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Finding and sorting in hybrid memory practices: ‘doing memories’ in connection with the logic of Facebook

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2024

Robin Ekelund*
Affiliation:
Malmö University, Malmo, Sweden

Abstract

This article investigates memory practices in connection with retrospective Facebook groups created for remembering specific aspects of the past. It focuses on how members of these groups experience and deal with how Facebook's interface and algorithms enable, shape, and interfere with memory practices. From this point of departure, the article discusses and nuances the idea that a ‘connective turn’ has brought with it an ontological shift in memory culture (Hoskins 2017a) and a ‘greying’ of memories (Hoskins and Halstead 2021). Theoretically, the article draws on Deborah Lupton's (2020) concept of ‘data selves’, which offers an account of how people interact with data and technology. This concept does not view data practices as immaterial but rather as material, corporeal, and affective, thus prompting an understanding of memory practices as hybrid processes where offline and online practices intersect (Gajjala 2019; Merrill forthcoming/2024). In this qualitative study, nine members of retrospective Facebook groups were chosen to participate in semi-structured interviews. The analysis explains the importance of viewing contemporary memory practices as hybrid, showing a greying effect within the affordances of Facebook that shapes both which memories are shared and how memories are shared. In addition, the analysis nuances the idea of an ontological shift in memory culture and the greying of memories by investigating how the interviewees’ deal and struggle with the affordances of the platform in their memory practices.

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

Abundance, immediacy, and automatisation – these are among the recurring terms in research that aims to understand and discuss contemporary memory culture in relation to digital and technological developments (Hoskins Reference Hoskins2011; Jacobsen and Beer Reference Jacobsen and Beer2021a; Smit Reference Smit2018). This illustrates both a concern and an interest in how social media platforms shape everyday memory practices. One of the most influential thinkers on these issues is sociologist Andrew Hoskins. He argues that a ‘connective turn’ has brought with it a radical and ontological shift in memory culture, which has resulted in ‘new ways of finding, sorting, sifting, using, seeing, losing, and abusing the past’. This, Hoskins writes, ‘both imprisons and liberates active human remembering and forgetting’ (Hoskins Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017a, 1).

The idea of a new and connective memory ecology is built mainly on theoretical arguments. Therefore, these arguments need to be connected to empirical investigations of contemporary memory practices. This article does so by studying practices within, and in connection to, Facebook groups that have been created for the purpose of remembering and discussing specific aspects of the past. The ideas of abundance, immediacy, and automatisation, which characterise this shift in contemporary memory culture, resonate with such memory practices – but how?

Central to the (re)shaping of contemporary memory culture is social media. Many social media platforms have identified memories as successful for producing lasting ties between the users and the platform. Facebook, in particular, has become increasingly memory focused. This is primarily because Facebook has developed an automated (re)production of memories in which algorithms select old posts and revive them as ‘memories’ for the individual user to share once again (Jacobsen and Beer Reference Jacobsen and Beer2021b). Facebook has also become a platform used by online nostalgia businesses to produce ready-made and commodified nostalgia content (Niemeyer and Keightley Reference Niemeyer and Keightley2020). In addition to these businesses, Facebook is popular with memory communities and groups (Ekelund Reference Ekelund2022a; Robards et al. Reference Robards, Lincoln, Pinkard, Harris, Dobson, Robards and Carah2018; Smit et al. Reference Smit, Heinrich and Broersma2018) such as the groups studied in this article.

Often, the pasts that these groups focus on are very specific, for example, the past of a particular decade or memories and stories of a particular city or local community. Thousands of such groups can be found on Facebook, if not hundreds of thousands. They bring together people of all ages, although, based on my research, most of the members tend to be 60 or older, with mixed sex and social background distributions. In the groups, personal memories and reflections share space with general discussions on the specific past of interest. Therefore, I call these groups ‘retrospective’, as they involve a retrospective gaze – a focus, an interest, and an emotional attachment to the past – that acts as the glue that ties these groups together.

Increasingly more research on digital memories emphasises and critically investigates the affordances of social media platforms. For example, studies show that social media platforms, including Facebook, are not neutral carriers of meaning (Bucher Reference Bucher2018; van Dijck Reference van Dijck, Bond, Craps and Vermeulen2017) but rather socio-technological actors – as in, non-human agents that both enable and interfere in the interactions that take place on the platforms (e.g. Smit Reference Smit2018). The technological and digital apparatuses that most of us carry with us today not only influence our everyday lives and our relationships but also shape our relationship with the past – what we remember and what we do not remember (Jacobsen and Beer Reference Jacobsen and Beer2021a). Again, abundance, immediacy, and automatisation is what our smart gadgets and social media platforms appear to offer us.

Recognising social media platforms as socio-technological actors further strengthens Hoskins’ claim that memory practices are (ontologically) not the same after the connective turn and the growing use of social media. However, how do people engaged in memory practices (epistemologically) understand and deal with this ontological shift? Focusing specifically on practices in connection to retrospective Facebook groups, this article investigates the experiences and practices of people who actively turn to Facebook to produce, share, and discuss memories about the past with others. More specifically, I ask how members of retrospective Facebook groups experience and deal with how Facebook's interface and algorithms enable, shape, and interfere with their memory practices.

