“Remembering together. Some considerations on how direct or virtual social interactions influence memory processes”.

Memory is usually studied and commonly represented as an individual faculty, a mental link between past perceptions and current states of mind. Referring to this definition, the aim of this chapter is twofold. First, I review some classical contributions, that studied how social interactions deeply influence the basic functions of individual remembering – such as information recall, reconstruction of the meaning of past stimuli or events, or monitoring activities that spontaneously follow acts of remembering. Second, I try to speculate about how these classical intuitions – advanced by Lev Vygotskij, Frederic Bartlett, Maurice Halbwachs -- not only allow us a deeper understanding of the importance of social influence on memory acts, but also may be applied to the new perspectives made possible by the virtual interactions that characterize our current technological ambience. In fact, we may see in these innovative technologies another example of the gradual “internalization” of socially induced performances that is a crucial step in developing memory’s potential areas.