Abstract
This article explores the mediatization of birthdays and anniversaries through the concept of “on-this-date” media as a way to understand the representation and circulation of media content that occurred in previous years, on that exact date. Drawing on journalism studies and mediated memory work, I argue that past events are made relevant and then irrelevant through a frame of on-this-date media. By juxtaposing Facebook Birthdays and Memories with the Associated Press’s “Today In History” feed, I analyze the multiple temporalities at work across analog and digital media platforms. Drawing on Keightley’s zones of intermediacy, I examine how time is mediated through the textual, technological, and social aspects of media, in sometimes conflicting ways. Thus, this article seeks to contribute to our understanding of mediatization by examining how media institutions structure, organize, and represent mediated temporalities.
Remembering a birthday or anniversary for many people can range from a nicety to a familial obligation. Recently, Facebook has become a dominant platform for communication related to such events. Not only does the platform remind users of friends’ birthdays, but it easily enables the wishing of happy birthday or anniversary messages as well. In addition, people can then post messages regarding how thankful they are for all the well wishes they received. While much academic research has examined Facebook in a variety of communication contexts, the roles of birthdays or anniversaries on the platform have gone largely unexamined (one exception being Fiebert et al., 2013). This article explores the mediated temporalities of birthdays and anniversaries by examining social transformations in communication brought about by changes in the media ecology (Couldry and Hepp, 2017; Kaun and Fast, 2014) and examines how the mediatization of time can occur across different systems of media (Ekström et al., 2016; Hepp, 2013; Kaun et al., 2016; Pentzold, 2018).
In this article, I explore the multiple temporalities at work in ways that historical events like birthdays and anniversaries occur in media. I situate media content and structures about these events as examples of on-this-date media, which I define as media content about an event that occurred on the same month and date but different year from the date the content is meant to be consumed. For example, we might identify on-this-date media through phrases like, “five years ago today this happened.” In these cases, the month and date of particular events make relevant historical occurrences to contemporary audiences. Birthday and anniversaries as well as coronations and inductions are fodder for on-this-date media. This genre of media draws on historical events while preserving the temporal norm of presentism of both news and social media through the invocation of “today.” While media content about annual holidays as well as birthdays can be considered on-this-date media, so too can any content about an event that occurred on a particular date. In this article, I broadly examine how media institutions rely on the temporal rhythms and structure of the date in history to anticipate and produce “new” content relevant to media audiences.
Specifically, I comparatively analyze two examples of on-this-date media: (1) the Associated Press’s (AP) Today in History and (2) Facebook’s Birthday and Memories features. The AP’s daily feed Today in History provides a list of historical events that occurred on that date in history as well as celebrity birthdays from that date. Facebook’s Memories and Birthdays also highlight events or posts from previous years or alert users of people in their networks whose birthdays it is. The comparison between social media and news on-this-date content reveals how time is multiply produced through media or what Keightley (2013) calls the “zones of intermediacy” as time structures the ordinary (re)production of media content as well as its consumption. Comparative analysis between new and old media allows us to engage in what Hepp (2013) calls diachronic mediatization research. Juxtaposing old and new on-this-date media enables the identification of unique characteristics of on-this-date media brought about through changes as well as continuities of mediatization.
Despite notions of real-time media or news (Rushkoff, 2013), I argue that on-this-date is an important way through which media producers use content to structure the past, present, and future. In particular, I suggest that on-this-date media become an important media content filter in what Andrew Hoskins (2011a) calls a post-scarcity culture, where the digital environment is characterized by such sheer volume of material that it is difficult to comprehend (p. 269). With so much more of our political and social lives captured and stored through media technologies (Humphreys, 2018; Papacharissi, 2015), I argue that on-this-date media enables content producers to make relevant particular content for a specific day and then make it irrelevant (i.e. not today), thus making room for new on-this-date content.
On-this-date media, such as Facebook Birthdays and the AP’s Today in History, have largely gone overlooked because they are routine and less momentous than political or economic affairs that dominate the public sphere. The continuity of on-this-date media from analogue to digital also renders it less visible than other forms of making time in a digital society. As such, this project is inspired by ordinary studies (Highmore, 2010). Ordinary studies seek to examine the everyday routines, rhythms, and experiences that are often embedded in the taken-for-granted aspects of mediated life. These patterns can be overlooked because of their habituation. Yet, these everyday practices and structures also reveal deeply embedded sociocultural values and, in this case, the economic and structural influences of media that shape the production of media content as well as mediated time.
