Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Series Editors: Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton

International Advisory Board: Steven Brown, University of Leicester, UK,
Mary Carruthers, New York University, USA, Paul Connerton, University of
Cambridge, UK, Astrid Erll, University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Robyn
Fivush, Emory University, USA, Tilmann Habermas, University of Frankfurt am
Main, Germany, Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia, USA, Susannah Radstone,
University of East London, UK, Ann Rigney, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that
include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of mem-
ory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational
memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining
powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory
enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past.
These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our
past over the last 30 years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and
cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and
forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’
under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its
interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and
methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?

Matthew Allen
THE LABOUR OF MEMORY
Memorial Culture and 7/7
Silke Arnold-de Simine
MEDIATING MEMORY IN THE MUSEUM
Empathy, Trauma, Nostalgia
Rebecca Bramall
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF AUSTERITY
Past and Present in Austere Times
Lucy Bond
FRAMES OF MEMORY AFTER 9/11
Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law
Nataliya Danilova
THE POLITICS OF WAR COMMEMORATION IN THE UK AND RUSSIA
Irit Dekel
MEDIATION AT THE HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL IN BERLIN
Nina Fischer
MEMORY WORK
The Second Generation
Anne Fuchs
AFTER THE DRESDEN BOMBING
Pathways of Memory 1945 to the Present
Jane Goodall and Christopher Lee (editors)
TRAUMA AND PUBLIC MEMORY
Irial Glynn and J. Olaf Kleist (editors)
HISTORY, MEMORY AND MIGRATION
Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation
Andrea Hajek
NEGOTIATING MEMORIES OF PROTEST IN WESTERN EUROPE
The Case of Italy
Andrea Hajek, Christine Lohmeier and Christian Pentzold (editors)
MEMORY IN A MEDIATED WORLD
Remembrance and Reconstruction
Inez Hedges
WORLD CINEMA AND CULTURAL MEMORY
Amy Holdsworth
TELEVISION, MEMORY AND NOSTALGIA
Jason James
PRESERVATION AND NATIONAL BELONGING IN EASTERN GERMANY
Heritage Fetishism and Redeeming Germanness
Sara Jones
THE MEDIA OF TESTOMONY
Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic
Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering
THE MNEMONIC IMAGINATION
Remembering as Creative Practice
Amanda Lagerkvist
MEDIA AND MEMORY IN NEW SHANGHAI
Western Performances of Futures Past
Philip Lee and Pradip Ninan Thomas (editors)
PUBLIC MEMORY, PUBLIC MEDIA AND THE POLITICS OF JUSTICE
Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton and Monica Eileen Patterson (editors)
CURATING DIFFICULT KNOWLEDGE
Violent Pasts in Public Places
Oren Meyers, Eyal Zandberg and Motti Neiger
COMMUNICATING AWE
Media, Memory and Holocaust Commemoration
Anne Marie Monchamp
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY IN AN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN
COMMUNITY
Culture, Place and Narrative
Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg (editors)
ON MEDIA MEMORY
Collective Memory in a New Media Age
Katharina Niemeyer (editor)
MEDIA AND NOSTALGIA
Yearning for the Past, Present and Future
Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley
PHOTOGRAPHY, MUSIC AND MEMORY
Pieces of the Past in Everyday Life
Anna Reading and Tamar Katriel (editors)
CULTURAL MEMORIES OF NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE
Powerful Times
Margarita Saona
MEMORY MATTERS IN TRANSITIONAL PERU
Anna Saunders and Debbie Pinfold (editors)
REMEMBERING AND RETHINKING THE GDR
Multiple Perspectives and Plural Authenticities
Estela Schindel and Pamela Colombo (editors)
SPACE AND THE MEMORIES OF VIOLENCE
Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception
V. Seidler
REMEMBERING DIANA
Cultural Memory and the Reinvention of Authority
Marek Tamm (editor)
AFTERLIFE OF EVENTS
Perspectives of Mnemohistory
Bryoni Trezise
PERFORMING FEELING IN CULTURES OF MEMORY
Evelyn B. Tribble and Nicholas Keene
COGNITIVE ECOLOGIES AND THE HISTORY OF REMEMBERING
Religion, Education and Memory in Early Modern England
Barbie Zelizer and Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt (editors)
JOURNALISM AND MEMORY

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies

Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–23851–0 (hardback)
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Memory in a Mediated
World
Remembrance and Reconstruction

Edited by

Andrea Hajek
University of Glasgow, UK

Christine Lohmeier
Universität Bremen, Germany

and

Christian Pentzold
Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Andrea Hajek,
Christine Lohmeier and Christian Pentzold 2016
Foreword © Astrid Erll 2016
Individual chapters © Respective authors 2016
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-47011-9
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
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ISBN 978-1-349-56640-2 ISBN 978-1-137-47012-6 (eBook)
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Memory in a mediated world : remembrance and reconstruction /
Andrea Hajek, University of Glasgow, UK; Christine Lohmeier,
Universität Bremen, Germany; Christian Pentzold,
Technische Universität Chemnitz, Germany [editors].
pages cm — (Palgrave Macmillan memory studies)
Based on a digital memories seminar hosted by the Centre for Media and
Culture Research at London South Bank University in July 2012.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Mass media and history—Congresses. 2. Mass media and culture—
Congresses. 3. Collective memory—Congresses. I. Hajek, Andrea,
1979– editor. II. Lohmeier, Christine, 1978– editor. III. Pentzold,
Christian, 1981– editor.
P96.H55.M46 2015
302.23—dc23 2015023530
Contents

List of Figures and Tables ix

Foreword x
Astrid Erll

Acknowledgements xiii

Notes on Contributors xv

Introduction: Remembering and Reviving in States of Flux 1

Christian Pentzold, Christine Lohmeier and Andrea Hajek

1 Archive Me! Media, Memory, Uncertainty 13

Andrew Hoskins

2 Memory, Media and Methodological Footings 36

Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley

Part I Rejoining through States of Emergency

3 Towards a Memo-Techno-Ecology: Mediating Memories of
Extreme Flooding in Resilient Communities 55
Joanne Garde-Hansen, Lindsey McEwen and Owain Jones

4 Digitizing the Memorial: Institutional and Vernacular

Remembrances of the Taiwanese 921 Earthquake and
Typhoon Morakot 74
Chiaoning Su and Paige L. Gibson

5 Geolocating the Past: Online Memories after the L’Aquila

Earthquake 90
Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi

Part II Reforming States of Affairs

6 Disrupting the Past, Reframing the Present: Websites,
Alternative Histories and Petit Récits as Black Nationalist
Politics 113
Sarah Florini

vii
viii Contents

7 Feminist Impact: Exploring the Cultural Memory of

Second-Wave Feminism in Contemporary Italy 129
Andrea Hajek

8 Echoes of the Spanish Revolution: Social Memories, Social

Struggles 142
Ruth M. Sanz Sabido

9 Asbestos Memories: Journalistic ‘Mediation’ in Mediated

Prospective Memory 158
Mia Lindgren and Gail Phillips

Part III Recollecting States of Identities

10 Stories of Love and Hate: Cultural Memory in the Cuban
Diaspora 179
Ivan Darias Alfonso

11 Media Memory Practices and Community of

Remembrance: Youth Radio DT64 195
Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt

12 August 1991 and the Memory of Communism in Russia 210

Rolf Fredheim

Part IV Recalling States of Life

13 Mourning in a ‘Sociotechnically’ Acceptable Manner:
A Facebook Case Study 229
David Myles and Florence Millerand

14 Remembering, Witnessing, Bringing Closure: Srebrenica

Burial Ceremonies on YouTube 244
Laura Huttunen

15 Remembering Zyzz: Distributed Memories on Distributed

Networks 261
Bjorn Nansen, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn
and James Meese

Index 281
Figures and Tables

Figures

3.1 Setting 1’s abbey flood level 2007. Official mark. Dated
22 July 2007 66
3.2 Unofficial flood marks of residents inside and outside
their homes and gardens 66
3.3 Screen capture from a home video July 2007: flood water
surges through the kitchen and living room of his house
in [Setting 1] 67
5.1 Three levels for analysing the effects of interventions
using a local memory website (De Kreek & Van Zoonen,
2013) 94
5.2 A screenshot of the homepage of ‘Noi, L’Aquila’ 97
5.3 Application of the framework proposed by De Kreek and
Van Zoonen (2013) to the analysis of ‘Noi, L’Aquila’ 104
9.1 The Australian Asbestos Network: website landing page
featuring Sylvia Lovenfosse, along with Robert
Vojakovic, AM, JP and Rose Marie Vojakovic, AM from
the Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia, www
.asbestosdiseases.org.au. 164
9.2 Example of Australian Asbestos Network story page: Ted
Grant 167
12.1 Number of texts that mention ‘GKChP’ or the ‘August
Putsch’ 218
12.2 Distribution of texts by topic and publication 219
12.3 Proportion of texts about the topic Communist Rule 221
12.4 Number of texts about Communist Rule, by dates
mentioned (1900–2013) 221
15.1 Screenshot of Zyzz RIP Facebook memorial page 271

Tables

5.1 Frequency distribution of the location of the posts

(N=278) on the map 100
12.1 Number of articles by publication 217
12.2 Ten most central terms in topics about history 220

ix
Foreword

Prospective – projective – progressive. This collection’s agenda turns

on its head what many people think about memory: retrospective –
nostalgic – regressive.
Both descriptions of memory are accurate, of course, and there are
many nuances to be found in-between. Backward-looking memory ver-
sus forward-looking memory, it seems to me, are options – for both
rememberers and scholars; options which will inescapably bear politi-
cal implications. For memory studies, ‘prospective memory’ as theorized
and investigated in this collection means a reorientation of the field’s
predominant focus of research. While it is certainly true that nostalgic,
backward-looking and little-productive memories are, unfortunately, all
over the place in memory culture, this volume shows that there are also
materials available which tell a different story of remembering, a story of
the production of forward-looking, socially progressive and sustainable
memories. The question of which story we tell implies (like it or not) also
a normative choice. In that sense, this collection contributes to memory
studies not only as an epistemological, but also as an ethical, project.
This collection deals with the complex temporalities of memory.
In Futures Past and other publications, Reinhart Koselleck addressed sim-
ilar complexities and proposed terms such as ‘former futures’, that is,
the futures that were envisioned in the past, the projections about what
has now turned into our present time; ‘present futures’, or the futures
that we construct today; but also, to complicate things a bit further,
‘future pasts’, which, bearing this collection’s concerns in mind, I would
describe as the specific pasts that we construct today, as we hope them
to be remembered in the future (and these include, too, our present as a
‘future past’) (see Koselleck, 2004; 2003, p. 248).
Mediation of memory is another key concern of this collection. The
authors combine their reconsideration of the future-oriented tempo-
ralities of remembering with the insight into memory’s fundamental
mediatedness (see also Erll, 2016), and more specifically, with the ques-
tion of how ‘new’ digital and connective media have engendered new
ways of thinking about time. Andrew Hoskins (2009, pp. 93f.) makes the
strong claim that we are dealing with a ‘new digital temporality of mem-
ory’ in which memory appears in a ‘continually emergent state’. While
Hoskins helps us understand how future memory is already implied in

