George Floyd and cosmopolitan memory formation in online networks: A report from Northern Europe

Abstract

This work analyses the presence and management As personalized digital networks have increased in cultural and political relevance, there is a more urgent need to understand their role in democratic memory-formation. Moreover, scholars have suggested that, in a globalized digitalized age, collective memory could extend to transnational publics. This study aims to advance the understanding of memory on global social networks by investigating the way the death of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 was treated and understood by Twitter-users outside the United States. Using a combination of big data and contemporaneous qualitative interviews with users in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the paper brings the concept of cosmopolitan memory into the social media era. The study finds that users fused the event and its aftermath with observations of injustice in their own countries. However, this process operated differently among users of different ideological outlooks. Another key finding is that users on the radical right resented the uptake of the event as a cosmopolitan memory, and employed techniques termed as “combative counter-memory”.