More specifically, I explore on-this-date media through zones of intermediacy (Keightley, 2013) to examine the ways temporalities of on-this-date media are textually, technologically, and socially structured. Juxtaposing Facebook’s Birthday and Memory features with the AP’s Today in History reveals that “new” content is presented to audiences in highly formulaic and datafied ways that are relatively cheap and easy to produce, thus fulfilling a need for continually new content to (re)engage readers and users. While maintaining norms of presentism in both journalism and social media, on-this-date media are economically incentivized yet curated in socially meaningful ways. Therefore, on-this-date media represent an important lens into one way that multiple mediated temporalities occur within everyday culture.
Time and the Internet
Early internet research described the ways that information networks radically changed our understanding of time (e.g. Castells, 2000[2010]). Largely associated with a speeding up or sense of acceleration (Wajcman, 2015), networked technologies enable the rapid spread of information across space and time. However, media scholars have largely debunked the argument that technologies merely speed up our sense of time (Keightley, 2012, 2013) Drawing on Lefebvre’s (1991) notion of spatial practice, Leong et al. (2009) argue that Internet time is the dynamic assemblage of a triadic interaction between conceived time, perceived time, and lived time where lived time is the everyday social practices of time. Conceived time can be understood as the formal structures, technologies, and conceptualizations like calendars and clocks that socially produce time. Fornäs (2016) refers to these as third-time tools, revealing how these too are media technologies. Perceived time is the way that we experience time. As Leong et al. (2009) argue, Internet time does not exist in isolation but is understood in relation to the triadic interaction of lived, conceived, and perceived time.
Keightley (2013) explicitly brings mediation to our understanding of lived time. She suggests that “zones of intermediacy” is a helpful analytical strategy to understanding the mediated experiences of lived time. She writes,
The production of time in these zones is intermediate in several sense: in that time is produced through the interaction between media and social contexts of consumption, time can be produced through the interaction of multiple media in any given milieu, and that time can be experienced through the negotiation between the various temporal logics of technologies and symbolic content. (p. 68)
For Keightley, experiences of duration can occur through the textual content of a media message, the temporal logics of the medium itself, and through the experiential patterns of use of that medium. The interdependency of this triple articulation of media (Hartmann, 2006) is therefore experienced as a dynamic zone of intermediacy, which multiply shapes the production of mediated time.
Keightley’s zones of intermediacy is therefore a helpful analytical lens for understanding on-this-date media, because it reveals the ways the time is multiply produced, articulated, and experienced. Leong et al. (2009) similarly consider time to be an assemblage. The zones of intermediacy can therefore highlight key temporal contingencies in the two case studies of this project: Facebook Birthdays and Memories and the AP’s Today in History.
Mediated memory studies
Because I am examining how temporally bound media content is reused and recirculated, it necessarily interacts with our memories, sometimes collective memories, of previous events. Memory studies reveal the complexities of temporality and past events through the framing of memory as the active process of remembering, inevitably through media (Hoskins, 2018a; Kuhn, 2000; Özkul and Humphreys, 2015; Van Dijck, 2007). Memory is not a static cognition, but an active and social process of engaging with the past in the present. Thus, Annette Kuhn (2000) argues that memory work is a more apt description as it conveys the processual nature of memory. The presence of media has also played a central role in memory work (Van Dijck, 2007). According to Lohmeier and Pentzold (2014), “mediated memory work” is cognitive, somatic, and material in nature (p. 779). Media technologies play an essential role in both intrapersonal and collective memory work. On-this-date media become a lens through which to explore the everyday, yet complex ways that media platforms encourage mediated memory work, while maintaining temporal norms of presentism.
