Call for Papers:

Mediatization of Memory and the Digital Turn: Platforms, Actors, Practices
Special Issue of the Journal “Sociologia della Comunicazione” (n. 72, 2026)
https://static.francoangeli.it/fa-contenuti/riviste/cfp/sc-call8.pdf [note “English version” link at upper left of page]

Edited by Roberta Bartoletti (University of Bologna) and Elisabetta Zurovac (University of Urbino Carlo Bo)

Deadline for submission of abstracts: January 29, 2026
Deadline for submission of articles: April 10, 2026

Memory is necessarily an interdisciplinary field of study (Erll and Nuenning 2008; Tota and Hagen 2016), particularly fertile when observed at the intersection between cultural sociology and media studies. Despite the growing intertwining of digital media and memory, internet studies have long neglected this relationship (Bartoletti, 2011; Pogačar, 2010; Garde-Hansen, Hoskins, and Reading 2009; Jungselius and Weilenmann, 2023), just as memory studies have been slow to recognize its relevance (Bartoletti, 2007; Zierold, 2008). Furthermore, since the media impact how, what, and why individuals and social groups remember and forget, the fertile categories of mediation and remediation do not fully account for the complexity of this relationship (Erll 2008, Hoskins 2009).

In fact, placing ourselves in the theoretical perspective of mediatization, which recognizes the complex, inextricable, and profound interconnections between media and society (Couldry and Hepp 2013, 2017, Boccia Artieri 2015, 2025), we believe that the media represent the most powerful mechanism in the formation of memory in its many forms – individual, collective, and social (Esposito 2001, Bartoletti 2007) -, especially today. While the transformative role of the media in relation to memory can be traced back to the invention of writing, through printing and electronic media, today we are faced with complex and heterogeneous media ecosystems, which must be analyzed in terms of their specificities and dynamic interconnections, within the context of a process of co-evolution between media and society. Attention must therefore be turned to the logic of digital media and algorithmic platforms that are the protagonists of the current media ecosystem, and to the functionalities and affordances that shape the forms of identity and social relations, the experience of time, and the memory of users (Kaun and Stiernstedt 2014; Migowski and Fernandes Araújo 2019).

With the evolution of digital environments, the focus has shifted from self-expression within a social network (and therefore from networked memories: Bartoletti 2011) to connections between content mediated by algorithms, to the promotion of the self aimed at transforming social value into economic value, in the context of the platform society (Van Dijk 2013, 2017; Van Dijck et al. 2018). Connectivity, datafication, and quantification of memories (Jacobsen and Beer, 2021), programmability, and autonomy of content from context (“content without context”: Bhandari and Bimo 2022) are among the platform logics (Van Dijck, Poell 2013) that increasingly influence the work of users’ memory.

But while platforms today are predominantly algorithmic, we also know that algorithms cannot be considered tout court as actors of memory. Digital or algorithmic memory can be conceived as the ability to process information independently of meaning (Esposito 2017), a link that characterizes human memory. Thus, for example, photos curated algorithmically and suggested to users by an application are not equivalent to human memories (Lee, 2020), and it is also inappropriate to define them as “automated memories,” as in the case of Facebook’s affordance of the same name (Jacobsen and Beer 2021). Algorithms, being incapable of abstraction and only performing operations on data, ‘do not properly remember and do not properly forget’ (Esposito 2017, p. 6), just as algorithmic memory reconfigures the very relationship between remembering and forgetting as we know it. As is often the case in memory studies, metaphors are evocative but sometimes risk producing misleading effects if not treated with the necessary caution.

If the logics of algorithmic platforms enable and shape contemporary forms of remembering and forgetting, we believe it is essential to avoid any form of technological determinism that would obscure our understanding of the present behind new presumed socio-technical automatisms. Instead, research on memory in digital media must focus on ‘memory in practice’, which emerges from the interaction and negotiation between users and platforms — with their logics, functionalities, and affordances — where algorithmic mediations and recent developments in AI play an increasingly prominent role (Boccia Artieri and Bartoletti 2023; Jungselius and Weilenmann 2023). Such environments not only condition the hierarchies of visibility but also favor (sometimes in unexpected ways) the emergence of marginalized or forgotten stories, offering them new opportunities for circulation, recognition, and collective appropriation. An openness to the postcolonial and decolonial perspective, in fact, allows us to highlight how the governance of memory is also a question of epistemic justice and access to collective memory.

