One of the key ways in which mediated memory has transformed in the last decade is through the developments in digital and online media. Wulf Kansteiner (2002) has persuasively argued that when considering the production of personal, collective, cultural and social memory in the early twenty-first century we need to fully embrace the methods and tools of media studies and understand this production in terms of the increased media literacy of audiences:

At the time of writing this book a new horizon for understanding the relationship between media and memory beckons. The tools of communication and media studies have themselves broken free from the academic rules of objectified critical analysis. Media researchers are now participatory, creative, innovative and respectful of the media literacy of the former audience who are actively engaged in the consumption, production and dissemination of knowledge and information. These new media citizens not only challenge the hallowed arenas of media professionals but are also the ingenious and subversive memory-makers to whom Kansteiner refers. We can no longer speak of audiences and consumers but of active, critical and creative citizens of media, culture and society who have access to cheap and effective communication technologies even in the poorest circumstances (see, for example, Hopper (2007) on the rapid global uptake of the mobile phone).