A new memory ecology, social media, and algorithmic power

In Hoskins’ (Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017a) discussion of a new memory ecology, two concepts are of particular interest for this article. The first is ‘sharing without sharing’. With this concept, Hoskins argues that people feel active when they post, record, and react to digital content, and consequently, many do so compulsively. Sharing has become a digitally fostered and unconscious ‘obligation to participate and to reciprocate’, which entails that digital memory practices happen without any real intent or goal. They become ‘a continuous end in itself’, with no ‘prospect of arrival, settlement, or completion coming into view’, Hoskins writes (Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017a, 29). The idea of a sharing without sharing is closely connected to the concept of ‘grey memories’. Hoskins argues that in the new memory ecology, how we experience our personal memories has become blurred and obscured. Our memories have turned grey, as we have lost control over where they are, how they are displayed, and to what end (Hoskins and Halstead Reference Hoskins and Halstead2021). The concepts of sharing without sharing and grey memories offer a critical and also rather pessimistic understanding of what memory culture is in a present that is ‘emptied of meaning’ (Hoskins Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017b, 102). Hoskins’ account of contemporary memory culture, however, has not gone unchallenged (Halstead Reference Halstead2021), and this article is a further attempt to offer an empirically based assessment of the ideas of a sharing without sharing and grey memories.

In the growing body of research on digital memory, memory work on social media platforms has garnered much attention (e.g. Garde-Hansen Reference Garde-Hansen, Garde-Hansen, Hoskins and Reading2009; Smit Reference Smit2018; van Dijck Reference van Dijck, Bond, Craps and Vermeulen2017). This research shows that memory practices on social media offer a sense of belonging and meaning (e.g. Ekelund Reference Ekelund2022a; Lagerkvist Reference Lagerkvist2014); however, social media platforms push their users towards less insightful memory work (Ekelund Reference Ekelund, Glaser, Håkansson, Lund and Lundin2022b; MacDonald Reference MacDonald, Arnold-de Simine and Leal2020). Studies have also argued that Facebook in particular has become a platform characterised by affective and nostalgic memory work (Davalos et al. Reference Davalos, Merchant, Rose, Lessley and Teredesai2015; Ekelund Reference Ekelund2022c). All in all, this illustrates the complexity surrounding how memories are used and practised in the new memory ecology.

Social media platforms are increasingly viewed as socio-technical actors that enable, shape, and interfere in memory practices (Smit et al. Reference Smit, Heinrich and Broersma2018; van Dijck Reference van Dijck, Bond, Craps and Vermeulen2017). Within this research, a critical perspective on how algorithms work is integral. Studies have discussed how algorithms encourage us to remember as well as forget (Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen2021; Makhortykh Reference Makhortykh2021), and in addition, how algorithms sort, select, and display certain memories (Jacobsen and Beer Reference Jacobsen and Beer2021a). This leads to the quantification and automatisation of ‘likeable’ memories (Jacobsen and Beer Reference Jacobsen and Beer2021b) by which social media platforms are able to promote an immediacy and a rapidness in memory practices (Ekelund Reference Ekelund, Glaser, Håkansson, Lund and Lundin2022b; Kaun and Stiernstedt Reference Kaun and Stiernstedt2014).

With a few exceptions (Jacobsen and Beer Reference Jacobsen and Beer2021a), existing research on digital memory has thus far not studied closely how users of social media platforms experience and deal with the affordances of the interfaces and the algorithms. This article contributes to the existing body of research by investigating the experiences and memory practices of members of retrospective Facebook groups and is informed by previous research on algorithmic media and algorithmic power (Beer Reference Beer2017; Bucher Reference Bucher2018). These studies illustrate how algorithms produce the threat of invisibility for users (Bucher Reference Bucher2012) by shaping what is seen and what is made invisible on social media platforms (Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen2023). Furthermore, research shows that posts sometimes disappear on Facebook due to algorithmic interventions (Villegas Reference Villegas2016), and that Facebook produces ‘digital voids’ (Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen2021) by classifying, sorting, and selecting which posts should be resurfaced as happy memories and which could potentially be upsetting and unsettling. These results strengthen Hoskins’ argument that the connective turn has brought with it a greying effect. With concepts such as ‘algorithmic imaginary’ (Bucher Reference Bucher2017) and ‘algorithmic literacy’ (Swart Reference Swart2021), studies have also investigated how people experience and make sense of algorithms on social media. A central point in these studies is that algorithms become most visible for users when they produce irrelevant or uncanny results.

Theory and method

Theoretically, the article draws from Deborah Lupton's (Reference Lupton2020) concept of ‘data selves’. With this concept, Lupton builds an understanding of the relationship between people, data, and technology. She writes (Reference Lupton2020, 12–13),

I take an approach that views people and their data as inextricably entangled in human-data assemblages. These assemblages are configured via interactions of humans with other humans, devices and software, as well as the multitude of other things and spaces they encounter as they move through their lives.

In this approach, the entanglements of people and technology become an existential question, and experiences of ‘doing data’ – or in this article, ‘doing memory data’ – become practices that are simultaneously entangled, shared, and personal. ‘Doing data’ (Lupton Reference Lupton2020, 74), which is a particular perspective in Lupton's theory, focuses on understanding the ‘performances, enactments, and sense-making’ when people engage with data in relation to digital settings. Therefore, with the concept of ‘data selves’ and its perspective on ‘doing data’, our interest lies in exploring what people do with data and what data does to them (e.g. Jacobsen and Beer Reference Jacobsen and Beer2021a).

