pang & Brenda Chan
a
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Published online: 30 Jun 2015.

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To cite this article: Kai Khiun Liew, Natalie Pang & Brenda Chan (2015): Remembering digitally:
new media and the communicating of new memories, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural
Studies, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2015.1051801

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1051801

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 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1051801

INTRODUCTION
Remembering digitally: new media and the communicating of new
memories
Kai Khiun Liew*, Natalie Pang and Brenda Chan

Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore

Once contained in personal diaries, family photo albums and scrapbooks of small groupings
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of friends, the private and intimate realms of memories have now made a huge jump into the
public domain of cyberspace. Intersecting with the Digital Turn that has transformed literacy
practices and applications from the older internet blogs to the more recent social media
posts, the Memory Turn becomes a post-historical fragmentary search for the sublime,
suppressed and subaltern from the totality of the grand narrative of modernity. In rendering
more accessible, circulatory and pluralizing versions of the past, digital media have also
been instrumental in intensifying the democratization of the archives with the compression,
storage and retrieval of personal memories and mementos online. New possibilities and
politics have arisen from this digital expansion and globalization of memoryscapes whereby
official narratives are challenged with increasing frequency from countless uploads and
circulation of incidences, reflections and illustrations. From decorative blogs that profile and
perform identities as well as temporal markers to assist Alzheimer patients to more
politicized sites seeking to remember collective trauma and displacement, digital media
have become paramount to the shaping of histories and memories.
This special issue came about from an international conference on ‘New Media,
Memories and Histories’ that took place from 5 to 6 October 2012 at Nanyang
Technological University’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.
Of about 15 papers, we have made seven relevant selections that would be a representative
spread of scholarly discussions on the role of the New Media in shaping memoryscapes
from the private to the public in specific case studies across several countries including
Australia and Malaysia, the UK, Holland, Hong Kong and Singapore. The topics in these
papers span from studying new technical applications and semiotics to new politics of
repression and trauma on both national and transnational contexts.
Reminding readers about historicity of the eco-cultural destructions that is often
impacted on the Third World behind the building of futuristic communicative
technologies, Anna Reading and Tanya Notley illustrate the politics of ‘globital
memories’. Using the case study of the local resistance to the plans by the Australian-
based corporation Lynas to build a potentially hazardous rare-earth industrial plant in
Malaysia, the authors underline the need to appreciate the material politics beyond the
virtual properties of memory technologies. The transnational dimensions opened by the
linkages of social media in popular memory-making mechanisms will also be covered by

*Corresponding author. Email: kkliew@ntu.edu.sg

q 2015 Taylor & Francis

 2 K.K. Liew et al.

Berber Hagedoorn’s paper on the significance of digital television as social and historical
connecting tools to mediate cultural temporalities in the case of the regionally popular
Dutch cross-media documentary, In Europe. Positing an activist dimension in the public’s
re-scripting of postcolonial Hong Kong with images from their digital cameras, through
the lens of Rhythmanalysis, Helen Grace sees the potentials of more autonomous memory
making in the otherwise everyday user-generated images of the city. Tim Fawns et al.,
however, go into the area of applied research whereby they have devised a social media
timeline application that would help those suffering from dementia by getting them to
reinforce their memories with the timeline. In contrast, from the case study of the digital
interactive ‘shoebox’ of mini-audio clips and panoramic photo-illustrations of
autobiographical fragments of a young girl’s separation from her relatives during the
two World Wars, Janet Marles argues the multimedia Internet platform draws out
nonlinear ‘Memoradic Narratives’. Moving across to Singapore, Kai Khiun Liew and
Natalie Pang draw comparisons in the use of the social media by both state and civil
society to platform and contest the memories of Singapore’s postcolonial history whereby
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the former’s efforts to create ciphered collective nostalgia is pitched against the latter’s
agenda to push for retrospective justice.
Underlying the specific case studies of these individual papers are efforts to provide
new conceptual frameworks in approaching different dimensions of memoryscapes in the
era of the social media. Perhaps each of these papers here can be indexed and stringed
along seven interrelated approaches to the discourses of New Media, memory and history,
namely, Mining (Reading), Metaphorizing (Grace), Marking(Fawns), Mixing (Marles),
Mediating (Hagedoorn) and Memorializing (Liew & Pang). Collectively, it is hoped this
special issue would serve in bringing out novel perspectives to the new platforms of
memory in the dense and highly circulatory networks of the New Media.

Notes on contributors
Dr Kai Khiun Liew is an Assistant Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and
Information at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include
transnational cultural memories and New Media in the East and Southeast Asian contexts.
Dr Natalie Pang is an Assistant Professor in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and
Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her primary research interest is in
participatory forms of engagement using New Media, and she investigates this theme in the domains
of civic engagement and information behaviour. She practises both basic and applied research.
Brenda Chan is an independent scholar with research interests in the relationships between New
Media, heritage and memories.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
We are grateful to the Centre for the Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) as well as the Wee
Kim Wee School of Communication and Information of Nanyang Technological University in
funding the workshop that led to this publication.