Social media and social memory

I am getting increasingly interested in studying the role that new media plays in shaping social memory (e.g. how do blogs and social networks  impact how societies remember and forget? how will historical narratives be written in the age of data abundance). Needless to say, this proves to be a very exciting and intellectually-challenging subject of inquiry (expect a long essay/review sometime in January!).

This is why I am very excited about an experiment which is now underway in Poland. Deutsche Welle has more:

A young boy in shorts and a white T-shirt, with black hair, dark eyes, and a mischievous grin - that is how Henio looks to his friends on his Facebook page.

"My name is Henio Zytomirski. I am seven-years-old. I live on 3 Szewska Street in Lublin," he writes on his profile. His birthday is March 25, 1933. He is no more than seven or eight years old. As a young Jewish boy, he was killed by the Nazis in a concentration camp.

Henio has been signed up to Facebook since August 18, 2009. "On that day, I wrote my first entry," said Piotr Buzek. The 22-year-old works in the Brama Grodzka Cultural Center in Lublin, and he is responsible for bringing Henio back to life in the virtual world. He imagines how Henio felt during his life and writes as though he were him.

"Here at the center we have collected a lot of information about Henio's life, and then I tried to imagine how this young boy experienced the world around him," said Buzek.

...By now, Henio has more than 1,700 friends on Facebook, and more are being added every day. Henio doesn't chat with them - he only writes short sentences about his life. His friends comment on what he writes - empathetically and honestly. They tell him what war means. And sometimes they can only explain to him that for many things in life there is simply no explanation.

This very brave experiment in what I dub "social media remembering" may not be "historical reenactment" the way Collingwood envisioned it but it does raise a few very interesting questions. Could Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter function as "places of memory"? How will we come to remember events in Iran last summer given how much digital content has been produced? How will future historians make sense of it all? Lots of questions but very few answers...