The pervasive use of media at current-day festivals thoroughly impacts how these live events are experienced, anticipated, and remembered. This empirical study examined event-goers’ live media practices – taking photos, making videos, and in-the-moment sharing of content on social media platforms – at three large cultural events in the Netherlands. Taking a practice approach (Ahva 2017; Couldry 2004), the author studied online and offline event environments through extensive ethnographic fieldwork: online and offline observations, and interviews with 379 eventgoers. Analysis of this research material shows that through their live media practices eventgoers are continuously involved in mediated memory work (Lohmeier and Pentzold 2014; Van Dijck 2007), a form of live storytelling thatrevolves around how they want to remember the event. The article focuses on the impact of mediated memory work on the live experience in the present. It distinguishes two types of mediatised experience of live events: live as future memory and the experiential live. The author argues that memory is increasingly incorporated into the live experience in the present, so much so that, for many eventgoers, mediated memory-making is crucial to having a full live event experience. The article shows how empirical research in media studies can shed new light on key questions within memory studies.
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Online platforms for collecting local memories are often claimed to be a driving force of empowerment for individuals, groups and the community as a whole. Long term online participation especially plays a key role in the claims for empowerment on group and community level. However, the present research on local memory websites lacks empirical data to substantiate these claims and leaves aside questions about their wider presence, the way they are organized and how their particular structure and affordances enable online participation. To address these issues, we develop six analytical dimensions in order to analyse a comprehensive number of such sites, examining in particular their organizational and online participatory features. On the basis of a cross-sectional design including 80 cases from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and various other countries, we show three types of websites can be distinguished, namely residential, institutional and associational. In addition, we find that the expectancy of online participation is maximized not only by organizational aspects that fosterautonomy, but also by characteristics that enlarge the sense of authenticity. Our findings also show a limited number of cases with a considerable level of online participation, which offers the empirical data for analysis in terms of empowerment on group and community level.Nevertheless, we conclude that in most cases the organizational characteristics and participatory affordances of the websites are not sufficient to produce empowerment on all levels.
