Abstract
For memory studies, remembering and forgetting are social processes, part of larger memory discourses that play a relevant role in social and political struggles. Among the factors that condition those memory claims, it is possible to mention the development of digital technologies. These contributions seek to understand the relation between digital technologies and the processes of remembering and forgetting in contemporary public sphere. It starts noticing the dissolution of the public sphere among various antagonisms, many of them identity issues, then analyzing the impact of digital technologies upon memory discourses. Its main argument here is that these technologies both bring together and juxtapose the concepts of ars and uis, storage and remembrance, as established by Aleda Assmann. It concludes studying social media controversies as memory claims, trying to understand them through the problem of forgiving. It proposes that forgiving and online controversies share a structural resemblance, but function in opposite directions; thus, if both demonstrate the permanence of the past in the present, in online controversies it is also the victim’s difficult in forgiving that gives her a chance to recouple her agency.
Keywords:
memory; new media; forgiving