Lupton opposes the common view of digital data as immaterial, invisible, and intangible (Reference Lupton2020, 19), arguing instead that digital data are highly material given that they are generated through material devices, materialised in ways and formats that ‘invite human sensory responses’, and have ‘material effects on human bodies’. This thinking moves us away from perceiving digital data and practices of producing digital data as abstractions to doing data within human–data assemblages as an affective, bodily and material process. Using Lupton's concept of data selves, the article's analysis highlights everyday embodied experiences of doing memory data within a certain human–data assemblage. Furthermore, this leads to an analytical interest in the hybridity of contemporary memory practices. While much research on digital memory practices focuses primarily, if not exclusively, on the interactions that take place within the platform and its interface (e.g. Davalos et al. Reference Davalos, Merchant, Rose, Lessley and Teredesai2015; Robards et al. Reference Robards, Lincoln, Pinkard, Harris, Dobson, Robards and Carah2018; Smit et al. Reference Smit, Heinrich and Broersma2018), an interest in how people understand, experience and deal with memories in relation to the affordances of the platform calls for a hybrid approach (Merrill Reference Merrill, Wang and Hoskinsforthcoming/2024). Such an approach studies not only the online interactions but also the practices that take place offline in order to understand how these intersect and reroute each other (Gajjala Reference Gajjala2019). The method used in this article is semi-structured qualitative interviews (Brinkmann and Kvale Reference Brinkmann and Kvale2018) with nine members of retrospective Facebook groups (see Reference EkelundEkelund forthcoming/2024 for a more elaborate methodological discussion). The primary selection criterion was that the member should be active in their group in terms of making, reacting to, and commenting on posts, as this shows they have enough relevant experience of the group. Seven of the interviewees are members of local history groups that focus on sharing memories from a particular town or city. The remaining two interviewees are members of groups that focus on sharing memories from a specific decade when they were young – more specifically, the 1960s. Many of the memories the interviewees (as well as other members of these groups) share are directly connected to themselves or their family, most often in the form of photos from family albums, but they also strive to find memories and facts of a more general character to be shared in the groups, for example postcards and newspaper clippings. The interviewees were selected to represent the overall gender and age balance of the groups, resulting in interviews with five men and four women, between 64 and 71 years old. The age category is important, as previous research indicates that older people tend to have less algorithmic literacy (Swart Reference Swart2021), which means that the age of the interviewees shapes the nature of the hybrid practices (and the kind of hybridity) that the article investigates.

The interviews focused on three topics: (1) what the groups are about and how they work, (2) the interviewees’ practices within or related to the groups, and (3) Facebook as a platform for group-based memory practices. During the interviews, I used the experiences and insights gained from my netnographic fieldwork in retrospective Facebook groups (Ekelund Reference Ekelund2022c; Reference EkelundEkelund forthcoming/2024) to phrase the questions and introduce the topics. This helped the interviewees to describe aspects such as how they experienced the platform in more elaborate detail. It also helped to make the hybridity of online and offline practices more visible. The interviews lasted between 1 and 2 h and then were transcribed in full and coded into themes. The interviews followed the relevant ethical guidelines, including informed consent (Swedish Research Council 2017). All the interviewees’ names have been pseudonymised.

The first step in analysing the data was coding and thematising. In this phase, much of what the interviewees talked about could be related to two overarching themes, namely, aspects of finding and sorting, as they talked extensively about their process of locating and selecting ‘relevant’ memories to share within their group. The themes of finding and sorting also correlate with Hoskin's discussion of how the connective turn has resulted in new ways of finding and sorting (Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017a). In the second step, the analysis zoomed in on these themes, and the results are presented in the article's four subsections: the first two focus on finding and the latter two on sorting. Using these themes to structure the analysis, the article provides empirically based insights, as well as nuances, to the discussion on how the connective turn affects contemporary memory practices.

Finding retrospective Facebook groups

The interviewees all aspire to actively contribute to their respective groups, share relevant content, and participate in the discussions. Therefore, they need material to post and share. For eight of the nine interviewees, this is not a problem – at least not in the beginning. They talk about having inherited photo albums, folders, binders, and boxes of postcards, documents, and newspaper clippings from their parents and ancestors. Bertil describes how he has 30 moving boxes of ‘stuff’ from his father and grandfather stored in his basement. On an individual level, this shows an abundance that is not linked immediately with the connective turn. ‘Everyone sits and has old binders. We have all inherited binders’, Bertil explains, as if trying to convince that this type of inheritance is common for people engaged in retrospective Facebook groups. Judging from the interviews, this seems correct. A common thread is that the interviewees have been given boxes and boxes worth of material that they at first did not know what to do with (c.f. Gudmundsdottir Reference Gudmundsdottir2022). ‘I was almost on the verge of starting to throw [the moving boxes] out’, Bertil explains, ‘but then Facebook appeared. Okay, so I can share the pictures there, and then I can throw them away’. This shows that the initial problem was not about finding data but rather finding somewhere to put it – storing 30 moving boxes takes up a lot of space – and more importantly, deciding what to do with the data. Lotta talks about the same issue when describing how she inherited a large collection of postcards, photos, and books from her father.