x
 Foreword xi

new media technologies and ecologies, Richard Grusin (2010) shows

with his concept of ‘premediation’ how and why futures are mediated
in present societies. With ‘premediation’, Grusin describes tendencies of
American and global media after 9/11 to anticipate further threats by
means of incessant mediations of possible future wars and disasters.
What this volume, then, seems to suggest for further research is taking
a fresh look at the idea of ‘premediation’ in a mirror-inverted way, as it
were, and studying how not only disaster, but also better futures, can
be the target of premediation. As I am coming from literary studies,
let me introduce to this social science-based collection some examples
of historical and cultural imaginaries: Thomas Morus’ Utopia (1516), in
which a fictional utopian society is remembered and at the same time
constructed as an ideal for the future; the Star Trek series (1966 ff.), which
combines visions of a better, transplanetary future with frequent leaps
back into global history; but also the first drafts of the League of Nations,
made during the First World War, these were all imaginative investments
into the respective futures. They are ‘former futures’, as Koselleck would
have it. In varying degrees of fictionality and factuality, playfulness and
seriousness, these media products premediated better futures; they were
in their times acts of prospective, and progressive, cultural memory.
Such premediations characterize also our present time, as the individ-
ual chapters of this collection show with ample empirical evidence, and
they often emerge from vehement challenges to human sense-making,
such as emergencies, social struggle, death and displacement. Turning
our attention to present acts of prospective remembering, as well as
excavating the historical archive of mediated ‘former futures’, means
an important intervention of memory research into the ongoing discus-
sions about how we understand – and should critically analyse – the
various ways in which people understand time.

Astrid Erll
Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures,
Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main

References
Erll, A., 2016, forthcoming. Media and the transcultural dynamics of memory.
In Wagoner, B. ed., The Oxford Handbook of Memory and Culture. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Grusin, R. A., 2010. Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
xii Foreword

Hoskins, A., 2009. Digital network memory. In Erll, A. and Rigney, A. eds, Medi-
ation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin and New York:
de Gruyter, pp. 91–106.
Koselleck, R., 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. by
Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press. (Originally published as
Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1979.)
Koselleck, R., 2000. Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Acknowledgements

This volume originated from the Digital Memories Seminar hosted by

the Centre for Media and Culture Research at London South Bank
University in July 2012. We wish to thank the participants and guests
whose comments and ideas inspired us to think about the role mem-
ories play in linking the past, present and future in times when most
if not all walks of life seem to be mediated. We are especially grateful
for the constant support we received from Anna Reading who not only
promoted the seminar but also encouraged us to explore the dynam-
ics and tensions of employing memories in prospect and in retrospect.
We also wish to thank Philip Hammond, director of the Centre for Media
and Culture Research, and Katia Pizzi of the Centre for the Study of
Cultural Memory, which is part of the University of London’s Institute
of Modern Languages Research, for the generous funds that made this
seminar possible. Moreover, in November 2014 the Centre for the Study
of Cultural Memory hosted a second seminar, entitled Moving Memories.
Remembering and Reviving Conflict, Protest and Social Unrest in Connected
Times, which allowed us to continue the discussion and further develop
the ideas set out in this volume. Again we would like to thank all partici-
pants and guests as well as the staff at the Institute of Modern Languages
Research.
As this volume is a collaborative effort, we convey our thanks and
gratitude to the authors who kindly agreed to contribute to this project.
They followed us through the book’s many stages to address the dif-
ferent dimensions of mediated remembrance and reconstruction from
their own research and perspectives. We wish to thank the editors
of the Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies series, Andrew Hoskins
and John Sutton, for agreeing to add this volume to a great range of
publications shaping the discussion in memory studies and beyond.
We are also in debt to the anonymous reviewers for their detailed com-
ments and helpful remarks, and of course to the people at Palgrave
Macmillan, especially Felicity Plester who took up our germinating idea,
Chris Penfold who guided us through administrative matters and Sneha
Kamat Bhavnani who saw the book through production. Finally, we are
extremely grateful for the editing assistance we received from Charlotte
Fischer.

xiii
xiv Acknowledgements

Our academic departments and colleagues at Glasgow, London,

Munich, Bremen, Chemnitz and Berlin provided intellectual environ-
ments of critical debate and reliable support that were immensely
important in accomplishing this endeavour. Besides and above all, we
thank our friends and families for their love and help, which we will
always remember.

Andrea Hajek,
Christine Lohmeier
and
Christian Pentzold
Notes on Contributors

Ivan Darias Alfonso holds a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London

and a Masters from Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media
and Cultural Studies. His research focuses on Cuban émigrés in Western
Europe and constructions of identity. From 1994 to 2004, he worked in
Cuban media (print, broadcast and online) as a journalist and editor.
He is also an award-winning fiction writer and is currently working on
a book project on Media Representation and Cultural Memory in the
Cuban diaspora.

Michael Arnold is Senior Lecturer and Head of Discipline in the His-

tory and Philosophy of Science Programme in the School of Historical
and Philosophical Studies, at the University of Melbourne. His ongoing
teaching and research activities lie at the intersection of contempo-
rary technologies and our society and culture. His recent publications
include Online@AsiaPacific: Mobile, Social and Locative Media in the Asia–
Pacific (2013), ‘Selfies at funerals: Digital commemoration, presencing
and platform vernacular’, International Journal of Communication (in
press); and ‘#Funeral and Instagram: Death, social media, and platform
vernacular’, Information, Communication & Society.

Manuela Farinosi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of

Udine, Italy. Her academic interests include social and cultural aspects of
digital technologies, participatory media and sociology of disaster. She
teaches courses in sociology of communication, theories and techniques
of digital media and economic sociology. Among her most recent pub-
lications is ‘Challenging mainstream media, documenting real life and
sharing with the community: An analysis of the motivation for pro-
ducing citizen journalism in a post-disaster city’ (with Emiliano Treré),
Global Media and Communication (2014).

Sarah Florini is an assistant professor in the Department of Commu-

nication and Theatre Arts and in the Institute of Humanities at Old
Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. Her work focuses on the
intersection of technology and racial politics in US culture. Her recent
publications include ‘Tweets, tweeps, and signifyin’: Communication

xv
xvi Notes on Contributors

and cultural performance on “Black Twitter”’, Television and New Media

(2014) and ‘Recontextualizing the racial present by retelling the past:
Intertextuality and the politics of remembering online’, Critical Stud-
ies in Media Communication (2014). She is currently working on a book
manuscript titled Blackness. There’s an App for That: Racial Politics and
Black Digital Cultures.

Rolf Fredheim is a postdoctoral research fellow on the Conspiracy and

Democracy Project, hosted at the University of Cambridge. As a member
of the Memory at War Project, he analysed a large database of texts to
explore how symbols and historical events were mobilized in Russian
political rhetoric, and to pinpoint the hallmarks of Russian opposi-
tion discourse as manifested in news outlets. Research interests include
Russian politics, automated content analysis and modelling information
flow on social media. His most recent publication is ‘Filtering foreign
media: How Russian news agencies repurpose Western news reporting’,
Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (in press).

Joanne Garde-Hansen is Associate Professor of Culture, Media and

Communication at the University of Warwick. From 2009 to 2013, she
was Director of the Research Centre of Media, Memory and Commu-
nity (University of Gloucestershire, UK). She has co-edited Save As . . .
Digital Memories (Palgrave 2009) with Andrew Hoskins and Anna Read-
ing, authored Media and Memory (2011), co-edited Geography and Memory
(Palgrave 2012) with Owain Jones and co-authored Emotion Online: Theo-
rizing Affect on the Internet (Palgrave 2013) with Kristyn Gorton. She leads
the academic research on a number of community projects focused on
media, memory and local cultural heritage. She was co-investigator on
the ESRC Sustainable Flood Memories Project.

Martin Gibbs is an associate professor in the Department of Computing

and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. His research
covers a range of topics associated with the social use of digital tech-
nologies. He is currently chief investigator on the ARC-funded Digital
Commemorations project. His has written and continues to write about
digital memorials and computer games and has a specific interest in the
ways game designers and game players use games to commemorate and
memorialize the dead. He was the co-editor of From Social Butterfly to
Engaged Citizen, and he also co-edited the May 2013 special issue of The
Information Society, on the Death, Afterlife and Immortality of Bodies
and Data.
 Notes on Contributors xvii

Paige L. Gibson is a PhD student in Media and Communication at Tem-

ple University. She holds an MA in Communication from the University
of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests explore the intersection of
media technologies, identity and collective memory. Her latest publica-
tion, ‘Remediation and remembrance: “Dancing Auschwitz”, collective
memory and new media’, published in ESSACHESS, looks at Holo-
caust remembrance and German and Jewish identity construction on
YouTube.

Andrea Hajek is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University

of Glasgow. She is the Managing Editor for the Sage journal of Mem-
ory Studies, and she is a founding member of the Warwick Oral History
Network. Her research interests include memory studies, Italian social
movements, the 1968 protests in Europe, gender and women’s history,
oral history methodology and generation studies.

Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Research Professor in the Col-

lege of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow, UK. His research
connects multiple aspects of emergent digital society: media, memory,
conflict, security and privacy, to explore holistically the interplay of
contemporary media and memory ecologies. His latest book (with John
Tulloch) is Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism
(2016). He is founding Editor-in-Chief of the Sage journal of Memory
Studies and founding Co-Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series
Memory Studies. His AHRC Research Fellowship, ‘Memory and archival
regimes: War diaries before and after the connective turn’ interrogates
the intersecting and contesting roles of individual and organizational
memory of warfare through an original ethnography of Army Historical
Branch in Whitehall (the ‘keepers’ of the official operational record of
the British Army), http://archivesofwar.com.

Laura Huttunen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Univer-

sity of Tampere, Finland. Her research interests include transnational
anthropology and anthropology of migration, post-war Bosnian devel-
opment and Bosnia diaspora as well as multi-sited ethnography. She
has published in journals such as Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical
Anthropology, Journal of Refugee Studies and European Journal of Cultural
Studies.

Owain Jones is Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa

University. Previously he was Reader in Cultural Geography, Landscape
xviii Notes on Contributors

and Environment in the Countryside and Community Research Insti-

tute, UK. His research is in geographies of nature-society, landscape,
place and nature, memory and place, and geographies of childhood.
The UK’s ESRC, AHRC and the Rural Economy and Land Use Pro-
gramme have funded his research and he is published in many peer-
reviewed geography journals. He is currently principal investigator
of the Hydrocitizenship Project and was co-investigator on the ESRC
Sustainable Flood Memories Project.

