Lost Melbourne: A Digital Ethnography of a Facebook Local History Group

Places and historical artefacts are being reimagined through social media on a daily and routine basis. Using an approach drawn from digital ethnography we analyse a 24-hour snapshot of the 'Lost Melbourne' Facebook community from an insider's perspective. Lost Melbourne generates new perspectives on local history on a daily basis in its recombinant and messy assemblage of content, directed by its administrators and created by both administrators and members. Its content consists largely of digitised photographs and old films taken from personal collections as well as other online archives. In this essay, we explore the implications of these new archives and associated emergent amateur memory practices. Our research suggests that Lost Melbourne might best be seen as an example of 'network sociality' (Wittel, 2001), involving people motivated largely by a yearning for connection and continuity.