7.16. (Post)Digital Activism, Democracy and Platforms [ES/EN]

As part of the “Memory Activist Turn“, digital memory has often been addressed through explorations of novel features, including participatory culture, hyperconnectivity, the end of scarcity, and seemingly limitless accessibility and reproducibility of the past. Scholarship has highlighted the affordances of social media platforms, articulated through concepts such as “hashtag memory,” and “memetic memory.” Less attention, however, has been paid to hybrid forms of memory activism, operating across physical and digital realms. Such hybridity can be comprehended as part of a “post-digital” perspective that highlights simultaneity and overlap of online and on-site practices, inviting us to rethink the relationship between digital and non-digital. This paper examines memory activism in a post-digital culture. It draws on two empirical studies: the first focuses on memes and reveals ways in which memory of the Yugoslav wars and the genocide in Srebrenica is employed in far-right protest. In this case, digital content (memes) transforms into graffiti, that in turn serve as a new digitally shared photographs of graffiti. The second study investigates commemorative stickers in Israel, spreading widely after the massacre of October 7th and the war in Gaza. The stickers are physical objects used in the public sphere yet they employ digital logics – virality, hashtags, QR codes, URLs- to invite online commemoration. By examining post-digital memory activism, we ask how objects of memory circulate across online/offline contexts? How do they mobilize fragmented visual and textual assemblages in narrating the past? Are they objects of memory or ephemeral signs of participatory culture? We contend that hybridity re-conceptualizes memory activism by changing the temporality within which mnemonic objects operate. Ultimately, hybridity is the engine of memory activism, fostering growth and virality, generating new pathways of remembrance, and thus reshaping the contemporary culture of memory.

From the Second Intifada’s iconic images of Muhammed al-Durrah to the graphic photographs of Khaled Said in 2010, mediated representations of violence have long functioned as entry points into political activism and affective anchors of memory formation in the Middle East and North Africa. Such images fused grief, outrage, and solidarity into enduring political memories that continue to shape regional imaginaries of resistance. Yet today’s digital ecology differs sharply from earlier activist media. In contemporary conflicts, memory is generated and remediated across platforms that privilege virality, meme culture, and microcelebrity. Viral figures like Rashid al-Haddad—the so-called “Hot Houthi”—and Luigi Mangione, the young American accused of assassinating the CEO of United Healthcare who has since become a popular object of sexual desire online, exemplify the eroticization of political violence in digital culture. These figures embody the meme-ification of solidarity, where political commitment circulates through humor, sexualization, and play. Such forms of digital memory do not simply trivialize violence; they constitute new affective repertoires through which political conflict is witnessed, remembered, and reimagined. Drawing on theories of microcelebrity activism, performative politics, militarized sexuality, and political play, this paper argues that digitalized memory practices simultaneously archive political violence at unprecedented scale and mediate it through contradictory affects—mourning, outrage, irony, and desire. It asks: how does the saturation of digital media reshape the affective transmission of memory? What kinds of solidarities emerge when mediated images circulate as memes, and what forms of political engagement do they foreclose? By tracing how digital playfulness and mediated spectacle co-constitute collective memory across different contexts, this paper highlights the ambivalent role of digital culture in shaping remembrance, affect, and solidarity in the twenty-first century.

In the contemporary digital media landscape, election campaigns are increasingly mediated through images and videos (Farkas & Bene, 2021). Platforms like Facebook have transformed not only how political messages are disseminated but also how history is invoked, visualized, and emotionally charged (Assmann & Shortt, 2012). This paper investigates how parliamentary parties in national election campaigns in Denmark (2022), Sweden (2022), Norway (2021), and Finland (2023) visually referred to the past in their political communication on Facebook in the month leading up to each election. It asks how visuals were used to construct temporal narratives that connect past, present, and future – and what these strategies mean for political communication and democratic culture in the Nordics. Drawing on recent work in visual political communication and memory studies, the paper argues that the past plays a central, underacknowledged role in the visual performance of electoral politics. Rather than being merely decorative, visual references to the past are employed strategically to support policy agendas, evoke national belonging, and generate trust or outrage. These visual references shape the emotional and symbolic grammar of political communication, producing powerful, at times iconographic, cues that influence how voters perceive continuity, change, and political responsibility. As such, visual history is both a communicative resource and a democratic challenge, especially when compressed into the affective structures of the digital attention economy (Papacharissi, 2015; Döveling, Harju & Sommer, 2018). The paper thus contributes to both memory studies and political communication by showing how history might not merely be referenced but re-enacted through digital visual media. It concludes that understanding references to the past in visual political communication is crusial for grasping how political futures are imagined and contested in the Nordic digital sphere.

Studies on social memory in Argentina have documented how, since the 1980s, different memory frameworks have been constructed, integrating interpretations and narratives about the dictatorial past (1976-1982). However, there has been no in-depth investigation into how these frames have been reconfigured in the contemporary digital environment, where digital platforms present specific material and symbolic conditions for the production, circulation, and dispute of memorial narratives. This exploratory research seeks to analyze how new political generations produce and dispute narratives about the dictatorial past on digital platforms. In particular, we question: how are previous memorial narrative frameworks articulated, adapted, or challenged in the logic of platforms and in line with current political interests? Which voices and actors influence these digital narratives, and what innovations are emerging? What differences and inequalities can be identified among groups in terms of their use of digital platforms for this purpose? Through a multimodal analysis, the focus will be on the posts and interactions on Instagram and Twitter/X by two youth organizations that are part of Argentina's mainstream political parties: La Libertad Avanza and Fuerza Patria, particularly during the commemorations of March 24 between 2024 and 2026. The hypothesis guiding this research is that the narratives of these actors are nourished by previous memory frameworks, influenced by the political networks in which they are embedded. At the same time, they make strategic use of these narratives in relation to current political disputes. The generational imprint and unequal strategic use among groups could contribute to the amplification of narratives that had remained “underground” until recent years. Overall, this work seeks to contribute to the understanding of contemporary reconfigurations of social memory in the Argentine digital ecosystem.