Anne Kaun is Assistant Professor at the Department for Media and Com-
munication Studies at Södertörn University, Stockholm. Being interested
in the relationship between crisis and social critique, her current project
concerns historical forms of media participation that have emerged in
the context of large-scale economic crises. In 2013, she published Being a
Young Citizen in Estonia – An Exploration of Young People’s Civic and Media
Experiences. She has also published in peer-reviewed journals such as
New Media and Society; European Journal of Cultural Studies; Participation;
Communications – The European Journal of Communication Research; Infor-
mation, Communication and Society; and International Journal of Qualitative
Methods.

Emily Keightley is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences

at Loughborough University. Her research interests include the medi-
ation of memory, time and everyday life. As well as recent articles on
mediated mobility, memory and methodology, generational transmis-
sion and painful pasts, she has published the edited collection Time,
Media and Modernity (2012) and has co-authored The Mnemonic Imagina-
tion (2012) with Michael Pickering. Research Methods for Memory Studies,
co-edited with Michael Pickering, was published in 2013. She is assistant
editor of the journal Media, Culture and Society.

Tamara Kohn is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of

Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her cur-
rent research and teaching interests include the anthropology of the
body, senses and emotion, death studies, identity and personhood, and
methods and ethics in ethnographic practice. Her publications include
‘Crafting selves on death row’ (2012), in Davies and Park, eds, Emotion,
Identity and Death; and ‘Facebook and the Other: Administering to and
caring for the dead online’ (2012), with Nansen, Arnold and Gibbs, in
Hage and Eckersley, eds, Responsibility.
 Notes on Contributors xix

Mia Lindgren is Associate Professor and Head of the School of Media,

Film and Journalism at Monash University, Australia. She is co-author of
two books about broadcast; Australian Broadcast Journalism is now in its
third edition (2013) and Den Självkörda Radioboken (Liber, 2005). She
has been a chief investigator on three competitively funded research
projects examining journalistic approaches and storytelling in public
health and history. A former radio producer, she is also interested in
practice-led research. Her recent work has focused on the reinvention of
radio and changing forms of audio storytelling.

Christine Lohmeier is Professor of Communication and Media Studies

at the University of Bremen. Her research interests lie at the intersec-
tions of identity and belonging, media and communication, migration
and memory studies. She is the author of Cuban Americans and the
Miami Media (2014). She has also published in Media, Culture & Society,
M/C Journal and the International Journal of Media and Cultural Poli-
tics. Current research projects focus on the intertwined relationships
between memory objects, mediated memories and family histories and
the development of innovative qualitative methodologies.

Lindsey McEwen is Professor of Geography and Environmental Man-

agement at the University of the West of England. She was the principal
investigator (with research interests in flood histories and flood risk
management) on the ESRC Sustainable Flood Memories project. In this,
she works with Jones and Garde-Hansen as co-investigators to under-
stand the creative, mediated and archival methods used by communities
prone to environmental crises in order to share local knowledge and pro-
mote resilience. She is co-investigator on the AHRC Multi-story water
project (2012/13), which is exploring how flood narratives and situated
performance can be used to engage ‘hard-to-reach’ urban communities
around changing flood risk. She led the AHRC funding for a Living Flood
Histories project in 2010/2011 and has published widely in geography
and pedagogic journals.

James Meese is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne,

working on the Australian Research Council-funded project Digital
Commemoration, which investigates contemporary practices of digital
commemoration and their wider social and cultural implications. He has
also published work on copyright law, post-broadcast television, privacy
law, media regulation and sports media.
xx Notes on Contributors

Alessandra Micalizzi has a doctorate in Communication and New Tech-

nologies, and is a researcher at GPF where she is responsible for the
web division. She was a Postdoctoral Researcher at IULM University
and collaborates with the Department of Psychology at the Catholic
University of Sacred Heart in Milan. She teaches courses in commu-
nication at Afol Sud Milano and she is referent for the Department of
Studies and Research at CNOP (National Council of Psychologists). Her
primary area of research interest is the practice of sharing emotion in
online environments. Her recent work includes #Shameonline: Twitter
and the blushing practices in the Digital Age, presented at the Shame
and Writing Symposium at University of Warwick.

Florence Millerand is a professor in the Department of Public and

Social Communication at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
and chairholder of UQAM Research Chair on Digital Technologies Uses
and Changes in Communication. She is the co-director of the Lab-
oratory of Computer-Mediated Communication and member of the
Interuniversity Research Center on Science and Technology. Her aca-
demic interests include social and cultural aspects of communication
technologies, digital infrastructures and social studies of technology.
Her recent publications include ‘Web social: mutation de la commu-
nication’ (2010); ‘Towards information infrastructure studies: Ways of
knowing in a networked environment’ (with Bowker, Baker and Ribes),
in International Handbook of Internet Research (2010); and ‘Participatory
science: Encouraging public engagement in ONEM’ (with Heaton, Liu
and Crespel), International Journal of Science Education (2014).

David Myles is a PhD candidate at the Department of Communication,

Université du Québec à Montréal, and a member of the Interuniversity
Research Centre on Science and Technology (CIRST). He is a Social Sci-
ences and Humanities Research Council Fellow and holds the position
of Course Lecturer at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His aca-
demic interests include internet research methodology, cultural impacts
of social media use, citizen policing and the uses of information and
communication technologies in criminal investigations. His recent pub-
lications include ‘Enjeux éthiques de la recherche sur les forums Internet
portant sur l’utilisation des médicaments à des fins non médicales’
(Research ethics in the study of internet forums dedicated to the use
of diverted drugs) with C. Thoër and F. Millerand (2012) and ‘Se racon-
ter et conseiller les autres sur les forums en ligne: la construction d’une
identité d’expert en médicaments détournés’ (Advising others on online
 Notes on Contributors xxi

forums: Construction of expert identities in diverted drug use) with

C. Thoër, F. Millerand and V. Orange (2012).

Bjorn Nansen is Lecturer in Media and Communications at the

University of Melbourne, and a member of the Microsoft Research
Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces. He researches digital media and
communications technologies, computer interaction and network cul-
ture using a mix of ethnographic, participatory and digital methods of
research. His current research projects investigate young children’s use
of mobile media, domestic media environments, tangible and hybrid
interfaces, and the mediation of death and remembrance.

Christian Pentzold is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the

Institute for Media Research at Technische Universität Chemnitz and
an associate researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for
Internet & Society, Berlin. Currently, his projects look at convergent
multimodal discourse, internet-assisted cooperation, governance of digi-
tally networked environments, mediated memories and the exploitation
of entertainment programmes like television formats and social games.
Beyond that, he is interested in applying theories of practice to the study
of media and communication and in linking qualitative with quantita-
tive social science methods. His research has been published in journals
such as New Media & Society, Memory Studies as well as Media, Culture and
Society.

Gail Phillips is Emerita Associate Professor of Journalism at Murdoch

University. She spent 14 years working in commercial and public
sector radio at local and national levels before joining Murdoch Uni-
versity where she held a variety of leadership roles in teaching and
research. She is co-author of Australian Broadcast Journalism (2002, 2006,
2013) and is also co-author of Journalism Ethics at Work (2005). Major
research projects include the Reporting Diversity project funded by the
Australian government and the Australian Asbestos Network research
project funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Michael Pickering is Emeritus Professor in the Social Sciences Depart-

ment at Loughborough University. His most recent books include
Researching Communications (2007, with David Deacon, Peter Golding
and Graham Murdock); Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain (2008); Research
Methods for Cultural Studies (2008); Popular Culture, a four-volume edited
collection (2010); and with Emily Keightley, The Mnemonic Imagination
xxii Notes on Contributors

(2012). Rhythms of Labour: The History of Music at Work in Britain,

co-written with Marek Korczynski and Emma Robertson, appeared in
May 2013. It is accompanied by a double-CD box-set of music in the
workplace. A book co-edited with Emily Keightley, Research Methods for
Memory Studies, was also published in 2013. He is a member of the edi-
torial boards of Memory Studies, European Journal of Communication and
the Folk Music Journal.

Ruth M. Sanz Sabido is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communica-

tion at Canterbury Christ Church University (UK). Her research focuses
on memories of the Spanish Civil War, media discourse, anti-austerity
protests, conflict reporting and the Israeli -Palestinian conflict. She is
founder and Chair of the MeCCSA Social Movements Network and con-
venes the Canterbury Media Discourse Group. She is co-editor of the
book series ‘Protest, Media and Culture’.

Fredrik Stiernstedt is a lecturer at Jönköping University, Sweden. His

main fields of interest are media work and production, music and media,
radio and sound studies and the critical analysis of digital culture.
He has previously published in journals such as New Media & Society,
Participations, Journal of Radio and Audio Media and First Monday.

Chiaoning Su is Visiting Assistant Professor at Temple University, where

she received a doctorate degree in Media and Communication in 2015.
Her research focuses on disaster journalism, social memory, and media
globalization. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed jour-
nals such as Media, Culture & Society, Journal of Asian Communication and
Asian Cinema.
Introduction: Remembering and
Reviving in States of Flux
Christian Pentzold, Christine Lohmeier and Andrea Hajek

Reflexive remembering and reconstructing

‘We will remember’ is the exclamatory pledge given by those who are
moving on from troubled times. It is intoned, for example, in Laurence
Binyon’s Ode of Remembrance, which honours the British war dead of
World War I. In its Hebrew version it gives the name to Nizkor, a web-
based project that counters Holocaust denial. It is casted in plaques and
chiselled into memorials meant to last forever. Moreover, the solemn
promise never to forget collective experiences of trauma and pain in
times to come dictates many other forms and rituals of commemora-
tion. There, the words are uttered in order to bring together the past,
the present and the future, and thus to repeatedly connect the bygone
time that is to be recalled, the current time in which the pledge is
given and the forthcoming time when the promise will avowedly be
kept. The call and the assertion to remember are, therefore, not only
backwards-looking undertakings: rather, they carry the agents, objects
and circumstances of remembering along the temporal continuum
between yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Starting from this general observation, a growing body of scholarship
explores the hitherto largely unrecognized, future-oriented dimension
of memory in particular. Thus, it extends the definition of memory
as ‘the present past’ (Terdiman, 1993, p. 8), which echoes Maurice
Halbwachs’s (1992) classical insights into the constitution of the past
in terms of present worldviews and concerns. In broad terms, this
move involves examinations of the memory of the future, the future
of memory and the future of the study of memory alike (Crownshaw,
Kilby & Rowland, 2010; Gutman, Brown & Sodaro, 2010; Koselleck,
1988/2004; Vermeulen et al., 2012). In these endeavours, which connect

