Andreas Fickers

Susan Aasman

Joseph Wachelder

A multitude of devices and technological tools now exist to make, share, and store memories and moments with family, friends, and even strangers. Memory practices such as home movies, which originated as the privilege of a few, well-to-do families, have now emerged as ubiquitous and immediate cultures of sharing. Departing from the history of home movies, this volume offers a sophisticated understanding of technologically mediated, mostly ritualized memory practices, from early beginnings in the fin-de-siècle to today. Departing from a longue durée perspective on home movie practices, Materializing Memories moves beyond a strict historical study to grapple with highly theorized fields, such as media studies, memory studies, and science and technology studies (STS). The contributors to this volume reflect on these different intellectual backgrounds and perspectives, but all chapters share a common framework by addressing practices of use, user configurations, and relevant media landscapes. Grasping the cultural dynamics of such multi-faceted practices requires a multidimensional conceptual approach, here achieved by centering around three concepts as central analytical lenses: dispositifs, generations, and amateurs.

Dispositifs, Generations, Amateurs

Materializing Memories

Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes

Amateur Media and Participatory Cultures aims to delineate the boundary line between today’s amateur media practice and the canons of professional media and film practice. Identifying various feasible interpretative frameworks, from historical to anthropological perspectives, the volume proposes a critical language able to cope with amateur and new media’s rapid technological and interpretative developments. Conscious of the fact that amateur media continue to be seen as the benchmark of visual records of authentic rather than mass-media-derived events, Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes and Susan Aasman pay particular attention to the ways in which diverse sets of concepts of amateur media have now merged across global visual narratives and everyday communication protocols. Building on key research questions and content analysis in media and communication studies, they have assessed differences between professional and amateur media productions based on the ways in which the ‘originators’ of an image have been influenced by, or have challenged, their context of production. This proposes that technical skills, degrees of staging and/or censoring visual information, and patterns in media socialisation define central differences between professional and amateur media production, distribution and consumption. The book’s methodical and interdisciplinary approach provides valuable insights into the ways in which visual priming, cultural experiences and memory-building are currently shaped, stored and redistributed across new media technologies and visual channels.

Susan Aasman

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