Hoskins (2011b) argues that connective media bring about a rupture in memory studies from that of broadcast media. This rupture brings about what he calls “new memory,” characterized by (1) a real-time “or near instantaneous communication” (p. 20) through networked media and (2) what he calls a post-scarcity culture where the proliferation of networked media into all aspects of life creates plethora of trails, content, and architectures for memory work. Whereas journalism studies has explained how news media have shaped our understanding and experiences of historical events (e.g. Zelizer, 1998), Hoskins (2018b) is suggesting a larger disruption in the relationship between memory and media. One of the key aspects of on-this-date media is how it highlights both continuities and ruptures of mediated memory work between digital and analogue networks of media.
Journalism has long contended with complex temporalities and memory (Ekström, 2016; Meltzer, 2010; Swasy, 2016; Zelizer, 1998). Newsmedia use historical events as fodder for news stories. As such, they are important examples of how shared temporalities like anniversaries can make relevant certain content for a particular time. Contemporary news events are frequently contextualized or framed with historical references (Edy and Daradanova, 2006; Zelizer, 1998, 2008) As Edy (1999) notes, journalism is not just the reporting of events of the day, but actively draws on historical events to make sense of the contemporary. Large-scale collective memory events like national holidays have enabled researchers to examine the multiple ways time is articulated and experienced within journalism (Zandberg et al., 2012). News plays an important role in shaping our collective memory of historic events (Zandberg et al., 2012; Zelizer, 1992). Within norms of presentism, journalism both reflects and constructs past events through the present. Journalism studies have contributed extensively to our understanding of collective memory and the role of news stories within that process.
This project, however, specifically analyzes two cases that are not considered news stories, though they may be found in News Feeds and newspapers. In particular, the lack of narrative contextualization of the AP’s Today in History as well as Facebook Birthdays and Memories highlight the ways mediated temporalities become the key factor in the curation and filtering of content. Compared to news stories that might also draw on historical events of that same month and date, there is no narrative indicating why this content is meaningful or important to audiences or how things have changed since the original event. Instead, Facebook Birthdays and Memories as well as the AP’s Today in History represent content largely created years ago and recirculated annually, but nevertheless evoke new mediated memory work and meaning on a part of the audiences (Van Dijck, 2007). These two cases of on-this-date media were chosen specifically because of the lack of narrative, which helps to highlight the ways that media organizations structure and represent multiple temporalities. The routinization of the production of on-this-date media further contributes to our understanding of the mediatization of time in everyday life (Ekström et al., 2016; Kaun and Fast, 2014).
AP’s Today in History
Today in History is a daily feed generated by the AP and includes eight sections. The feed itself begins with (1) a line indicating the day, the date (month and date), which day of the year it is, and how many days left of the year: “Today is Monday, November 5th, the 309th day of 2018. There are 56 days left in the year.” Then the feed gives (2) a “Highlight in History,” typically one to two sentences describing a historical event. Then there are (3) 12 historical events listed in chronological order from this date in history. Next, there is (4) a “10 years ago,” (5) a “five years ago,” and (6) a “one year ago” highlight. Next is (7) a list of celebrities and well-known politicians who were born on this date and their current age. Finally, there is (8) a “Thought for Today,” a pithy quote from a historical writer, statesman, or celebrity. Sometimes no date is attributed to the quote, but it often includes birth and death years for the author. Sometimes the quote is attributed to someone who was born or died on this date.
The Today in History section of newspapers in the United States is both an easy to find section of the newspaper and a hard to find section. It is easy to find in that it is in the same standardized spot daily, such as on page A2. This page typically includes the weather for the country, winning lottery information, the continuation of a story from the front page, and masthead information for the newspaper itself. This is a page of the newspaper that is highly standardized and can be prepopulated. Another common page for the Today in History section to appear is in the Life or Entertainment section, tucked between the crossword, word scramble, Sudoku, horoscopes, comics, or TV listings.
Today in History is difficult to find because it is typically not archived in newspaper databases or may not be available in online newspapers because it is not a news story. It is not within an official section of the newspaper such as local or foreign news, sports, business, or obituaries. Nor it is considered a newspaper section in and of itself. One can find it in the PDF version of newspapers online, sometimes referred to as the electronic edition or e-edition, but these are not necessarily searchable. Today in History is also not to be found in the premier newspapers in the United States, like the New York Times, LA Times, or Washington Post. Instead it can be found in local city papers.