Sharing memories and history is important, I think. It was actually my father who collected postcards and photos throughout his life. And we took over that collection. And we kind of didn't know, ‘what are we going to do with it?’. Well, my husband used to be a typographer. So he has scanned all the pictures and made two books out of it. They are only ours, so to say. But it is those postcards we put out [i.e., share in the Facebook group]. And my father, he was a resident of [the city] all his life. And he thought history was important. And I also like history. It's a story after all, memories from generations back. And I think it feels more and more important. (Lotta)

What Lotta as well as several other interviewees describe when talking about the material they have inherited can be interpreted as having been given a burden, a weight, and a responsibility. The boxes contain data that connects to the past – mnemonic objects that illustrate and tell stories. Kept in the boxes, these memories are mute. Even when scanned and made into books for oneself and one's near family, the memories can only resonate so far. Listening to the interviewees, it appears that the materiality of the objects – the binders, albums, and indeed, the large size of the boxes that take up considerable space in their houses and flats – have a sensory and material effect on them and their perception of the world (c.f. Lupton Reference Lupton2020). Doing data memories, therefore, did not start by joining a social media platform and becoming a member of a retrospective group, but rather the Facebook groups provided the interviewees with an outlet – an opportunity to do something with the material they already had, to share it and thereby give life to the memories previously contained in boxes. The retrospective groups thus gave them a way to unburden themselves, enabling them to carry the responsibility they felt they had been given when inheriting the boxes.

Once using Facebook was decided, however, it meant that the interviewees were engaging with a socio-technical actor whose interface and algorithms not only enable but also shape and interfere. Among the research that has studied Facebook as a platform for memory work, an important finding is how social media platforms promote the immediacy of shared content and interactions. Kaun and Stiernstedt (Reference Kaun and Stiernstedt2014) have discussed Facebook in terms of ‘social media time’, meaning that the logic of the platform prioritises newness and immediacy in order to engage users longer and more often. They argue that this results in a constant production and collection of new data to be posted. Research on memory communities on Facebook have likewise stressed that the affordances of the platform produce a hurried and fragmented form of memory practices – a production of instant memories that are selected and shared for an instantaneous response from others (Ekelund Reference Ekelund, Glaser, Håkansson, Lund and Lundin2022b). This connects with Hoskins’ (Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017a) concept of sharing without sharing, and the idea that digital technologies make people share memories compulsively and unconsciously rather than pursuing memories with an active and actual awareness. In the interviews, it is clear that the interviewees experience the rapidness promoted by the platform. Having started with boxes and boxes of stuff and seemingly an abundance of data, this plenitude, however, soon faded after the constant posting of content in the Facebook groups. For example, Peter explained that some time ago ‘they’ – meaning he and the two other group administrators – ‘had emptied all the archives’. As a result, they now had to try to find new data. Of the interviewees, only Bertil still has boxes of material to go through (approximately 10 more moving boxes of the 30 he started with).

Many of the interviewees first turned to using Facebook groups to be able to do justice to the memories and stories contained in the boxes they inherited and had thus fulfilled their goal. However, the weight and responsibility of having inherited boxes of memories seems to have been replaced by the weight and responsibility of keeping the retrospective Facebook groups going. The interviewees talk about feeling ‘committed’ to the groups, being ‘afraid’ that the groups will be ‘exhausted’ or ‘irrelevant’, afraid that the memories, the knowledge, and the stories that they and others have shared in the groups could ‘disappear’. Engaging in sharing memories in the groups has thus resulted, for several of the interviewees, in an emotive relationship with not only the memories and connections with the past but also with the constant flow of data in the groups.

The interviewees talk about their constant and active search for new data to post in the groups. A couple of them even describe themselves as ‘detectives’ in their ‘hunt’ for, most often, photos and postcards to be shared. Hans describes himself and other members of the group that he is engaged in as ‘photography detectives’. Peter talks about some members as ‘time detectives’: they have become ‘brilliant’ at ‘looking at clothing and other details’ in order to put a date on specific photos. He also talks about himself as ‘perpetually on the lookout for “accidental findings”’, meaning that he always hopes to find material that can be shared in the group, even when he is not actively searching for it.

The interviewees thus seem to be consumed by their engagement in the groups and by their feelings of responsibility towards the flow of content in the groups. It takes up a large part of their everyday life, even when they are not on the platform. Again, this connects to Hoskins’ (Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017a) idea of a sharing without sharing – that the connective turn has meant that digital memory practices become ‘a continuous end in itself’. The interviewees have reached a goal in sharing the data and the memories they first envisioned, but the affordance of the platform and the affective relationships they have built with the groups means that they keep on sharing without any real prospect of completion.

It is also interesting to take note of the interviewees’ use of language. They describe themselves and other members of the retrospective groups as ‘searching’, ‘hunting’, ‘being on the lookout’, and doing ‘detective work’. Hereby, they articulate themselves as highly active, engaged, and, most importantly, conscientious of their memory practices. While the platform pushes them towards immediacy, their response is to try and keep up the tempo with clear intent and purpose and an awareness about what they are pursuing. This nuances the idea of a sharing without sharing (Hoskins Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017a), and several of the interviewees also emphasise that it is important to them that the groups are not, as Lena phrased it, ‘open to any kind of content’ and that it is crucial that the groups ‘keep [their] narrow focus’. Thus, the very character of the groups – that they are explicitly centred on often very specific aspects of the past – helps the interviewees maintain a focus in their memory practices.