1
2 Introduction

the disciplines of memory studies, sociology, history, cultural analysis,

comparative literature as well as media and communication research,
a range of fields – like the formations of diasporic communities, fic-
tional imaginations, post-war efforts for education and reconciliation,
news discourses or biographical narratives – have been studied in terms
of the remembrance of the future or, respectively, for the future (e.g.,
Hirsch & Miller, 2011; Keightley & Pickering, 2012; Strong-Wilson et al.,
2013; Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013; Niemeyer, 2014). Finally, besides
humanities and social sciences the topic of future-oriented memories
has also been taken up by cognitive science and psychology with regard
to planned actions and intentions (cf. McDaniel & Einstein, 2007).
Considering both retrospective memories and the prospective employ-
ment of memories, this volume looks at troubled times that demand
resolution, recovery and restoration, with the chance to revise old and
reconstruct new ways of living. As such, it focuses on issues of trauma,
conflict and turmoil that thread through the burgeoning literature using
different yet related concepts of collective, personal, cultural, popular,
national or family memory (e.g., Alexander et al., 2004; Connerton,
1998; Erll & Nünning, 2008; Hodgkin & Radstone, 2003; Huyssen, 1995;
Lebow, Kansteiner & Fogu, 2006; Levy & Sznaider, 2006; Misztal, 2003;
Olick & Robbins, 1998; Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi & Levy, 2011; Radstone,
2000; Radstone & Hodgkin, 2003; Reading, 2003a, 2011; Roediger &
Wertsch, 2008; Rossington & Whitehead, 2007). Overall, the chap-
ters assembled here assume that experiences of private or public crisis
often allow for a projective use of memories, be they individual or
collective. Hence, contrary to the idea that such states of exception
eliminate memories, the volume examines the ways in which memories
in and of traumatic, conflictual or incisive events and experiences are
addressed through a productive employment of past ideas, relationships
or practices.
Seen together, the contributions show that times of trouble must not
only be experienced as cataclysmic breakdown, disaster and disintegra-
tion but that they also open up the chance, on the one hand, to redraft
and rework personal opinions, actions and the overall conduct of life
as well as, on the other hand, to revise communal and social identities,
interactions and institutions. Arguably, the possibility for such ‘produc-
tive remembering’, as Andreas Huyssen (2003, p. 27) put it, is set within
reflexive modernity. In this period, as Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck,
Scott Lash, Zygmunt Bauman and other social thinkers have argued,
situations of uncertainty and risk accruing to an increasing number of
public and private domains also provide opportunities for change and
 Introduction 3

progress, at least for those empowered to assess and assume the unfold-
ing challenges and chances (Bauman, 2000; Beck, 1992; Beck et al.,
1994; Giddens, 1990). Reflexive modernization, in consequence, comes
with many projects for reorganization and reform directed at its own
multifaceted conditions. Thus, many of the cases discussed in the vol-
ume revolve around social movements, initiatives for public advocacy
and self-reflective accounts that aim at remembering and reconstructing
public and private life. In mastering the complex societal requisitions
that assumedly mark the shift towards this second stage of modernity,
the studied individual and collective actors thus purposefully engage in
bringing memory forward (Rothberg, 2009). In doing so, they employ,
on the symbolic level, ideologies, discourses and narratives; on the
practical level, short-term tactics and long-term strategies; and, on the
relational level, personal bonds and communal ties to tackle challenges
to identity, collectivity, life choices and common welfare.
Viewed this way, the oppositional groups forming in the latter days
of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), for example, were actively
involved in advancing the system change and thus in bringing about
the first free parliamentary election in 1990 and, ultimately, the German
reunification. For one, they referred back to failed movements in parts
of the Eastern Bloc, notably the Prague Spring, the Hungarian Revo-
lution and the Uprising of 1953 in East Germany. Yet in their pro-
gressional struggle to transform the socio-political state in the then
present time these forums and leagues can also be understood as having
been concerned with observing and reflecting their own formation and
expansion as well as the unrolling events in which they were partici-
pating. As such, at least some of them gave attention to the appropriate
forms of the future remembrance of these struggles and their respective
accomplishments – how they will be remembered – by documenting the
unfolding processes in photographs, by drafting eyewitness accounts as
well as by collecting items and documents. Stemming from these efforts
as well as the material resources and cultural framings they established,
the peaceful revolution and its legacy are commemorated in a number of
intersecting and at times conflicting ways (cf. Saunders & Pinfold, 2013).
As such they marked, for example, the celebrations of the 25th anniver-
sary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which, in turn, sought to install novel
iconic visions like the ‘Border of Lights’ retracing the former course of
the Berlin Wall with illuminating balloons (see the cover image of this
volume).
Similar patterns of anticipated future remembrance can be observed,
for instance, within diasporic groups. In the case of the Cuban American
4 Introduction

community in Miami, public and private archives thus have been estab-
lished in order to enable the following generations and the wider public
to remember life in Cuba, the circumstances of departure of different
migrant groups and the arrival in the new country of residence. The
selection of certain objects and their presentation already frame the
ways in which historic events as well as personal circumstances will
be remembered. This is not to say that these (re-)presentations are not
debated and contested. However, recurrent themes and narratives lead
to a mythologized version of the past, which forms part of the collec-
tive identity of migrant groups and sub-groups and informs their future
plans and ambitions (cf. Lohmeier, 2014).

Mediating memory

In times when all walks of life are thought to be increasingly mediated,

such simultaneously backward- and forward-looking enterprises involve
a variety of media. Hence, to a considerable extent, the agency of those
engaged in productive remembrance rests with their ability to make
use of media as past ideas, actions and contacts become available and
transferable through time and space with the help of different types of
semiotic representations and communication technologies.
The worldwide Occupy movement, for example, has diversified into
several international and local branches with the help of web technolo-
gies like websites, email and chat as well as platforms like Facebook,
Twitter and Meetup. For one, these means of communication were
employed to organize the ongoing activities around the normally
ephemeral camps that spread across many local sites and loosely cou-
pled people. Moreover, the activists mobilized these tools, which were
already in use in the demonstrations of the Arab Spring and in the
Iberian anti-austerity Indignants Movement, to gather the symbolic
marks of their engagement so as to record what were often transient
happenings. Some also went on to promote the movement’s ambi-
tions through multimedia and art. Therefore, other than using media
as a means to contend in the present for a variety of due changes, the
Occupy protests strategically adopted imagery and slogans like ‘We are
the 99 per cent’, the #Occupy hashtag or the Guy Fawkes mask in
order to furnish future subversive actions with pertinent representa-
tions (Nielsen, 2013). As such, they were not only appropriated by other
movements but also collected and conserved by institutions like the
National Museum of American History and the New York Historical
Society (Flamini, 2011).
 Introduction 5

Of course, media have been employed to fix, share and store expres-
sions and impressions of individual and collective experiences since
the very beginnings of human culture. Rather fundamentally, collective
memories are thus, as Wertsch (2002, p. 25) has explained, mediated
in the sense that humans use voices and texts as means to express and
pass on their experiences and ideas. Moreover, from wall painting and
cuneiform tablets via manuscripts and prints to the rise of networked
electronic infrastructures and digital services and applications, media
innovations have facilitated the reassembly of the practices and mate-
rials of individual and collective remembrance and reconstruction (e.g.,
A. Assmann, 2011; J. Assmann, 2006; Edy, 2006; Erll & Rigney, 2009;
Ernst & Parikka, 2013; Garde-Hansen, 2011; Hoskins, 2003; Kansteiner,
2006; Neiger, Zandberg & Meyers, 2011; Sturken, 1997; Zelizer, 2000,
2010; Zelizer & Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2014).
While the entanglement of media and memory has altogether gained
considerable attention in memory studies, the volume considers the cur-
rent conditions of mediation or mediatization more broadly. Hence, the
notion of a ‘mediated world’ refers to the assumed centrality of media
in any of an increasing number of social life worlds. In this regard,
José van Dijck (2007, p. 16) explores media and memory’s twin rela-
tion in terms of the prefiguration of cultural memory through media.
She defines mediated memories as ‘the activities and objects we pro-
duce and appropriate by means of media technologies, for creating and
re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation
to others’ (2007, p. 21). Reflecting on mediation as a ‘process of shift-
ing interconnected individual, social and cultural dependency on media
maintenance, survival, and growth’ (2014, p. 661), Andrew Hoskins has
posed that the potentials for remembering and reconstructing are fun-
damentally changing in an ‘emergent sociotechnical flux’ (2014, p. 661)
that affects memory’s biological, social and cultural dimensions. Thus,
following the conceptual works of Sonia Livingstone (2009), Friedrich
Krotz (2009), Stig Hjarvard (2008) and others, we assume that due to the
cumulative volume and systemic societal impact of an almost perva-
sive media manifold, an increasing range of public and private forms
of remembering-cum-reviving is done in relation to media. As such,
the empirical analyses assembled here, which are set within a broad
range of localities ranging from Australia and Asia via Europe to North
America and Latin America, interrogate, to use a distinction made by
Nick Couldry (2012, p. 35), social life worlds where agents and activities
are directly oriented to media, where they involve media without hav-
ing media as their aim or where the possibility to act is conditioned
6 Introduction

by the presence and functionality of media (Lohmeier & Pentzold,

2014).
Although the majority of these mediated memories in states of flux are
set within digitally networked environments, and so-called social media
feature strongly in several of the chapters, all sorts of media can essen-
tially be termed social and have the potential to afford various forms of
memory-making and mnemonic practices. Yet these new types of con-
nective media have been met with the expectation to engage people in
memory matters in particular (Ashuri, 2011; Cohen & Rosenzweig, 2006;
Foot, Warnick & Schneider, 2005; Haskins, 2007; Hess, 2007; Pentzold,
2009; Reading, 2003b; Reading et al., 2009). A considerable portion
of recent studies that look into these forms of productive remember-
ing is especially concerned with mourning and grief, investigating for
example the interactions and rituals concerning the handling of online
profiles of deceased users and the engagement with their enduring
virtual presence. In sum, they show that these personal and collec-
tive losses can stimulate the formation of compassionate communities
beyond acts of mourning and personal acquaintance, providing new
sources of solidarity (Brubacker et al., 2013; Christensen & Gotved,
2014; Jones, 2004; Lingel, 2013; Marwick & Ellison, 2012).

