Feminist Impact: Exploring the Cultural Memory of Second-Wave Feminism in Contemporary Italy

Abstract

One of the most remarkable features of recent protest movements that have manifested themselves across the globe is the widespread use of digital and social media, such as social networking sites and applications, including Facebook and Twitter. During the so-called Twitter revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, for example, people widely recorded events on their smartphones before sending them around the world (Beaumont, 2011). Although we must remain critical of the actual impact of social media and consider the fact that the internet often serves as no more than a tool to get messages across or to logistically organize mobilization (Eaton, 2013, p. 5), patterns of protest have changed with developments in technology (p. 7). Social media have, therefore, played ‘both an instrumental and constitutive role for activists worldwide in their efforts to disseminate social movement discourses, to mobilize for direct actions online as well as offline, to coordinate direct action and to self-mediate acts of resistance leading potentially to movement spill-overs’ (Cammaerts, forthcoming). It seems, then, that the medium is very much the message, and this has had significant consequences for the way memories are produced and circulated: technological innovations in media and communication have increasingly shaped both individual and collective memories, placing them within and across national and global frames and allowing people not only to witness and share global events in a more direct and personal manner, but also to ‘produce’ memory by recording events on their mobile phones or tablets, and subsequently sharing the events with the community.