The structural characteristics of the Today in History make it quite flexible for newspapers to include. First, it does not include long narratives, but short, episodic descriptions of events. Typically, the AP’s Today in History offers 13 events, including the “Highlight in History,” each described in just one sentence. Occasionally the “Highlight in History” will include two sentences describing an event rather than just one sentence. In addition, there are descriptions of two or three events for 10, 5 and 1 year(s) ago. But all events from Today in History are succinctly described. This punctuated style and separated events of Today in History means that it is very customizable. For example, an editor can include only some sections of the feed and it will still read like a full account of “Today in History.”
While events from Today in History are derived from the news of the past, birthdays from Today in History are not. Nevertheless, birthdays are always included in the Today in History feed. The birthdays are typically of celebrities who were not famous at the time of their birth. Therefore, their births were not “news,” leading to the question of why newspapers would publish birthdays as part of their everyday news cycle. There are least two potential reasons. First, analogous to Today in History, these birthday events become fodder for nostalgic reminiscing of celebrities of the past. We are reminded that celebrities whom readers might remember as famous in their twenties or thirties are not immune to getting older and like the reader, also age with time. Second, readers can enjoy the knowledge of sharing a birthday with someone famous. For example, those readers born on 6 November share a birthday with actresses Sally Field and Emma Stone. Not only do these famous women share this connection, but potential readers can share it as well. I want to suggest that these birthdays are small but meaningful ways to enhance human connection.
While much has been written about Facebook, much less has been written about its role in memory and time. That said, one such study examined “Facebook time” and the ways that the platform afforded mediated memory work (Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2014). Specifically analyzing a Facebook page for a defunct radio station, the researchers argue that the “Facebook users’ temporal experience is one of immediacy, ephemerality, ‘liveness,’ and flow: to be immersed in an atmosphere and an interface of rapid change and forgetfulness, rather than remembrance and preservation” (p. 1161). The Facebook interface does not enable the archiving of narrative but instead encourages a sense of flow within a temporal logic of immediacy and liveness. In particular, the researchers note that Facebook’s newsfeed, and primary interface, conveys a kind of continuous stream of activity.
While Kaun and Stiernstedt (2014) identify the ways that collective memory work is limited on Facebook, there are a number of features on Facebook that are distinct from other social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram which encourage reminiscence and reflection, in particular Facebook’s Memory and Birthday features. In the next section, I give a brief history of the Memory features on Facebook and the responses they garnered when initially launched.
Facebook Memories as on-this-date media
Facebook Memories initially began in 2014 on the 10th anniversary of Facebook’s launch, with the “Looking Back” feature, which automatically created short videos using people’s Facebook posts and comments (Konrad, 2017). “Looking Back” highlighted several features of one’s Facebook account: (1) the year you joined Facebook, (2) the most liked posts since that time, and (3) other photos you’ve shared. In 2019, when you go to the “Looking Back” site, it is only a note from Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team just saying thank you for using Facebook. As one tech writer noted, “The videos are a bit cheesy, but are potent reminders that for many of us, Facebook has become a very normal way to document our daily lives” (Hamburger, 2014: para 1).
The “Looking Back” feature was met with both great excitement and critique. As Tech Crunch writer Kumparak (2014) shared:
For the past 24 hours, my Facebook newsfeed has been predominantly filled with just two things: (1) People sharing those cutesy automated “Look Back” videos that Facebook made for most of its users to celebrate the company’s 10th anniversary (2) People complaining that they hate their Look Back. (para 1)
Much of the complaining about the “Look Back” feature was that its algorithmic choices in what it deemed important were either woefully wrong or at least fell short of our complex experiences with memories (Hathaway, 2016). Thus within days of launching the original Look Back feature, Facebook launched an “edit” function that enabled users to remove or change their videos (Kumparak, 2014).
A year later in 2015, Facebook launched On This Day, described by the company as “a new way to look back at things you have shared and posts you’ve been tagged in on Facebook. Only you can see your On This Day page. On This Day shows content from this date in the past” (Gheller, 2015: n.p.). Recognizing the desire of users to look back at their previous posts, On This Day celebrated a kind of emotional reminiscence and personal reflection as well as the ability to share these. In Facebook’s announcement of the feature, they emphasized that only the primary user could see these posts unless they explicitly share them. Facebook’s “On This Day,” nevertheless, caused great ire for some users. Algorithmically curated, based on the number of comments and “likes,” Facebook Memories sometimes served up unsuspecting users’ posts from their past that involved divorced or deceased family members (Meyer, 2014). As such, Facebook added multiple options such as not receiving Memories from posts in which certain people are tagged or are from particular dates or time periods.
