As the end of December draws near, Facebook routinely sends users a short video entitled Your Year on Facebook. It lasts about a minute and brings together the images and posts that received the highest number of comments and likes over the last year. The video is rounded off with a message from Facebook that reads: Sometimes, looking back helps us remember what matters most. Thanks for being here.

It is this looking back, increasingly the focus of social networks, that is the inspiration behind Davide Sistos brilliant reflection on how our relationship with remembering and forgetting is changing in the digital era. The past does not really exist: it is only a story we tell ourselves. But what happens when we tell this story not only to ourselves but also to our followers, when it is recorded not only on our social media pages but also on the pages of hundreds or thousands of others, making it something that can be viewed and referenced forever? Social media networks are becoming vast digital archives in which the past merges seamlessly with the present, slowly erasing our capacity to forget. And yet at the same time, our memory is being outsourced to systems that we dont control and that could become obsolete at any time, cutting us off from our memories and risking total oblivion.

This timely and thoughtful reflection on memory and forgetting in the digital age will be of interest to students and scholars in media studies and to anyone concerned with the ways our social and personal lives are changing in a world increasingly shaped by social media and the internet.

Davide Sisto is a researcher in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Turin.

Table of contents:AcknowledgementsIntroduction. Social Networks and Looking BackThe past is just a story we tell our followersFacebook and Looking Back: #10YearsChallenge, On This Day, MemoriesChapter One. From Social Networks to Digital ArchivesThe Twenty Days of Turin: Facebook in 1977Naked in front of the Computer: Social Networks in the 1990sThe World Doubled: Reincarnation or the Cocaine of the Future?Blogs, Forums, Mailing Lists: A New Life in 56KThe Era of Shared Passions: An Epidemic of Digital MemoriesDigital Memory as Crazed Mayonnaise: The Past is Emancipated, Identities MultiplyChapter Two. Collective Cultural Autobiographies and Encyclopedias of the Dead 2.0Experiments in Collective Cultural AutobiographyCopy and Paste: Writing About Oneself is Like Summing Up the History of the UniverseCancer Bloggers: My Message is My BodyStories of Cancer Bloggers on YouTube and FacebookFacebook: Encyclopedia of the Dead 2.0?Autobiographical Memory: Inventing a Forgotten PastDisinterred Bodies: Social Networks and Data Flows as ArchivesChapter Three. Total Recall, Digital Immortality, RetromaniaBecoming the Database of Ourselves: Lifelogging and Video-camera MemoryThe Memobile: From Total Recall to Digital ImmortalityThe Memory Remains: The Life of Memories Post-MortemMind-Uploading as a Declaration of Independence for MemoriesInsomnia Inside a Garbage Heap: Funes, or of a Life that Never ForgetsCreating Space in Memory: Forgetting and Sleep as Forms of ResistanceThe Web as a Melancholy Receptacle of Regret: Hollie Gazzard, The Last Message Received, WartherapyRetromania and Sad Passions: The End of Nostalgia and the Loss of the FutureSan Junipero Exists and Lives in FacebookConclusion. Digital Inheritance and a Return to OblivionDigital Inheritance: What to Do with our Own Memories?The Value of Oblivion and the Joy of Being ForgottenBibliographyNotesIndex