Finding more memory data (and then more…)

As Facebook promotes a newness principle (Kaun and Stiernstedt Reference Kaun and Stiernstedt2014), the platform becomes a catalyst for how its users engage and interact, and this also applies to retrospective groups (Ekelund Reference Ekelund, Glaser, Håkansson, Lund and Lundin2022b). It prompts members of the groups to search for new content; for example, the interviewees speak of how they go visit the library, local folklife archives, city and town archives, local museums, and memorial sites in search of data. They also browse the internet, search Google, visit digital collections made available by museums and individual enthusiasts, and they buy and trade old postcards on online marketplaces. Often, these activities are focused on finding relevant image material. This shows that the operative logic of Facebook not only promotes immediacy but also interactions between its users that are image focused. Posts that include, or focus on, photographs are also the posts that receive the most likes and comments (Malik et al. Reference Malik, Hiekkanen, Dhir and Nieminen2016), as they are coded as more relevant and thus made more visible by the platform (Bucher Reference Bucher2018). It is therefore not surprising that most of the activities involving the interviewees’ memory practices are image centred, given that this is what the digital platform encourages.

The search for sharable photographs took an unexpected turn for one of the interviewees, Monica, when other members of her Facebook group, which she created and administers, began to contact her, offering access to their family albums. As a result, at least once a month, she packs her digital scanner into the trunk of her car and drives to those who have contacted her. Often, they are elderly people who have neither the equipment nor the expertise to scan and digitally share their photos but have heard of Monica and the Facebook group she created:

So now I borrow a lot of material. People are very kind: ‘Well, come home to us, you can take everything’ (laughs). So, I kind of get to borrow and scan [the photo albums]. And then, as a thank you for being allowed to borrow their old albums, I scan in all the pictures that they want scanned, and then they get a USB stick with them as a thank you. Because I get to take the pictures that I want. So, I've scanned in a lot of colour photos from the 1980s that are totally uninteresting, but I scan and edit them in Photoshop because then they get something back. And then maybe they are four siblings, and so they can share them with each other. And most people think that's good, that you get something back when you contribute to the group.

The constant hunt for new photos has thus produced a local and micro-level memory economy where Monica gets new material for the Facebook group, while others get a copyable, sharable, and improved digital version of their physical photo albums. The hunt for old photographs that is produced, or at least seems to be sped up, by engaging in retrospective Facebook groups, produces not only intensified interactions between group members online but also between people outside of social media platforms in offline social interactions.

Doing data memories is always a hybrid phenomenon where the old photographs are as crucial as the digital technology of the scanner or smartphone. The latter helps translate the former into a digital existence. In addition, there is the bicycle that Erik rides to the local archive, Monica's car, the stairs to Bertil's basement, the computer screen, the keyboard, and the mouse used by Peter when he visits digitised archives. These material aspects of the hybrid memory practices have an affordance in the same sense as the operative logic of the digital platform (c.f. Lupton Reference Lupton2020). While Facebook promotes speed and immediacy, the physical attributes of the scanner, the bike, the car, and the bodies of the people who engage in the retrospective groups produce a slowness and a friction that contrasts with the seemingly uninterrupted speed of digital existence. This slowness of material existence seems to help and encourage the interviewees in continually reflecting on their doings of data rather than making their memory practices blurred, obscured and grey (Hoskins and Halstead Reference Hoskins and Halstead2021) – even though they have no control over what happens with the memory data once they share it online.

In addition, several of the interviewees stress that they are constantly searching for information and facts about the past in question. Anders describes how he makes visits to the library, not to search for photos but rather the small facts and details around a particular street, a date, a company, or a person. Another interviewee, Madeleine, has taken several guided tours in her home city, and she has visited open lectures organised by the church and the local cultural history association. Peter explains that he uses Wikipedia often and that he has ‘gone into the church records’ on other occasions, and Erik speaks of visiting local second-hand shops in search of books about the history of his hometown. He also emphasises how he has saved all the information leaflets that were sent out to his community when a new district was built nearby, for future use and for the possibility of finding interesting information about the area. ‘I collected every single one of those’, he enthusiastically acknowledges.

The engagement in retrospective Facebook groups thus seems to produce a constant search for and collection of data. The search is primarily for image material, for example, old photographs and postcards, which is what the platform promotes, but it can also be in the form of knowledge about the past that is discussed in the groups. Peter describes how this has evolved in the group that he is a member of:

That [i.e. the sharing of knowledge] has escalated in this group. You have learned a lot. Plus, people have asked questions, and damn it, I want to find out [what the answer is]! Then you must browse through old books and Google to find out ‘When was that house demolished?’ ‘When was it built?’ ‘Why has it become the way it has become?’ ‘Why is this place called this?’.

While the logic of the platform promotes a constant hunt for new data memories, which connects with the idea of a social media time and an instantaneousness (Ekelund Reference Ekelund, Glaser, Håkansson, Lund and Lundin2022b; Kaun and Stiernstedt Reference Kaun and Stiernstedt2014), the actual interactions in the groups produce reflections and queries that prompt the interviewees to become more conscious of what it is they are doing. This reflective process is sped up by the constant flow of new content in the groups, but the memory practices that take place in connection with the retrospective groups still nuance the idea of a sharing without sharing (Hoskins Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017a).

