Navigating landscapes of mediated memory

The papers in this volume reflect the debates that progressed during the 3rd Global Conference on Digital Memories: Exploring Critical Issues, held as part of Cyber Hub activity in Prague, Czech Republic in March 2011. These edited draft papers make up an intriguing critical snapshot in advance of the final published texts. As has been evident since the first conference on Digital Memory, the development of new technologies for communication is inextricably tied to processes and practises of memory. The impact of our ongoing shift towards the digital is still playing out - where issues around persona, identity and context are fundamental to how we select to present ourselves in our increasingly online, socially-networked and global mesh of connections, confusions and potential contradictions. A key insight gained by the first conference was the acknowledgment that how we remember (and how we develop our practises of remembering) in the digital realm will most certainly have ‘... political [and] economic impact on contemporary society and...will be crucial for knowledge and power distribution in the future.’1 This is becoming more important and conferences such as this are vital to how we might begin to understand and act upon such knowledge - where society may be constantly (re)structured around notions of digital ‘remembering,’ both in terms of how we strategically look to archive ourselves and our own lives (long-term) and how we actively engage with practises of curation and communication in terms of our existence on an everyday basis....