According to Facebook, “every day over 90 million people use On This Day to reminisce about these moments they’ve shared on Facebook” (Hod, 2018: para 2). Notifications on the site alert users when they log in to this previous content which might be important or relevant. Beyond looking are previous posts, users are also encouraged to share or comment then share posts from previous years on that date.
In their study of Facebook time, Kaun and Stiernstedt (2014) briefly talk about the “Look Back” and the Timeline features on Facebook, but point out that both make explicit the sheer amount of data that Facebook has collected about its users. This might suggest that one of the reasons why Facebook shifted from a broad “Look Back” to the more specific On This Day was to minimize the visibility of the vast amounts of data that Facebook has about users.
Facebook birthdays as on-this-date media
On Facebook, birthdays as well as anniversaries (e.g. wedding, job, friend) and national holidays, are all versions of on-this-date media. In particular, birthdays on social media can serve several functions. First, birthdays have long served the social function of celebrating developmental milestones particularly of children (Golden and Weiner, 2011). Second, as a time when families come together, the celebrations of birthdays reinforce the family and social structure. Furthermore, expressing wishful birthday sentiments can be understood through the ritual model of communication which reinforces the social order and one’s place in it by reaffirming social and relational connections among group members (Carey, 1988).
But what do birthdays do for Facebook as a company? First, they can confirm that a user is over the age of 13, which is the legal minimum age of use in the United States. Second, birthdays can also be considered as a product, which is how Facebook internally describes the various aspects of their platform. Thus, it generates value and is a means of generating key performance indicators or metrics (e.g. number of users on the site, number of active users, and number of posts). Birthdays on Facebook can be understood as a form of the low hanging fruit of social media activity and content generation. They are an example, like holidays and memories, of readymade content to feed an always-new newsfeed. Viswanath et al. (2009) suggest that for Facebook users who are not very active on the site, posting happy birthday messages may be the primary impetus for them to create content on the site. Not only do the birthday notifications generate active liking but they also beget content creation and messages which generate further activity and responses.
That said, the birthday wishes and greetings on Facebook are not necessarily insincere nor meaningless (Humphreys, 2018). Facebook Birthday messages can be experienced as lovely. Indeed heartfelt thanks on Facebook are often expressed after one’s birthday. As such, Facebook birthdays can be understood through the massification of emotional labor. As West (2008) points out in her analysis of the greeting card industry, there is a universal specificity to the production of personal connection. Everyone has a birthday and birthday information is among the content always asked for and regularly included in people’s Facebook profiles. Acquisti and Gross (2006) found that birthdays were the most common form of personal information shared by Facebook users in their study, with 84% of users providing accurate and complete information regarding their birthday. Despite the irregular distribution of birthdays throughout the calendar year (Stiles, 2016) and depending on the size of one’s network, there is a good chance that it will always be someone’s birthday. The universal specificity of birthdays enables the event to be both unique to everyone (i.e. everyone only has one day of birth) and only one birthday for each year (i.e. you only turn 40 once). Yet birthdays are distributed such that they can become an everyday occurrence and even commonly shared within social networks.
Birthdays have a curious relationship to memory. The person whose birthday it is may remember previous birthdays but does not have memories of the day of their birth. It is likely they have heard stories from family members about the day or have seen pictures of themselves from that day, such that they may have conversational memories (Edwards and Middleton, 1988), but they themselves do not have personal memories of the event. And indeed birthdays are seldom a celebration of a successful birth event and more often are celebration of another year of growth, development, and milestones (Golden and Weiner, 2011). Thus, situating Facebook Birthdays as a form of on-this-date media is a helpful lens for understanding why Facebook promotes them and why they are an ongoing part of many people’s Facebook experience.