This redefines both the boundaries of oblivion and those of shared memory, expanding and pluralizing the sources and methods through which social memory is constructed in the digital ecosystem. Here, memory is not only stored, but actively co-constructed, contested, and manipulated through creative practices by users (Reading, 2011), new spaces, and new actors: user-generated content (UGC), user-generated games (UGG), online communities, and content creators foster interpretative and representative processes of the past that give rise to contested memories, alternative reinterpretations of historical events, but also phenomena of manipulation and rewriting of memory that begin to circulate on the internet and in the collective imagination. These forms of digital memory work raise new questions about the veracity, authority, and plurality of remembrance.

Rather than perpetuating new apocalyptic discourses on the crisis or end of memory, whether individual and/or collective, we believe it is increasingly urgent to conduct careful research into the multiple and specific mediated contexts in which memory work is carried out today, to contribute to a deeper understanding of the challenge of the digital turn in memory studies (Mandolessi 2023). For these reasons, a ‘digitally aware’ perspective, capable of enhancing the specificity of different socio-technical environments and the practices developed within them, is now essential for advancing the theoretical and methodological debate on memory. In this context, we propose to focus on the complexity of the current media ecosystem (articulated in social media, algorithmic platforms, video game worlds, and emerging forms of generative artificial intelligence) to explore new socio-technical forms of remembering and forgetting. The focus is on the practices of memory that develop at the intersection between the individual and collective dimensions, where personal biographies and shared histories intertwine. In these digital spaces, both private memories (Pasquali, Bartoletti, and Giannini, 2022) and public memories (Tota and Hagen, 2016; Tota, Lucchetti, and Hagen, 2018; Zurovac, 2023) take shape and circulate.

In line with this perspective, authors are invited to submit original articles based on critical theoretical reflections and empirical approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, on the following topics of priority, though not exclusive, of interest to the issue:

• practices of remembrance and forgetting in digital environments (social media, algorithmic platforms, video games, generative AI, etc.);
• algorithmic memories “in practice”: negotiation, domestication, or rejection of affordances and algorithmic selection logics;
• historicization of the relationship between memory and digital media; native memories and genealogies of the network;
• nostalgia for and in social media;
• crisis, dissolution, or reconfiguration of generational memories in algorithmic platforms;
• memory governance: powers, rules, and infrastructures that shape remembering and forgetting in digital media;
• postcolonial and decolonial perspectives: diasporic memories, marginal memories, and memory activism;
• beyond algorithmic memories: digital visual cultures and the memory of artificial intelligence;
• video games, digital worlds, and social media as contemporary lieux de mémoire;
• remix, appropriation, and creative forms of digital memory work.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

29 January 2026: deadline for abstract (600-750 characters). Authors will be notified of acceptance by 2 February. Please note that such preliminary feedback does not imply publication. Articles will be double-blind refereed, and publication will be subject to the outcome of the evaluation.

20 April 2026: deadline for article submission (up to 45000 characters, including spaces, including references). Authors are invited to send an original article, in English or Italian, to the editors of the issue at roberta.bartoletti2@unibo.it and elisabetta.zurovac@uniurb.it, and to the editorial staff of the Journal (Stefania Antonioni: stefania.antonioni@uniurb.it). Articles must be concurrently uploaded to the Journal’s platform, along with an abstract in Italian and English of 600-750 characters and an author profile of 300-500 characters. No payment from the authors will be required.

The Special Issue is expected to be published by the end of 2026.

For editorial guidelines, please refer to the section “Author  Guidelines” on the Journal’s website:
https://www.francoangeli.it/riviste/sommario.aspx?IDRivista=52&lingua=EN

REFERENCES

Available at https://static.francoangeli.it/fa-contenuti/riviste/cfp/sc-call8.pdf [note “English version” link at upper left of page]