Digital Storytelling and the Performance of Memory

Abstract

Digital media are recognised as having a sizeable and ever-increasing effect on the ways in which memory can be, and is being, represented and reconfigured in the early years of the twenty-first century (see, e.g., Amelunxen, et al., 1996; van Oostendorp, 2003; Rabinovitz and Geil, 2005). Our very ideas about the form, permanence and malleability of memory are being infinitely and creatively explored through new and multi-media. We are now able to encounter many differing forms of re-presentation independently and/or simultaneously (visual, textual, aural and even sensual) that coherently (or otherwise) constitute representation (van Oostendorp, 2003). The current ‘memory boom’ (as recognised by Andreas Huyssen, 2003a) should not be looked at in isolation from the technological play and investment, that have, in part, enabled it. As Huyssen says: ‘We cannot discuss personal, generational, or public memory separately from the enormous influence of the new media as carrier of all forms of memory’ (Huyssen, 2003a, p. 18). This carrying of memory for a presumed infinitum is a task the digital media ably take on, at the same time as they aid the collapse and shrinkage of time and space resulting in what Huyssen calls ‘the crisis of temporality’ (Huyssen, 2003b, p. 21). New digital media thus have an integral role to play in what is remembered, the form in which it is stored and, later, how it will be retrieved.