How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions ? phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very much up in the air. The essays in this collection discuss the new technologies of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social. Contributors: David Berry, Ina Blom, Wolfgang Ernst, Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Liv Hausken, Yuk Hui, Trond Lundemo, Adrian Mackenzie, Sonia Matos, Richard Mills, Jussi Parikka, Eivind Rossaak, Stuart Sharples, Tiziana Terranova, Pasi Valiaho.

What happens when we suddenly feel that a moving image is being slowed down or halted? Nowadays it happens all the time in the cinema and the art galleries. A basic question of life - is it still or is it moving? - here urgently addresses emotional and aesthetical issues as well as questions concerning media. The still/moving image compels a new sensibility. Eivind Rossaak's highly original media aesthetic analysis of the arts explores how the malleability of the speeds of motion instantiates odd relationships between different art and media forms. Three works are exemplary: Larry and Andy Wachowski's The Matrix, Ken Jacobs' Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, and Bill Viola's The Passions. The last chapter calls for a "Politics of the Slow." This book is part of the emerging still/moving field within the interdisciplinary study of visual culture, cinema, new media and the arts. "The usefulness of this book lies above all in the judicious and felicitous choice of contrasting complementary case studies, each of which is given a highly original historical placement and subjected to a complex and multi-layered historical hermeneutics," Professor Thomas Elsaesser writes.