Contributions

Exploring these ideas, the volume assembles contributions that empiri-

cally study the conscious, future-oriented remembrance of past events,
activities, relations or experiences that are employed to reconstruct
future ways of living and living together. As such, it moves beyond the
idea of mediated memories as enterprises that turn back time and bypass
critical occasions for personal development and social progress. Rather
than focusing on retrospective memories, the volume interrogates the
prospective employment of memory work in devising memory-wise prac-
tices and discourses so as to revive and reconstruct personal and public
life. In other words, the volume does not rest with investigating past
events and how these are mediated, but looks at four crucial arenas of
contemporary scholarship and current affairs regarding the active collec-
tive and individual processes of remembering and reconstructing linked
to situations of emergency, social struggle, displaced communities and
death, respectively.
Accordingly, the volume is organized along four parts that enquire
into four major states for remembering and reviving in troubled
times under the conditions of mediation. Along the social macro,
 Introduction 7

meso and micro scales, which are introduced by Michael Pickering

and Emily Keightley, the first main part, ‘Rejoining through States
of Emergency’, centres around the responses to grand scale natural
disasters. The second part, ‘Reforming States of Affairs’, investigates
transformations supported by social movements and activism. The third
part, ‘Recollecting States of Identity’, looks into types of community-
(re)building around ethnic, cultural or habitual commonalities and
boundaries. Finally, the fourth part, ‘Recalling States of Life’, is con-
cerned with matters of death and mourning. More specifically, in
order to explore this perspective thoroughly, the contributions con-
sider a wide range of conflicts, troubles and challenges, as these take
shape in the personal and the public spheres. Overall, the volume
examines changes in personal life courses as well as disruptions of pub-
lic life and simultaneously aims to acknowledge the interconnections
between them.
The two opening chapters address overarching themes of this anthol-
ogy from a theoretical and a methodological perspective. Andrew
Hoskins begins by characterizing memory in terms of the current media
ecology and then moves on to critically examine the possibilities of
recording and the attempt to archive ‘everything’. Hoskins concludes
by emphasizing the value and humanity of involuntary remembering –
both on an individual as well as on a collective level. Michael Pickering
and Emily Keightley then call for a more refined methodological base in
memory studies in order to complement the strong focus on theoretical
and conceptual work in this emergent field. Their contribution outlines
interscalarity as a useful principle for empiric research.
In the first part, ‘Rejoining through States of Emergency’, Joanne
Garde-Hansen, Lindsey McEwen and Owain Jones bring together geog-
raphy, memory studies and digital media studies as they unfold a
mixed-media approach to the 2007 UK floods, which they define as
a memo-techno-ecology of remembering and forgetting environmental
crises. In doing so they offer a critical reflection upon how individu-
als and communities use mediated memory practices to remain resilient
through remembering and forgetting. Chiaoning Su and Paige L. Gibson
follow up with their study of the 921 Earthquake and Typhoon Morakot
in Taiwan. Using narrative analysis and juxtaposing institutional and
vernacular remembrances, they examine the content and architectures
of two memorials, the 921 Internet Museum and the alternative journal-
ist platform 88news. Finally, Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi
consider the digitization of memories following the 2009 earthquake of
L’Aquila in Italy. Their focus of research is the local memory website,
8 Introduction

We, L’Aquila. By exploring the users’ narrative and practices, Farinosi

and Micalizzi analyse the way the website stores, processes and shares
community memories after a collective tragedy.
The second part musters papers that study activism for social change
and through which activities the agents involved in such movements
strategically make use of past struggles and their lessons. Sarah Florini
considers websites, memories and alternative histories in the con-
text of Black national politics in the US. Andrea Hajek takes a closer
look at contemporary feminist activism in Italy in her exploration of
the cultural memory of Italian feminism, drawing on theories of re-
mediation and travelling memories. Ruth M. Sanz Sabido analyses social
memories and struggles of the Spanish Revolution. The section closes
with Mia Lindgren and Gail Phillips’s study of journalistic forms of
prospective memory-making regarding the handling of asbestos and its
consequences in Australia.
The third part assembles research that looks at how communities that
have been lost or displaced due to a change of system try to recre-
ate established communities and (re)build novel communal bonds and
collective identities. Ivan Darias Alfonso begins by addressing the cul-
tural memory that connects Cuban migrants to their country of origin.
While Darias Alfonso focuses on blogs of migrants, Anne Kaun and
Fredrik Stiernstedt consider the Facebook fan site of Radio DT64 to
examine the rebuilding of a scattered audience community. Finally, Rolf
Fredheim uses a quantitative approach to consider the employment of
the Communist past in contemporary Russia.
Finally, the fourth part features contributions that examine how peo-
ple intentionally use social media in their efforts to mourn and create
memorials of people who have passed away. David Myles and Florence
Millerand investigate socio-technically acceptable forms of mourning in
a social network. Laura Huttunen focuses on burial ceremonies com-
memorating the massacre of Srebrenica on YouTube. Bjorn Nansen,
Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn and James Meese conclude
with an analysis of the dispersed memories of a deceased bodybuilding
icon on social media platforms.
In sum, the chapters gathered in this collection focus on diverse
locales and political, social, economic and environmental contexts.
They consider individual, communal, national and global media-related
approaches of coping with and making sense of things past while
accomplishing the present and projecting the future. Two common
threads run through all chapters: first, a shared interest in times of con-
flict, crisis, disaster and challenges; second, the contributions investigate
 Introduction 9

the projective use of past feelings, ideas, relations or strategies. By bring-

ing together empirically based scholarship, this volume aims to advance
knowledge and understanding of the moving relationship of memories
and media in troubled times.

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 Introduction 11

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12 Introduction

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Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
1
Archive Me! Media, Memory,
Uncertainty
Andrew Hoskins

Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel is a novella told through

the diary of a fugitive who escapes his native Venezuela to what he
believes is an uninhabited island. His hallucinatory account is key to
the story, with time and tides out of synch and a strange reoccurrence
and duplication of objects, people, animals and even two suns and two
moons. At the centre of the Fugitive’s disorienting existence is Faustine,
a woman he becomes more infatuated with as he watches her, although
she never appears to see him.
However, Faustine, like much of what the Fugitive sees, ‘lives’ only
as a multi-sensory projection from an elaborate machine. Its inventor,
Morel, had brought his close friends and Faustine to the island, where
he recorded their entire week together without their knowledge. Here
is Morel’s critical revelation to his friends: ‘My abuse consists of hav-
ing photographed you without your permission. Of course, it is not like
an ordinary photograph; this is my latest invention. We shall live in
this photograph forever. Imagine a stage on which our life during these
seven days is acted out, complete in every detail. We are the actors. All
our actions have been recorded’ (Bioy Casares,1964, p. 66).
Morel’s machine is powered by energy from the sun and the tides
and this replays the week on an endless loop. Thus the recorded circular
time of the projection, and the chronological real time of the Fugitive,
overlap. This accounts for the duplications and distortions that initially
seemed the product of his feverish state, exposed to the inhospitable
conditions of the island. We learn that Morel and his friends all died
in a ship that sank when they left the island, thus they live on only in
the recording. However, the Fugitive believes that Morel’s motivation
(including planning for their deaths) is his unrequited love for Faustine.
Morel would achieve immortality with Faustine and the others would

13
14 Memory in a Mediated World

have the same with their best friends, in exchange for the otherwise
uncertain duration of their lives. Yet, in the end, it is the Fugitive that
sees the same opportunity by learning to use Morel’s machine: ‘The real
advantage of my situation is that now death becomes the condition and
the pawn for my eternal contemplation of Faustine’ (Bioy Casares, 1964,
p. 100). The Fugitive follows carefully the moves of all of the characters
over the week and then places himself in the recording. The new version
now shows him and Faustine as being in love, and her life now forever
entwined with his in the eternal projection.
The pursuit of a kind of total memory here has a devastating cost, an
eternal entrapment in the life which has already been recorded – the
past before that is lost – and the future falls away. Furthermore, Morel’s
invention is premised upon a belief in the immortality and the incor-
ruptibility of the archive, yet it is corrupted and altered by the Fugitive,
who inserts himself into the recording.
This may all sound very familiar as an account of the misguided faith
in the archival promise of technologies of the present, and a blindness
to or disregard of the risks to privacy and identity in the exposure of
intimate lives in and through new media such as early 21st-Century
lifelogging and Facebook. However, Bioy Casares’ book was first pub-
lished in 1940. It is essentially an imaginary of the power of media to
seize and to hold and to control human remembering and forgetting.
It is useful as just one template to place over today’s digitally infused
world to ask: what is really new about emergent media and its shaping
of memory?
In this chapter I respond to this question by arguing that paradoxi-
cal states of permanence and obsolescence, of empowerment and loss
of control, and of stability and ephemerality define remembering and
forgetting in today’s media ecology. There is a vast literature specifically
on ‘media ecology’. And although a survey is beyond the parameters
of this chapter, I find Neil Postman’s definition useful as: ‘the matter
of how media of communication affect human perception, understand-
ing, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates
or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study
of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people’ (Post-
man, 1970, p. 161). And to draw on my ongoing work with William
Merrin: Media ecology is then the idea that media technologies can be
understood and studied like organic life-forms, as existing in a com-
plex set of interrelationships within a specific balanced environment.
Technological developments, it is argued, change all these interrelation-
ships, upsetting the existing balance and thus potentially impacting
 Andrew Hoskins 15

upon the entire ‘ecology’. So, at the time of the introduction of a new
medium there is always a period of adjustment, or settling down, or
appropriation of the established by the emergent. For example, many
commentators acclaimed a revolution in ‘citizen journalism’ as shaping
populist uprisings in the early years of this century. Now, however, what-
ever you want to call this phenomenon, it has largely been appropriated
by or incorporated into the mainstream, that is, it is ‘just journalism’
(Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2015).
But what is surprising about today’s digitally affected media ecology
is the short time in which the above paradoxes of memory have become
established and the rapidity of the advance of historical amnesia over
the nature and experience of the preceding media ecology (that which
William Merrin (2014) calls the ‘broadcast era’, particularly that of the
mid- to late 20th Century). This follows from the ‘connective turn’
(Hoskins, 2011), a heady cocktail of immediacy, volume and pervasive-
ness of the digital – driving an ontological shift in what memory is and
what memory does, giving remembering new scale and potential, yet
also ushering in new risks to active remembering and of a perpetual
haunting: a loss of control over forgetting. What I mean by this is that
what was once an active memory, a human memory that had to work
to sustain a continuity of past – of identity, of place, of relationships –
is fundamentally weakened with the shift from reliance to dependency
on the search devices of our machines.
However, the weakness of human memory has long been signalled
by attempts to bring it external aid. Growing technological externaliza-
tion through increased use of and reliance on media forms and devices
is seen to strengthen and enhance memory. Pick your discipline (psy-
chology, philosophy, sociology, cognitive science, media studies) and
the chances are that it sees media as augmenting, extending and pros-
thetizing human memory. Writing, printing and the electronic media
in successive phases have transformed human cognition and the capac-
ity, control and power to remember. Technological progression is said to
equate to an advancement of memory and its human mastery. Memory
as such is constantly renewed by the media and technologies (and the
metaphors) of the day – in this way it is always ‘new’ – as well as through
these same media reflexively shaping a reassessment of the very value
of remembering and forgetting under these conditions (Hoskins, 2001,
2004a, 2004b, 2009, 2010).
For instance, Bernard Stiegler (2010, p. 67) considers that: ‘Human
memory is originally exteriorized, which means it is technical from
the start.’ He distinguishes the stages of this process as beginning two
16 Memory in a Mediated World