Zones of intermediacy
The parallels between the AP’s Today in History and Facebook’s Birthdays and Memories highlight one way that historical events become relevant fodder for today’s media environment. The temporal similarity of month and date is enough to bring the historic to the contemporary in meaningful ways. Drawing on Keightley’s (2013) zones of intermediacy enables us to make explicit the ways that mediated time are textually and technologically articulated as well as socially experienced through on-this-date media.
Textual
Time is first represented in the textual content of the historical event itself. The year is always made explicit in on-this-date media. This kind of explicit temporal articulation of year encourages the reader to harken back to a different time. Sometimes these are years through which one lived, but sometimes they are not. While Facebook Memories are ostensibly only within the lifetime of the reader, this is not the case for the AP which draws on notions of collective memory that reveals the ways societies decide and produce what to remember (Halbwachs, 1992). For example, people born after World War II do not remember Kristallnacht from lived experience, but they may remember learning the importance of the event from family or school. Moreover, the inclusion of any event in the AP’s Today in History renders the event worthy of our collective memory (Zelizer, 2008).
Layered with the historical dates is the explicit articulation of “today.” This is a relative term that presumes the date on which the content is to be consumed by the reader. The month and day of both the historical events and the birthdays are presumably the same as that which the reader inhabits, so they are implied, but explicitly invoked through the term “today.” Facebook Birthday notifications explicitly mention that it is someone’s birthday today. Thus the mediated text of on-this-date media explicitly articulates both a historical time and a presumed consumptive time.
While the AP’s Today in History does not usually include photos, Facebook Memories frequently include images that can also convey temporalities. Photographs of Christmas morning or Thanksgiving dinners from previous years visually convey temporality. Clothes, hairstyles, and even people can represent temporalities as well. In Keightley’s (2013) study, she specifically draws on people’s “experience of time produced at the juncture between the temporal logic of photography as a media technology, the textual content of particular photographs and the social times in which they are experienced” (p. 68). Thus for Facebook Memories, the images, text, and even comments can all convey temporal content.
Technological
Time is technologically structured through on-this-date media in several ways. Technologically, both Facebook and the AP produce “new” on-this-date content daily.
The 24-hour day structures the publication cycle of the Today in History newsfeed as well as the announcements of “new” on-this-date Memories and Birthdays on Facebook. Despite tensions of continual news production for an online audience or even a 24-hour news network (Meltzer, 2010), the AP produces and publishes Today in History in daily cycles.
Another important way that time is technologically structured in on-this-date media is through the time/date stamp. Most digital content is explicitly and technologically assigned a time/date stamp for when the content was published or posted. In some cases, there can be temporal incongruencies between the time/date stamp of when content was digitally published and the temporalities in the textual content. For example, if a newspaper editor posts the AP’s Today in History on their website at the end of their workday, it may be time/date stamped 1 day before the content of the post. Similarly, the availability of Facebook’s On This Day memories is determined not by the content of the post, but by the date it was originally posted on Facebook. Therefore, if people post about events or experiences from previous days (like their vacation last week or a birthday party this past weekend), the memory post will be associated with the date they posted it, not the date of the event.
The temporal contingencies become all the more highlighted for annual holidays or events that are not tied to a specific date. For example, Easter, Mother’s Day, and the first day of school are annual events frequently captured in Facebook memories, but nonetheless reveal how algorithmic curation can lead to a lack of temporal alignment and thus potential lack of relevance for certain kinds of content. Of course, Facebook memories are not always textually and technologically temporally aligned, but it is in the misalignment of temporalities of annual events not tied to dates where we see missteps in algorithmic curation. New Birthday and Memory notifications are only bound to the time/date stamp in the database and selectively promoted based on the date the user accesses the platform. Memories related to common holidays might be more relevant to audiences on the day of the event rather than on the date it occurred in the past, which may not align with the present.
Social
The third way that the zones of intermediacy reveal temporalities of on-this-date media is through the social context of media use. Both newspapers and Facebook want and expect readers to be consuming their product daily, if not multiple times per day in the case of social media. Indeed, their key performance indicators are associated with daily use. For newspapers, this metric is typically their daily circulation numbers or online users. For Facebook, this metric is daily active users. While the definition of daily active user has changed over time, as of 2019 it is defined as some form of interactivity on the site such as the liking, commenting, clicking a link, and posting, 1 including of course, wishing someone a happy birthday. Of course, people do not always read the newspaper or check Facebook everyday, they have their own routines. People read day-old newspapers and wish others a belated happy birthday on Facebook. People may have their own rhythms of news and social media consumption, but there are presumptions in media production from both institutions of daily consumption.