Sorting memory data

One of the main characteristics of Facebook's operative logic is that it curates the flow of content by personalising and constantly redistributing it based on what it understands as relevant, interesting, and ‘hot’ (Bucher Reference Bucher2018; van Dijck Reference van Dijck, Bond, Craps and Vermeulen2017). The default setting when browsing a Facebook group is that the interface will present the ‘most relevant’ posts at the top of the timeline. This curation is based on whether a single post is new, if it recently has received many likes, reactions, or comments, and if it is posted by a member whose posts you yourself usually react to, comment, or like. This means that the groups’ timelines do not sort themselves chronologically or collectively, but rather the structure and order of the timeline presents itself as constantly changing and as personalised. This connects with Hoskin's concept of grey memories, in that individuals have no control over how the content they share is displayed and to what end (Hoskins and Halstead Reference Hoskins and Halstead2021). How, then, does this affect the interviewees’ memory practices?

When asking this, it is important to take note of how the interviewees describe the retrospective groups. Several of them talked about the groups as ‘archives’. Ulla, for example, described the group that she is a member of as ‘a wonderful little archive of pictures from the past of the city’. Hans and Anders both referred to the practices in their respective groups as ‘archival work’, and the groups were also described as ‘collections’. In the interview with Christina, she also talked about the group as ‘a collection of memories and stories from generations back’. Peter used the same concept when he talked about how he and others are ‘adding to the collection of information and memories’ of their city.

The concepts of an archive and a collection are common in memory practices and memory work. They have also been used to discuss how Facebook and other social media platforms affect contemporary memory culture (e.g. Garde-Hansen and Reading Reference Garde-Hansen, Garde-Hansen, Hoskins and Reading2009). Nevertheless, the notion of the archive and collection harken back to a pre-social media age and an idea of a systematic order and categorisation (Bowker Reference Bowker2005). The use of these concepts to describe the retrospective groups are central to interpret not only how the interviewees understand the groups but also to construe how they make sense of doing memory data in relation to a digital platform built on an operative logic of newness and personalisation.

When I asked the interviewees how they have experienced the interface and the arranging of the groups’ timelines, several of them said that they had not noticed or thought about this, which indicates low algorithmic literacy (Swart Reference Swart2021). This is not surprising, as this is how the algorithms are supposed to work on social media platforms – they are ‘barely noticeable’ (Bucher Reference Bucher2018, 94). Nevertheless, when explicitly asked about it, the interviewees quickly recognised that the group content and its timeline often seemed elusive to them. For example, Christina described how she, almost subconsciously, had developed a technique where she takes screenshots of posts and photos that she finds interesting: ‘I've learned that, if I don't take a screenshot, I won't find it again. […] So that's what you have to do if you want to have a chance to go back [and find a post].’

Another example is Hans’ reaction when I ask his opinion about how Facebook presents the group content on the timeline:

Hans – Well, I haven't thought about that. I haven't gotten involved in it. You adapt. You learn the method and just go.

Robin – How would you describe this ‘method’?

Hans – I don't know [laughs]

Robin – But there is a method?

Hans – Yes there is. In a way. But I haven't thought about it. It is like it works in its own way.

Even though a couple of the interviewees said that they had not actively noticed or reflected on how the interface of the platform curates the groups’ data, they, as in the cases of Christina and Hans, still seemed to have developed strategies and methods for dealing with and making sense of how the platform works. Most importantly, their strategies and methods seem to be about being able to sort the data. Christina's many screenshots are not only a technique to save specific content, but they are also a way for her to categorise and organise the data. The screenshots allow her to sort the selected content in specific albums on her smartphone so she can retrace specific themes and discussions in a way that is not possible within the interface of the retrospective group. The interviews thus shed light on how individuals, consciously or not, deal with the greying effect produced by the operative logic of the social media platform.

Another of the interviewees, Erik, also said that he had not thought about how the content shared in his group is arranged by the interface, although he had noticed that it was difficult to maintain the systematicity that he envisioned for his posts. In the interview, he emphasised that he wanted to ‘keep a systematic order’ with his posts. This, he described, included both a thematic and a chronological selection of the postcards he was currently going through. This systematic order, however, was nullified as soon as his postcards were shared, he explained. While Erik did not seem worried or upset about this – ‘This is just the way it works on Facebook’ – he stressed that the sorting of photos and postcards took up a lot of time and was important to him. During the interview, he showed me bookshelves and cabinets filled with binders, folders, and albums of all the material he had carefully gone through and sorted.

This act of carefully sorting the physical data, of going through all the boxes one had inherited, of categorising the ‘new’ data one had acquired, and of putting scanned material in specific folders on one's computer was something all the interviewees talked about as important to them. Sorting is thus an integral aspect of doing memory data, but this happens primarily outside of the retrospective groups and the digital interface of the platform. Thus, studying the memory practices that take place in connection with digital platforms as a hybrid phenomenon illustrates how individuals strive to maintain control over where their memories are stored in the real world, how they are displayed, and to what end, even if they have no control over this within the digital platform.

Sorting the timeline

While several of the interviewees said they had not thought about how Facebook arranges the group content, others stressed that they not only thought about it but had actively tried to create more order and find a more structured way of approaching the groups’ timelines. Two of the interviewees described that they had started using the group search function to handle the increasing quantity of data in their groups. Bertil talked about the search function as something he tried to promote within the group. He also described how the messiness of the group content meant that some photos were shared repeatedly and that some questions were constantly asked. The group search function, he argued, could be a solution to the problem:

[The group] has a very good search engine. And we try to inform people that there is actually a search engine. [The group] has an incredible amount of photos. So, instead of people asking, ‘Do you have a photo of our old house?’, enter the street name or whatever it may be in the search engine first!