million years ago, as a lithic (stone) tool as a ‘spontaneous memory sup-

port’ from the much later Paleolithic ‘conscious methods of memory
storage’, namely ‘mnemotechniques’, through to the digital devices of
today that are ‘ a full-fledged mnemotechnology, a technology that sys-
tematically orders memories’ (2010, p. 67). But with each transition,
with each greater medial embedding of human memory, there is also a
cost, a giving up of control over the propriety over one’s own memories.
(The ultimate cost of Morel’s invention is that the recording kills the
subject.)
Yet connectivity, or hyperconnectivity for some, signals the organic
and the technological – long seen in relation to one another (David
Channell, 1991) – finally in consort, and the mark of a post-human con-
dition. For example, Arthur Kroker (2014, p. 105) sees hyperconnectivity
as ‘not old school mechanical or even electronic connectivity in the
sense of point-to-point communication in a world suddenly stitched
together by ubiquitous mobility, but connectivity as something imma-
nently cellular, networked, biological, and metabolic’. Kroker writes of
the emergence of the ‘network ego’, a kind of cellular subject without
an earlier sense of individual privacy (of the prior media ecology). For
him (2014, p. 106) the loss of privacy is not merely some kind of trade
or exchange for the realization of the network ego, but when declared
by some new media executives as a public good, it is ‘one of the key
expressions of the new ethics of digital ideology’.
And it is precisely the rapid and wholesale relinquishing of privacy
that makes the 21st-Century memorial self so peculiarly vulnerable to
the ravages of post-scarcity culture. The remembering and forgetting of
self and society under digital conditions is today less a matter of rec-
ollection, and more one of search. At least greater reliance on human
recollection once offered a degree of certainty in its relatively steady
change, decline and dissipation, including with its embedding in the
delimiting finitude of the media of the day (‘decay time’, Hoskins, 2013).
In contrast, search is premised on a model of the pursuit of total mem-
ory, where the ease and the compulsion of connectivity, the recording
of everything and the entanglement of the network ego obfuscates the
precariousness of future access.
Today, the digital’s messing up of the decay time of media – and
our presence within it – ushers in a new set of risks and uncertain-
ties to communications and activities that were comparatively benign
in terms of the knowable limits of their reach and the ephemerality of
their record. To take a photograph and to be knowingly photographed
was once to understand not necessarily or fully the technical operations
 Andrew Hoskins 17

of the representation (film, developer, paper) but at least to be aware

of the finitude of the medium, its circulatory potential, its gatekeep-
ers, the potential and the limits of embarrassment, scandal or even ruin
that could arise from the photographic act. But today we live in an age
with a diminished media consciousness. One can become an expert in
computer code and algorithms and all that is computational, but that
is not the point. All of this knowledge would not offer an increased
security of memory, any greater certainty as to the limits or lifespan of
an image, or object, or account, nor the capacity to intervene or affect
such parameters or trajectories of media. This applies both to the know-
ing and/or willing (but not necessarily enlightened) media participation,
and also to the barely noticed and everyday random recordings but also
systematic surveillance, that will feed the future memory of today.
Indeed, uncertainty is heaped on memory through the perpetual
haunting of the network ego by the mediations of its former self. This is
part of the generalized state of ‘emergence’, namely the vastly increased
potential of the increasingly digitized present and past being available
to literally emerge without warning at some future point. For exam-
ple, Article 17 of the European proposal for a General Data Protection
Regulation in seeking a ‘right to be forgotten and to erasure’1 is symp-
tomatic of a belated political realization of a loss of control over the
hyperconnectivity that drives the everyday for so many.
Today’s ‘ethics of digital ideology’ then are also expressed in what
I call a sharing without sharing: the digitally fostered values of unbri-
dled commentary, so-called ‘open access’ and the embrace of network
narcissism that all perpetuate memory’s new uncertainties. This is evi-
dent in the nostalgia for forgotten earlier media ecologies that did not
require digital participation for the maintenance of self-identity and
basic sociality. For example, as Lev Grossman and Matt Vella (2014) sug-
gest: ‘One forgets how to be alone and undistracted. Ironically enough
experiences don’t feel fully real till you’ve used your phone to make
them virtual – tweeted them or tumbled them or Instagrammed them
or YouTubed them, and the world has congratulated you for doing so.’
And this compulsion of connectivity helps feed a new kind of archive of
self – a shadow archive – of one’s digital traces.
As the uploading and the downloading of self and society continue
to run amok, the flipside of the repeated warnings of a looming digi-
tal dark age are the risks in moving, as Geoffrey Bowker (2007, p. 26)
puts it, ‘from the era of recorded memory to one of potential mem-
ory’. Although preservation and remembering are not the same, the very
accumulation of digital content awaiting prospective emergence renders
18 Memory in a Mediated World

a generation perpetually spooked by an almighty dormant memory. The

likelihood of potentially transcendent missed, or hidden, or thought to
be deleted images, videos, emails and the like emerging to transform
what was known or thought to be known about a person, place or event
constitutes a spectacular uncertainty for the future evolution of memory
and of history. We need a new kind of sociology of haunting.

Entanglements

A useful means to consider the new digital relations of remembering

and forgetting is through the self’s entanglements with media. These
are not merely some latest extension of the co-constitutive nature of
human memory and its external tools and props but, rather, an entan-
glement of human and machine and human. Entanglement equates to
an invisibility of sorts, it is never truly outside the self, never wholly
represented and visible, and temporally it is about becoming rather than
being. To see memory as an emergent entanglement is to resist the tradi-
tional way of seeing memory as discrete entities or phenomena, or even
as memory’s favourite mistaken metaphor of ‘container’: the body, the
brain, the group, the cultural and so on. Rather, an ecological approach
is premised on memory as constituted through emergence, enfoldings
and interactions. Memory is thus made and lost through an ongoing
dynamic trajectory of hyperconnections rather than being merely resid-
ual (in brains, bodies, media) and also inevitably in decline. But it is the
massive growth in the number of devices and opportunities for digital
enfoldings that pushes the entanglements of memory into a new orbit.
Luciano Floridi (2013, p. 32–33), for example, identifies this shift partly
as ‘the reversal from entity’s primacy over interactions to interactions’
primacy over entities’.
Yet not all entanglements are equal, benign or visible. It is our
entanglements with the increasingly unknown and invisible – a dimin-
ished media consciousness – that places new uncertainties just below
the surface. For all the computational, big data, new ways of seeing,
the more we rely on and pursue connectivity, the more it slips from
our grasp. To be clear, the unnoticing of these entanglements should
not be mistaken for a functional symbiosis with computational tools.
The notions of extended cognition or the extended mind, for example,
are a fashionable extension of the history of media’s augmentation of
memory, as set out above. It is said that we lend our memories out
to our machines, our social networks, and they circuit or loop back
to the self, like continuous aides-memoire. And especially since the
 Andrew Hoskins 19

turn of this century, a slew of concepts envisage all that is new about
media as extending memory in some fashion: Alison Landsberg’s (2004)
‘prosthetic’ is the extensionist archetype. And some of the traditional
and popular categories of memory have been stretched to try to cap-
ture movement and the new mobilities of the age: the ‘transcultural’
(Crownshaw, 2011), ‘travelling’ (Erll, 2011) and the ‘multidirectional’
(Rothberg, 2009).
Unfortunately, the extensionist idea is exuberantly applied to the
digital. For example, ‘Don’t fear the Cybermind’ is the title of a com-
mentary by the psychologist Daniel M. Wegner (2012) in which he
claims that the internet is an extension of a ‘transactive memory sys-
tem’ in which we ‘can remember much more by knowing who else
might know what we don’t’, and the digital is just an extension of
this system. However, the lexicon of extensionality does not sufficiently
invoke the hyperconnectivity of the self in changing the very nature of
what memory is and what memory does. Digital hosts – devices, net-
works, databases – that routinely and inexorably displace the partner,
the family, the group as companions of transactive memory – for all
their pseudo-intimacies, have given memory away.
The tipping point from reliance to dependency on these devices and
networks – on hyperconnectivity – is here. For example, Floridi (2013,
p. 37–38) conceives of ‘a new threshold between history and a new age’
called ‘hyperhistory’. He argues: ‘human evolution may be visualised as
a three-stage rocket: in prehistory, there are no ICTs; in history, there
are ICTs, they record and transmit data, but human societies depend
mainly on other kinds of technologies concerning primary resources
and energy; in hyperhistory, there are ICTs, they record, transmit and,
above all, process data, increasingly autonomously, and human societies
become vitally dependent on them and on information as a funda-
mental resource’ (2013, p. 38, emphases in original). The processual
aspects of ICTs thus complicate the entanglements of individual and
machine in that the digital device cycles of development, decay, obso-
lescence and replenishment pull the individual into a new temporal and
informational dependency.
Today, the routinized accelerating obsolescence of our digital devices
hooks us to a structural dislocation of time that atrophies memory
(Crary, 2013). ‘Hooked’, that is, as the more we attempt to exercise
power over our proliferating connectivities, the more the machine
entwines itself around us. But, as I have suggested, to think of
the outsourcing of memory from the self to some kind of exter-
nal separate world and existence, does not capture the effects of
20 Memory in a Mediated World

these entanglements. The post-human world does not leave space for
such separations. Social and cultural frameworks of remembering have
dissolved and diffused inside the machine and inside us. This process is
similar to Scott Lash’s (2007) idea of the ‘vitalization of power’, where
the avalanche of data flows causes ‘immanence’, there is no space or
time ‘outside’ of the informational. And, as Adam Gopnik (2011) argues:
‘surely having something wrapped right around your mind is differ-
ent from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What
we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the
inverted self.’
The convergence of communication and archive is a primary entan-
gler of human memory and machine. And such entanglements are
revealed by efforts to manage or to escape them altogether. Today, the
pervasiveness of privacy settings across an array of social media signify a
standardization of vulnerability of exposure of the self and increasingly
entire personal biographies to the benign-sounding ‘friends of friends’.
But social media are nonetheless platforms for mostly contrived rather
than unadulterated versions of the self, as profiles and postings are made
already with a public audience in mind. Thus Lee Hoffman (founder and
CEO of the lifelogging app Memoir) says: ‘What you put on Facebook
is what you want the world to think of you. “I’m cool because I’m on
top of Mount Everest”. But you don’t post that you threw up two hours
before on your way up there, which is 90% of your life.’2
The promise of Archive Me is ultimately that of the self’s curato-
rial control. Digital nostalgia services such as Timehop3 return postings
from a range of social/micro media from a year ago with a ‘this day
in history’ reminder, a popular feature of an array of news and enter-
tainment programmes and sites, from the archive of the self. But there
is a fundamental difference between mixed media content of notable
public events remediated publicly on anniversaries in our banal main-
stream commemorative culture and media content created, posted and
‘shared’ by the self, even if these appear as intertwined in today’s media
ecology. For example, when Facebook in its ‘Year in Review’ feature
in December 2014 algorithmically selected a particularly well-engaged
photograph to frame for its users under the line: ‘Here’s what your
year looked like!’, it apologized after suddenly confronting some with
painful reminders such as pictures of recently deceased loved ones and
of other personal tragedies.4 And in March 2015, Facebook announced
a developed feature called ‘On This Day’5 to compete with Timehop and
similar apps.
 Andrew Hoskins 21