There are multiple temporal rhythms at work within on-this-date media. Not only relying on daily rhythms, on-this-date media rely on annual rhythms as well. The temporal structure of the year acts as a social marker of anniversary and remembrance. Keightley (2013) argues that domesticated rhythms surrounding media technologies are central to understanding their impact and effects. Because of these annual rhythms, on-this-date media is anticipatory in nature. We know when things happened in the past and can easily anticipate the anniversary of their occurrence. Much of data science and algorithmic culture is increasingly about anticipatory networks and systems. From Google’s auto-fill (Noble, 2018) and to Facebook’s Open Graph (Bucher, 2012, 2018), much of the world of algorithms is to anticipate interest and behavior based on previously collected data. Yet time and again, scholars have shown the political, cultural, and economic biases that shape algorithmic culture (Eubanks, 2018; Gillespie, 2018; Noble, 2018). While memories and birthdays might not seem particularly discriminatory, they generate a normatizing function through their circulation on social media (Humphreys, 2018). Holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries are particularly difficult events for people who are grieving the loss of a loved one (Bendaña, 2017) and inundation with normative message may enhance feelings of loss. While the anticipatory nature of on-this-date media can be datafied through social media to produce a steady stream of new daily and relevant content, the experience of anticipation on the part of audiences is not always positive.
There is similar normatizing potential with the AP’s Today in History. It is not the place in the newspaper where new voices and issues are introduced into the public sphere. Because it lacks contextual narrativization, it must rely on readers’ presumed knowledge and collective memory of events for people to engage in meaning making and memory work. By solely relying on news events of the past, it plays to the older demographic of newspaper readers who have the collective memory to understand why people and events are listed. It becomes a trip down memory lane and reinforces both the annual nature of remembrance and the lesson that we mustn’t forget the past (Zelizer, 1998).
While both Facebook and the AP Today in History broadly curate what to include in their on-this-date media, they do so differently. Facebook algorithmically curates based on the personal network of the user, whereas the AP likely draws on their vast archive of news content to continually update and curate the Today in History feed. Of course, individual newspapers may further curate the list for their city or regional area. Thus, a key difference between news media and social media curation is a shift from national or regional focus to one based on the personal. For example, on Facebook people will only see the birthdays of people in their networks and memories in which they were tagged or posted. In the newspapers, we see curatorial choices likely from an assistant managing editor, choosing events and birthdays that they think will resonate with their readers.
On-this-date media are often presented to audiences as socially meaningful, based merely on their date. However, on Facebook, Memory and Birthday notifications frequently generate new messages and posts. Narration about the content significantly increases the social significance of on-this-date media. 2 This can occur through several ways. First and most commonly, people write happy birthday messages or other celebratory sentiments on Facebook users’ walls. When sharing Memories one can write a brief reflection to include in the post, such as “I still love this photo” or “wow, time flies!” As Fornäs (2016) writes, “Narrativizing media practices continue to culturalize these seemingly nonembodied and abstract technological temporalities and make them meaningful” (p. 5225). Sharing Facebook Memory posts can be understood a part of our mediated memory work (Lohmeier and Pentzold, 2014). Moreover, on-this-date media encourages collective reminiscing about the past through the invocations of events that happened on this date. Additional narrativizing and posting generated through these notifications can create new meaning and social significance based on events of the past. The publishing and the sharing of on-this-date media reinforces a shared past and thus also our current social connections through that past.
Mediatiziation and on-this-date media
This analysis specifically examined the zones of intermediacy of on-this-date media that are central to processes of mediatization. In particular, I focused on the multiple temporalities at work through textual, technological, and social aspects of on-this-date media. By examining how these temporalities differ between the two cases, I highlight processes of mediatization for on-this-date media.
