Sharing ‘memories’ on Instagram

Abstract

This article examines the performance of remembered experience within sharing in-the-moment carried out by young women on Instagram. I propose that the small stories analytical framework provides a way to examine at a micro level sharing of ‘memories’ online by addressing practices of selecting the past, showing and telling the past and interacting with the past in digital traces. For digital memory studies, this moves beyond a focus on affordances and infrastructure transformed memory and the examination of how people engage with memories that have been predefined. The analysis demonstrates how the performance of remembered experience is displayed and positioned across the interplay of past, present and future. Young women’s sharing in-the-moment reconfigures the function and meanings of ‘memories’ beyond the platform’s mobilisation of the term. It is part of how they express feelings and experiences about their unfolding lives.