Yet, the faster and further the archival churn of this media, the greater
the risk of the past sitting uneasily in its new present. Postings made in
earlier configurations of, say, a 2007 Facebook, when comments were
made for an intended more limited and contained audience, may not
be appropriate for the hyperconnective 2015 version of the platform.
For instance, Dino Grandoni explains: ‘some Facebookers rediscovered
years-old conversations they had had between their old Walls and their
friends’ – walls which read like private conversations.6 The shadow
archive flattens chronological time, constantly remediating that which
was once under the control of functional human forgetfulness.
The media self is made through the very condition of being social,
requiring extensive archival entanglement. Although those in public life
have always been vulnerable to the mass exposure of their private and
personal lives – good or bad, unwitting or deliberate – today leaving
the multitude is not an option. It is easy to be reassured by those who
experiment by what they see as coming ‘off-line’ and reporting their
experience of abstinence. But any pronouncement of the greater value of
disconnection is false, for it is given in the wake of an almost inevitable
return to hyperconnective life. Thus, Jonathan Crary characterizes the
digital self as an ‘application’ of ‘various services and interconnections
that quickly become the dominant or exclusive ontological template of
one’s social reality’ (2013, p. 43).
Although the social media haunting of the future education, job
or relationship prospects of users has been documented (Mayer-
Schoenberger, 2009), it is precisely because of the growth of platforms in
the entangling of so many users that they have become victims of their
own success. In its earnings announcement at the end of 2013, Facebook
admitted that its numbers of daily users, especially amongst teenagers,
had decreased. It appears that social media has become just too sociable
for a generation that wants to live their digital lives in a more unin-
hibited fashion amongst their peers, without the constant monitoring
of the increasingly social media-savvy panopticon of parents, teachers
and various other elders. The exodus of the young is to messaging apps
such as Snapchat, MessageMe and Kakao Talk, with WhatsApp hav-
ing globally 350 million active monthly users.7 These at least offer a
much more direct and delimited mobile platform for real-time chat-
ting with individuals and groups of genuine friends (rather than the
vagaries of the accumulation of expansive ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ on
social media) as they are typically people who have shared their mobile
numbers.8 This trend appears as a significant attempt to escape the
22 Memory in a Mediated World

social or extrasocial entanglements of hyperconnectivity upon which

platforms such as Facebook rely.
However, the photo messaging app ‘Snapchat’ can be seen as a flawed
attempt to create a medium without memory. Users can send pho-
tographs, videos and other media as ‘snaps’ to another individual or
to a chosen group and determine the amount of time (between one and
ten seconds) the recipient(s) can view them. After the designated time
the snap is no longer viewable on the recipient’s device and will also
be deleted from Snapchat’s servers. Sexting – the sending and exchange
of sexually explicit messages – attracts a teenage user base to Snapchat,
as unlike virtually all other digital media it guarantees the decay time
of the content sent and thus offers a rare delimiting of an audience, a
secrecy of sorts, in an era that is defined by the virality of so-called social
media. Snapchat is also indicative of the compulsion of connectivity, of
the desire to be connected through a sharing without sharing, also an
example of the reciprocal or rather the obligatory nature of retweeting,
following, linking and liking required to establish and sustain digital
presence and value. But the compulsion of Snapchat is derived more
from the rush of the digital present as well as the prospects of trans-
gressing the usual tempers of the spreadable and viral potential of social
media on the uploading of intimate and explicit content. For example,
Dennis Phelps (a Snapchat investor) states: ‘The temporary nature of
the photo or video often creates a sense of excitement and an urgency
of consumption that is rare in this era of information overload.’9 This
characterization hints at the common equation of information over-
load with stasis, the incoming and outgoing volume of digital images
and other media content demanding strict regimes of personal archiv-
ing and deletion to avoid all being rendered equivalent. For instance,
Douglas Rushkoff (2013, p. 157) observes that: ‘in the short forever,
nothing recedes. Everything relative is now also relevant.’
Despite the overwhelming array of means through which communi-
cational archives such as social media can be classified, ordered, sorted,
tagged and searched, their inherent hyperconnectivity effects a deep
simultaneity. All that is vital and all that is redundant now seems to
have the same location, the same presence, the same screen: personal
priority and perspective are diminished in the shadow archive where
everything seems perpetually here and now. However, Snapchat’s pre-
eminent promise of accelerated decay time and ultimately permanent
deletion does not appear very robust. Richard Hickman, a computer
forensics examiner working for a firm that specializes in the recovery
of digital data for family law (according to their website, to ‘assist in
 Andrew Hoskins 23

uncovering the truth’10 ), found that the metadata of snaps remains and
that images sent via Snapchat are recoverable.11 Moreover, Snapchat’s
guarantor of a security of forgetting through a technological solution
was exposed as even more fragile when, in January 2014, the service
was hacked and usernames and phone numbers of 4.6 million Snapchat
accounts were downloaded and temporarily posted online.12
If abstinence or disconnection from the digital self as an ‘appli-
cation’ in Crary’s terms (above) are not workable options, are there
other imaginaries that can compete with Archive Me? A radical solu-
tion to contain the spreadability of data and to become invulnerable
to hacking is to attempt reversal, to remake and reinhabit an earlier
media ecology, immune from the risks of hyperconnectivity. To escape
hyperconnectivity requires the return to an ecology whose media offers
genealogical and representational certainty, whose literate paper trails
are traceable for the purposes of containment. And the returning to
an earlier media/memory age is not as far-fetched a solution as per-
haps it first sounds. Following the scandal of US whistle-blower Edward
Snowden’s revelations of US surveillance operations in 2013, Russia has
attempted to diminish exposure to digital uncertainties through return-
ing to the use of more discernible media of memory. Their Federal
Guard Service, who are charged with protecting the country’s highest-
ranking officials, ordered 20 Triumph Adler typewriters, according to
an Izvestiya newspaper report.13 The return to this technology rendered
mostly obsolete by the word processor highlights the unique voracity of
the processes of physical production that leave a discernible trail, rather
than the expansionist vagaries of the digital grey. The fluidity associ-
ated with digital content is leaky, spreadable and hackable, in ways not
possible with the artefactual (re)producible constraints of older media
forms. The digital, in giving up all reproductive resistance, gives way to
new uncertainties not manageable by even those whose business it is
to keep secrets. Nikolai Kovalev, a former head of the Russian Federal
Security Service, makes this point: ‘Any information can be taken from
computers. Of course there exists means of protection, but there is no
100% guarantee that they will work. So from the point of view of keep-
ing secrets, the most primitive method is preferred: a human hand with
a pen or a typewriter.’14
This example illuminates that the digital as a leap into the uncertain
does not provide a stable, secure or predictable basis for how the past is
made. This is a matter of a loss of control: a giving away of the propri-
ety of memory to the unknowable workings and vulnerabilities of the
network. The problem with grey media is that there does not appear to
24 Memory in a Mediated World

be a way of wresting control back. A return to old media is one strat-

egy: a reinvention or reimposition of the spatially bound archive of the
Russian Federal Guard Service offers a digital-free cocoon but one that
is hardly scalable. It remains vulnerable to its enveloping in the grey
cyber fog of hyperconnectivity. And the Russian move to old media is
somewhat after-the-fact. The revelations of Wikileaks15 and the 2013
US surveillance scandal reveal that the digital has already entrapped the
past and made it vulnerable to a new hactivist scale of big data. Surely,
the whole development of the culture of hacking is indicative of new
individual and mass vulnerabilities. This is in contrast to a healthier
and more stable vulnerability of traditional medial decline and decay,
within which time the relative generational stability of memory was
both defined and maintained.

Total memory

Today the digital drives the archive inwards as well as out as post-
scarcity culture is increasingly being translated into the post-scarcity
self. Immersion in digital ambience and routinized hyperconnectivity
obscures exposure to the risk of being forever networked. Growing famil-
iarity with and apparent command over digital technologies makes
them seem an increasingly benign means of communicating-in-the-
world. Hence the surprise and shock at the revelations in June 2013 of
‘Prism’, the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) computer surveillance
programme alleged to access the contents of emails and live chat held by
the world’s major internet companies including Google, Facebook and
Skype.
The latest turn in the shadow archive of affective media is the
encroachment of wearable tech and the march of the ‘quantified self
movement’. The cheapness, portability and pervasiveness of digital
devices have increased so-called self-tracking and fast-developing tech-
nologies for data acquisition of daily life. This has added significantly to
the weight of emergence that hangs over the future, which is also shap-
ing new indiscriminate forms of memory. The random, accidental and
deliberate documenting of the banal through to the recording of the
most significant of events, seem equally vulnerable. Throw in Google
Glass and Street View, the encroachment of CCTV, Microsoft’s SenseCam
and an array of other lifelogging devices, and one may conclude that
this is the end of uncensored life, the end of uncensored memory. How-
ever, much of the discourse on total memory focuses on the perceived
advantages of a comprehensive digital memory record. The work of
 Andrew Hoskins 25

Gordon Bell has been influential to this idea: ‘Now I don’t think of it
as a back-up to my memory . . . it is my true memory. So, my computer
is my e-memory, my biomemory is just a URL to the e-memory. So my
true memory is here’ (lifts up laptop).16
Following on from the initial researcher exclusivity of Microsoft’s
‘SenseCam’, suddenly lifelogging devices are affordable and wearable
for the consumer market. So pre-emptive data acquisition, a new data
fetish, is no longer the exclusive domain of the technologists such as
Bell. For example, ‘Narrative’ is one of the latest lifelogging devices and
as a media form is easily forgettable, attached to the wearer with its tiny
36x36x9mm dimensions, promoted as ‘easy and effortless’. Through
its associated app, Narrative promises not only photographic mem-
ory (retrieval) but organization and search: ‘Relive your life like you
remember it’ is the promise of Narrative’s digital memory. Its website
explains:

The Narrative camera is a tiny camera and GPS that you clip on and
wear. It’s an entirely new kind of digital camera with no controls.
Instead, it automatically takes photos as you go. The Narrative app
then seamlessly and effortlessly organizes them for you . . . The cam-
era and the app work together to give you pictures of every single
moment of your life, complete with information on when you took
it and where you were. This means that you can revisit any moment
of your past.17