The comparison of Facebook birthdays and memories with Today in History also highlights the ever-important temporal construct of the day. Despite the acceleration of time and the sense of overcoming time that scholars have attributed to digital and networked technologies (Castells, 2000[2010]; Wajcman, 2015, 2018), the mediated environment, including our mediated memory work, is still highly reliant on the rhythm of daily life. This study contributes to Keightley’s (2012) call for analyses of “the ways in which time is organized, represented and communicated in media content” (p. 4). On-this-date media reveal the ways that the production of media content reinforces both days and dates. Fornäs (2016) suggests that calendars from which dates are generated are regimes of time. The highly regimented nature of dates is active in both the cases of Facebook and AP. Fornäs argues that the digitalization of calendars renders their experiences as more abstract, rationalized, and automatized, which we see as evidence of generating temporal misalignments in digitized on-this-date media. However, even narrativization of media content through the brief description of what happened on that date can create and reinforce social connection in a digital realm where automatization might just render alienation. Acknowledging that a post is about events from a few days prior or that you’re wishing someone a belated happy birthday is much more common on social media than in a newspaper, whose temporal structures of production are much more formalized. In cases where temporal misalignment occurs between content and technology, the explicit acknowledgment or apology of an early or delayed posting, for example, can rectify temporal uneasiness.
By comparing on-this-date media across two different cases, I have argued that both the form and function of this kind of media shape mediated temporalities. The short, episodic nature of Facebook Memories and Birthdays as well as events and birthdays from the AP’s Today in History enable some posts to be included and others excluded, but still be experienced as complete. Birthdays serve an important way of connecting people in minor but meaningful ways. Whether it be a celebrity or a friend from high school, knowing that it is someone’s birthday is a form of social connection. The format characteristics of birthdays and event headlines, as opposed to longer news narratives, enable their relatively easy integration into different kinds of media outlets. The episodic nature further renders content irrelevant within 24 hours, and then often invisible in the case of the AP Today in History, thus making room for new content.
This article further argues that on-this-date media recognizes the economic incentives driving contemporary social media platforms and traditional newspapers alike. Facebook and the AP have the ability to use and reuse content in ways that make it temporally relevant by presenting it as on-this-date media. Whereas the editorial labor of choice within newspapers is still done by humans, the algorithmic decisions on Facebook nonetheless present filtered mediated versions of the world. While newspaper editors may try to localize the AP’s Today in History content to their city and the presumed demographics of their readers, the localization on Facebook occurs to a much greater extent being both datafied and personalized to individual users and not just geographic region. Nevertheless, the underlying economic motivations of on-this-date media are remarkably similar.
On-this-date media reveal the ways that media institutions rely on daily rhythms to create a continual supply of new content for readers. This study reinforces how “today” continues to be a very important temporal structure and rhythm for both users and media institutions alike. The zones of intermediacy that become produced through the triple articulation of textual content, technological structure, and routines of use on-this-date media reveal the layered assemblages of a common, but overlooked aspect of mediated time.
Furthermore, the on-this-date media simultaneously represents the past, present, and future. This study identifies on-this-date media as a way of contributing to our understanding of the ordinary and often overlooked ways that mediated time is produced through events from the past that are re-presented in the present and can be anticipated for the future. By explicitly focusing on a feature not included in elite US newspapers, this article identifies a new way that mediated time is represented to many American newspaper readers as well as Facebook users. Applying Keightley’s (2013) zones of intermediacy to on-this-date media reveals the layered and complex ways something seemingly as simple as birthdays enact multiple mediated temporalities. On-this-date media highlight how the “today” is both a profound and yet ordinary way that multiple mediated temporalities are produced across media platforms and systems.
On-this-date media demonstrate the ways that media institutions reproduce content as a kind of peripheral media that we encounter daily. These are often overlooked or taken-for-granted media content, but they nonetheless serve an important ritual function of communication that can reinforce social connection through mediated memory work. Moreover, on-this-date media reveal the complex ways that media institutions organize and represent multiple mediated temporalities in ways that are economically incentivized and meet the needs for “new” content daily. Temporal similarity becomes a curatorial frame through which content is filtered and served up to readers and users. On-this-date media reveal how certain historical events and experiences can enter into collection attention one day, but also how they can legitimate forgetting the next day.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
