In Farhat Shahzad’s article,The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning, she writes about the use of technologies of memory in interpretive communities. She states that “human beings interpret, relate, select, record, share, and tell their memories with the help of a variety of technologies of memory such as media, textbooks, documents, the internet, museums, monuments, and landscapes.”
Though I never thought of social media in a scholarly way such as a “technology of memory,” I think Facebook is a great example of it. With the rapid rise of the internet, the ways in which people connect and communicate with one another has significantly changed and is continuously changing all the time. Facebook itself is a community, and there are thousands of different communities within it.
While I was looking through the page of a recently joined group, I noticed some connections with what Shahzad shared in her article, and saw Facebook in somewhat of a different way. The specific page I was looking at was called “Friends of Dan Mindich.” This page was created in memory of a teacher from my previous school who had tragically died during a rough water swim earlier this month. There were several posts about Dan from fellow colleagues and students in Hawaii, as well as people from his hometown in New York, close friends in Africa, and college classmates, all spread throughout the continental US. The posts included pictures of Dan from classes, weddings, vacations, and reunions, as well as some anecdotes on his silly outgoing personality or the ways in which he changed the lives of those around him.
Although the circumstances of the page was very sad and unfortunate, I think it’s a pretty awesome thing that came out of this tragedy. It’s a place where all these different people from around the world can come together in this sort of online “community” and share stories, pictures, lessons, etc, of Dan that can be available for everyone no matter where they are.
Indygo, I thought that your post was very interesting. I have also seen many tribute pages on Facebook to people that have died. I think that it is a sweet way to remember someone and stay connected with other people that remember them. I wonder if the Facebook medium necessarily corrupts the memory of who they were. As we read in the Shahzad essay and talked about a lot in class, the memory of an event is different for every person based on his/her past experiences and interpretive communities. As we all know, we don’t really post bad pictures of ourselves and our friends on Facebook, we put our best foot forward. I am sure that this tendency is also present on tribute pages, no one is going to post bad pictures or rude memories of the deceased. I wonder if the medium of Facebook (meaning the fact that we only post good pictures and memories) amplifies the effect of an interpretive community. Since everyone is only posting positive things about the deceased, does the page act as almost a hyper-interpretive community, changing everyone’s memory of the person to be the same, perfect memory? Is there anything lost in that uniformity and perfection?
Hey Indygo, I know you wrote this post awhile ago, but as I was writing my class blog post I looked through your older posts and was very intrigued with this post! “Technology of memory” is one of the key terms with focused in class this semester. I agree with Farhat Shahzad’s statement about how technology of memories are something we have an access to in everyday life. However, in the same research paper, Shahzad also raises an awareness of how memories could be edited depending on the community that owns technologies of memory. I strongly feel that when accessing to one’s memory, we need to be aware of the community which the person is from.