In Facebook groups, members can search for content that has been shared in the group by clicking a search button. A window pops up asking you to type in your search query for ‘posts’, ‘comments’, or ‘members’ within the group. The user is then taken to a page where you can scroll through the search result. The ranking of the search results seems to be based on a relevance principle, but users can also choose different ‘filters’ to narrow down the selection. One can click to include only the posts one has already seen to only see the ‘most recent’ posts, and one can select criteria for ‘posted by’, ‘tagged location’, and ‘date posted’. Based on the interviews, however, the search function does not seem to be used much. As Facebook promotes a focus on images, as discussed above, this means that a text-based search function may not be as useful as it first seems. To find a specific post, one must know either who made the post, roughly when the post was made, or which specific words were used.

The interview with Peter kept coming back to how Facebook's interface makes it difficult to navigate the group's content. He would like the search function to be more useable:

I would like [to have] a better search filter. Especially now when you have 10,000s of pictures in the archive. You know that the picture is there, but you can't find it. And you search for different words, but you would like to have [a] word plus word plus word [search option]. Then maybe you could dial it in. But that search option does not exist. So that's a bit sad.

Peter's thoughts illustrate how some of the interviewees struggle with navigating and making sense of the groups’ timelines. As Facebook is interested in its users continuously making posts – regardless of whether the content of the post is new or it has already been shared – the platform is also less interested in its users being able to successfully relocate old posts. Therefore, the difficulties in using the group search function can be understood as serving the purposes of the operative logic of the platform rather than the interests and logic of the members of retrospective groups.

Another strategy that two of the interviewees spoke about is ways to bundle content, for example, by labelling posts with hashtags. Monica talked about having spent hours and hours in front of the computer working on ‘cataloguing’ the group content by adding hashtags to posts. Hereby, she had arranged posts in terms of school photos, aerial photos, portraits of people, photos of buildings, etc. The result is that members of the group can click on a hashtag to see all the other posts with the same tag. ‘I want it to be like at the library’, Monica said. Then she laughed before she continued: ‘I want to be able to categorise, to catalogue. Like you would if you worked at a research archive or a library.’

Peter also emphasised that he had found the ability to tag posts and photos as ‘probably the best way to create some kind of order’ in his group. During our interview, however, he explained that he had read that Facebook was going to disable this feature.

We have tried to sort and categorise using hashtags and such. But now, Facebook will remove it. It's going to stop working now, one of these days. I think. We have collected all the pictures here about boats under the hashtag boats. But now it disappears. ‘Poof it's gone’. It is sad.

Peter seemed resigned when talking about this. His tone of voice and body language expressed powerlessness and sadness. All the work that he had put into sorting and categorising the data, for himself and the other group members, was to be obliterated. He returned to the subject later in the interview: ‘That function will disappear. And why they do it, I don't know. They haven't written why. It just popped up, saying “we're going to remove this”.’ When interviewing Monica a week later, I shared what Peter had told me. She was perplexed: ‘I haven't heard that, but it doesn't sound good. It would be disastrous. Even if it's not a good way to sort photos, it is still a way.’

The interviewees’ memory practices thus deal with what Bucher (Reference Bucher2012) has discussed as a threat of invisibility and what Jacobsen (Reference Jacobsen2021) has phrased as a sculpting of digital voids. The elusive character of the interface and the algorithmic curation of content seem to give the interviewees, Peter and Monica in particular, a feeling that the memory data they spend so much time to find, sort, and share can become invisible and unusable. This illustrates how the interviewees struggle with the greying effect of the digital platform and how the doing of data memories in connection with Facebook can become a practice that causes anxiety.

In addition to using hashtags, Monica had tried other ways to catalogue and curate the group content: ‘I have made “package posts”’ she explained, meaning that she had taken old posts, together with new content, and posted it as one post – a ‘package’ including several photos. This, she explained, lets other group members view the content as thematic photo albums. However, this strategy seemed to work only temporarily:

I made a package where I collected all the wedding photos [in one post]. But when people commented on them, they came loose. […] The pictures were torn apart. So, then the flow [of the group timeline] became, well, there was lots and lots of wedding photos [displayed as individual posts]. So, it became like, ‘Well, ok, this is how it turned out’.

Just like Peter in the previous example, Monica was resigned when talking about this. Again, it is the logic of the interface that becomes problematic. If a photo that has been posted as part of a package receives a comment, it is understood by the interface as ‘more relevant’ and is therefore displayed on its own. Monica describes this as violent and destabilising. The photos are ‘torn apart’ and ‘come loose’. In a sense, then, she feels that both her memory work, and the memories that she wishes to share, becomes blurred, obscured, and greyed (Hoskins and Halstead Reference Hoskins and Halstead2021). Her use of words illustrates both the resignation she feels as well as how the disordered and fragmented character of the interface violates her ideas of order and systematicity. However, understanding that this way of curating the group data does not work as intended, Monica also learnt something about how the interface works and how she can manipulate it for the purpose of the group:

Most people only see the new flow [of posts]. You can't be bothered to scroll that far down [in the timeline] when you first join the group. And if you only see [the latest] feed, then you might think that there are not many pictures. But there is, and there is [another] way of sorting that I have started using. It allows others to see pictures that were posted maybe seven years ago. I lift pictures just by putting a punctuation mark. They would never see them otherwise.

