The blended boundary between individual and social memory in the 2.0 web era

The paper starts with a qualitative research, carried out through 52 in-depth interviews, on memory and its evolutions in connection with digital tools and networked environments. The aim was to investigate how new generations build their individual memory and, more specifically, which things, mementos and interfaces of memory they use; what practices are implemented to create and to socialize memory, how and in to what extent they transform it into cultural capital. The role of interactive media for memory production, storage and communication will be outlined; furthermore, the web and social media will be analysed as cultural interfaces through which people approach their past. The analysis will explore how digital environments for writing, publishing, and showing personal experience are changing the subjective criteria used to distinguish past and present, private and public dimensions of memory. The productive dimension of 2.0 web environments is indeed giving rise to a new diffused subjectivity in which, on the one hand people are stimulated to enlarge the virtual audience of their subjective memories, whilst on the other hand, they transform and mediate their subjectivity in order to adapt it to a global language and circuit.