By ‘lifting’, Monica means that she locates old posts that she thinks will be relevant for other members of the group, and by making a comment as brief as a punctuation mark on the post, she tricks the interface into thinking that it has become more relevant again, and it is thus displayed in the top sections of the timeline. In a sense, then, Monica is working with the algorithms and in the same way as algorithms work. She manually sorts and selects certain memories to be displayed, but while the automatisation of algorithms produces a quantification of memories (Jacobsen and Beer Reference Jacobsen and Beer2021b), her manual process is intended to produce a qualification of memories. However, this technique does not mean that she can produce a systematic catalogue of content in the way that she would like, but rather it means that she adapts to the fragmentary and messy character of the platform's operative logic and its greying of memories. The aspect of sorting, which is integral in the interviewees’ memory practices, thus seem to be a constant uphill battle when it takes place within the interface and when it must work together with the shaping power of the algorithms.

Conclusions

The analysis of the interviewees’ doings of memory data can in many respects be connected to the discussion of the connective turn's impact on contemporary memory culture – a sharing without sharing and a greying of memories (Hoskins Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017a; Hoskins and Halstead Reference Hoskins and Halstead2021). While the greying effects within online memory culture are technical facts, this article illustrates how members of retrospective Facebook groups try to manage these effects.

It is important to remember that the interviewees, who are all in their 60s and 70s, are not representative of the average social media user. However, based on my research, they might be said to be representative of many of those who turn to Facebook with a particular interest in sharing memories of the past, most evident in that they have joined retrospective groups with the conscious intention of sharing memories and knowledge about a specific past and have an interest in, and feel a responsibility towards, the past. In many cases, they have inherited material in the form of photo albums, binders, and boxes of memory objects and have clear and purposeful ways of finding memory data to share within the groups. In the search for more material, they visit museums, archives, and libraries; go on guided tours; attend open lectures; and explore second-hand shops. In addition, they search the internet, consult Wikipedia, and access digital archive collections. The ways in which the interviewees go about their memory practices illustrate a carefulness and a focus in their doings of memory data, which contrasts with the idea of a sharing without sharing.

At the same time, the affordances of the digital platform – in this case, Facebook's interface and algorithms – have a clear impact on the interviewees’ practices. The platform works as a catalyst that pushes them towards a constant search for new sharable data. It also directs them towards certain kinds of data, most importantly, it promotes an image-focused interaction. This results in an ongoing hunt for sharable images. While most of the interviewees first turned to Facebook to share the memory data they had inherited, the logic of the platform means they repeatedly try to find and share other memory data as well. This illustrates how the digital platform pushes their memory practices towards a sharing without sharing (Hoskins Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017a), in that they seem to feel an obligation to continuously participating and sharing.

Furthermore, the article has investigated how the interviewees deal and struggle with aspects of the online platform. This becomes most obvious in how the platform arranges the group timelines based on personalisation and relevance factors. While most of the interviewees indicate low algorithmic literacy (Swart Reference Swart2021) – as in, they had not noticed or thought about this, some of them had still developed techniques to make sense of and adapt to the logic of the timeline. Here, an important aspect for the interviewees is the sorting of data. Interestingly, most of this sorting takes place outside the platform interface. Primarily, the interviewees sort and categorise their data in folders and binders, in boxes and on shelves. They also sort their data digitally on their computers and smartphones, in digital folders and albums. This seems to give a sense of systematicity to their memory practices. For those who also seek a direction and systematicity within the timeline of the platform, however, the elusive and fragmentary character of the interface makes it difficult. In a sense, then, the interface has a greying effect in that it blurs and obscures the memory practices (Hoskins and Halstead Reference Hoskins and Halstead2021). Some of the interviewees therefore talk with resignment and describe how the interface violates their memory practices.

By approaching the memory practices of the nine interviewees as hybrid phenomena (Reference EkelundEkelund forthcoming/2024; Merrill Reference Merrill, Wang and Hoskinsforthcoming/2024) and by looking at how online and offline practices connect and reroute each other (Gajjala Reference Gajjala2019), the article illustrates how their experiences and practices both emphasise and at the same time nuance the idea of a connective turn and an ontological shift in contemporary memory culture (Hoskins Reference Hoskins and Hoskins2017a). It is clear that there is a greying effect within the affordances of Facebook that shapes both which memories are shared and how memories are shared. This is something the interviewees struggle with. In a sense, they have lost control over the (online) memory practices they so consciously seek to carry out. Therefore, they constantly labour, both to keep their memories meaningful and to keep up with the logic of the platform. Thus, the article sheds light on the agency the interviewees exercise in pushing back against the greying effects of the social media platform. The analysis also makes clear that the materiality and physicality of much of the (hybrid) memory practices and memory data that the interviewees deal with work as compasses that help them find and maintain agency and a sense of focus and direction. Using a theoretical and methodological approach that investigates memory practices as hybrid, this article gives further weight to Hoskins’ discussion on the effects of the connective turn for memory practices, and at the same time also nuances these ideas and how they affect contemporary memory culture.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive feedback during the process of writing this article.

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