So the people from Narrative claim that it is useful because it captures

the moments that users didn’t realize were moments until afterwards.
Its website offers testimonies from those having tried the prototype.
For example, ‘Marcus’ (aged 27) says: ‘If I had the opportunity to relive
a moment, I would like to see when my parents were young, specifi-
cally a situation I’ve heard about not playing out the way they’ve told
me . . . .’ Imagination involved in human memory from this perspective
is no longer deemed a sufficient or even a vital part of the process for
remembering; instead, memory requires some kind of entanglement
with image or video for it to remain. And this compulsion to record
has extended from the public, from the nodal, into the personal and
the everyday. But the logic is perverse as the memory of many moments
deemed ‘special’ are made so precisely because they are misremembered,
embellished, altered and transformed through their retellings.
But it is not only the missed special moments that Narrative promises
to secure for future remembering, it is also the prospects of providing a
26 Memory in a Mediated World

whole new viewpoint that drives its appeal. For example, another pro-
totype user, Elias (aged 26), explains: ‘I think the camera would capture
things from a different perspective and that it wouldn’t be as much of
a re-experience as a completely new one.’ And it is these ideas, that we
can or should be able to manipulate or secure the past to fill in all of the
details of a memory only available through the living memory of others,
or to compensate for our own naturally fallible and imperfect memory, is
becoming ever more influential in feeding the pursuit of total memory.
But it is the profound uncertainties of decay time and the acceleration of
technological consumption and desire that is the real basis for an emer-
gent fetishization of total memory. It is not the recording devices that
transform the potential memory of the post-scarcity self, rather it is the
computers and networks the device connects to and the uses that this
enables such memories to be put to that makes the difference.
The fetish of the quantified self movement is not just a matter of
a single technology or form such as the lifelogger. Rather, there is an
emergent trend towards not just pre-emptive data acquisition, but pre-
emptive data aggregation – that is, an imagining of how the multiple
components of the quantified self can be connected and re-folded into
the present, to enable the present to be more attuned to the past in
order to maximize its management. The capacity to retrieve, display
and aggregate data from multiple sources of social media (Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter) postings and updates, and from an array of life-
tracking and journaling apps, is a complete game-changer in the haste
to archive the self even in the context of recent debates as to the nature
of and prospects for digital memories. The difference is in the quanti-
fied self’s mimicking of how human memory works rather than merely
supplementing or augmenting it.
Key to this transformation is the idea of ‘schema’ in human remem-
bering and as a key aspect of the organization of experience. Schema is
a kind of framework and standard, which the unit of memory (mind,
group, society, etc.) forms from past experiences and by which new
experiences are expected, measured and also reflexively shaped. The
term is associated with Frederic Bartlett,18 writing over three-quarters of
a century ago, whose work had a significant influence on the psychology
of memory.19 Bartlett drew on the work of the neurologist Henry Head
(1920) and claimed that the key process of remembering involves the
introduction of the past into the present to produce a ‘reactivated’ site
of consciousness: ‘Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable
fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction,
or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole
 Andrew Hoskins 27

active mass of organised past reactions or experience’ (1932, p. 213). Past

representations are not then to be treated as stored objects, but rather as
patterns which are repeated and reconstituted anew in the flux of neu-
ral firing. Schemata could then be understood as emergent topographic
patterns of neural connectivity that are subject to plastic redistribu-
tion over time, or as Bartlett (1932, p. 208) states: schemata are ‘not
merely something that works the organism, but something with which
the organism can work’. Bartlett developed this work as what he called
‘cultural conventionalisation’, how cultural resources are employed to
modify or transform what is strange so that it may be accommodated
within an existing framework (Brown & Hoskins, 2010). To achieve
conventionalization persons must share schemata, which are at once
personal, since they are the means of organizing experience, and collec-
tive, since they are embedded in cultural settings and materials (Brown
& Hoskins, 2010). It is not a question of the past itself as an entity as
such, but ‘our attitude towards’ it and our ‘organisation’ of past expe-
riences. Similarly, as Paul Connerton (1989, p. 6) puts it: ‘in all modes
of experience we always base our particular experiences on a prior con-
text in order to ensure that they are intelligible at all; that prior to any
single experience, our mind is already predisposed with a framework
of outlines . . . The world of the percipient, defined in terms of temporal
experience, is an organised body of expectations based on recollection.’
The effectiveness of memory is thus determined by the repertoire of
schema available to the individual. Recognition and understanding of
events unfolding in the present is made through a prism of what has
gone before.
Yet digital technologies, despite often being noted for their flexibil-
ity and instability, their capacity of ‘plastic’ redistribution mimicking
neural connectivity, interfere with or threaten the working of schema.
In fact the aggregation of life-tracking and journaling apps signals
the mediatization of schema.20 The mobile app Memoir, for example,
promises precisely this in its promotional line: ‘Your memories surfaced
at the right moments.’21 And there seems little of memory that can-
not be recorded, processed and translated into mediatized schema. Seth
Fiegerman, blogging on ‘Memory Machines’, hints at this spectrum of
uses available through Memoir: ‘When you walk into a restaurant, the
app might pull up a previous entry reminding you of the last time
you were there. If you search for a friend within the app, it will dis-
play all the pictures he or she took when you were in the same place at
the same time based on the metadata, regardless of whether you were
tagged. While ringing in the New Year, you might get a push notification
28 Memory in a Mediated World

reminding you of how you celebrated one, two or three years earlier.’22
This kind of intervention threatens the fine balance of what David
Middleton and Steven D. Brown (2005, p. 189) call an ‘organised set-
ting’, which they define as ‘a complex of cognition and emotion that
is located within, and dependent on, the cultural and material partic-
ularities of the local environment’. This dependency is unsettled and
skewed by the immediacy and archival power of the schema instantly
on tap from the increasingly accessible mobile app. Put differently, the
complex of cognition and emotion of sorts is digitally hijacked, rather
than remembering being as seen by Middleton and Brown (2005) as
negotiated through a ‘situated activity’.
The rapidly spreading so-called ‘smart’ mobile devices that enable the
capture and the refolding of digital data into later times and contexts are
increasingly sophisticated in the types of data that can be captured and
in their automation. The quantified self includes the data acquisition of
physiological states (temperature, blood oxygen level, sweat rates, etc.)
gathered from body sensors, and this kind of self-monitoring is often
aimed at aiding health and well-being. But in addition to environmen-
tal sensors and geolocation trackers, it is the aggregation of multiple
types of data that provides an increasingly sophisticated and compre-
hensive version of an individual’s life trajectory. Whereas lifelogging is
the process of this recording, computing scientists have begun refer-
ring to the outcome as ‘human digital memory’ (HDM) which is the
combination of an array of data and content types; for example, the
‘DigMem’ system gathers various data from smart, connected appli-
ances (Dobbins et al., 2013). Yet this pervasive and mobile computing
work is driving a broader set of discourses – including those incorpo-
rated by a new wave of companies promoting consumer lifelogging
devices and apps – that naturalize a synergy between the digital and
the human and its memorial ends. It seems that the very spontane-
ity and unpredictability of human remembering – including the use
of schema – are seen as vulnerabilities for exploitation in the pursuit
of total memory. Thus as Dobbins and colleagues (2013, p. 8) suggest:
‘Memories are often impulsive events and are better suited to being
captured and shared on a portable device.’ But rather than degrading
spontaneity, human digital memory is seen as ‘dynamic and data rich’
(2013, p. 8) through its capacity to aggregate data from such an array of
devices.
But what precisely is the value that is attached to claims as to the
‘richness’ of human digital memory? It seems that HDM is attempt-
ing to capture and to reproduce aspects of situated activity in an
 Andrew Hoskins 29

organized setting in Middleton and Brown’s terms (above). In an inter-

view, Dobbins hints at this: ‘In the future you could simply ask, “When
have I been happy?” And the system would return all the information
associated with that emotion.’23
But the mediatization of schema, and more broadly the pursuit
of total memory, appears to discount the potential value of ‘invol-
untary memory’. The differentiation of individual remembering was
famously developed by Marcel Proust between ‘mémoire volontaire’
and ‘mémoire involontaire’ – ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ memory.
Voluntary memory is that usually understood to involve purposeful,
conscious reflection, a kind of deliberate pondering about what has
gone before. Involuntary memory, however, is that which intervenes
suddenly and without warning into the presentness of our conscious-
ness. Esther Salaman (1970), for example, defines this as ‘another kind
of memory of experience, which comes unexpectedly, suddenly, and
brings back a past moment accompanied by strong emotions, so that
a “then” becomes a “now”’. The latter bears no trace of the past which
it reveals – the circumstances under which we experience this kind of
individual involuntary memory are wholly different from those of the
original experience. Furthermore, these different types of remembering
are qualitatively different. And the frequently cited Proustian line is:

Voluntary memory, which is above all the intelligence end of the

eyes gives us only the surface of the past without the truth; but
when an odour, a taste, rediscovered under entirely different circum-
stances evoke for us, in spite of ourselves, the past, we sense how
different is this past from the one we thought we remembered and
which our voluntary memory was painting like a bad painter using
false colours . . . [He] will suddenly rediscover forgotten years, gardens,
people in the taste of a sip of tea in which he found a piece of
madeleine . . . because they are involuntary, because they take shape of
their own accord, inspired by the resemblance to an identical minute,
they alone have a stamp of authenticity . . . as they make us savour
the same situation under wholly different circumstances, they free
from all context, they give us the extra-temporal essence.24

Human digital memory then, in its sucking up and retention of

situated activity, is prohibitive of involuntary remembering and its
associated spontaneity and apparent authenticity. The digital manage-
ment systems of memory bury the potential shock of the old – Proust’s
‘extra-temporal essence’ – through the mediatization of schema. The
30 Memory in a Mediated World

consequence is a remembering that is already narcotized with the weight

of one’s past’s highs and lows pre-empting any prospect of surprise. And
I now turn to further address total memory’s devaluing of the perceived
imperfections of human remembering and the new risks of lives lived
and pre-empted through data.

No exit?

A key misnomer of HDM is that it affords a greater control over remem-

bering and that this is inherently a good thing. Rather, it is a mistake to
conflate the dynamics and richness of data with the dynamics and rich-
ness of human remembering or to imagine that the former (data) could
or should ‘fix’ the latter (human). HDM rides roughshod over the active
nature of human remembering and does not acknowledge its value. Paul
Connerton, for example, argues: ‘Information technology, by projecting
‘memory’ outside persons, divests personal memory of many of its for-
mer assimilative roles; by directing the attention of those addicted to its
immense capacities of storage and material, and to a rapid succession
of micro-events, it generates a culturally induced mental habit which
makes it increasingly difficult to envision even the short-term past as
“real”’ (2009, p. 144). Real life is messy, full of the conflicts, contra-
dictions and contestations that arise through the fallibilities of human
memory, but quantified-self advocates do not appear to recognize much
value in this messiness.
Instead, the search for total memory treats the digital as though it
were merely another stage in the history of media’s augmentation of
human memory, without either acknowledging the value of memory’s
former imperfections which it seeks to smooth over, nor seeing the dam-
age that its smoothing has on our formerly clearly defined present and
past. Jannis Kallinikos explains:

. . . such a reliance on the algorithmic potency of the machine trans-

forms the active memory of the past and its distinctions to an
undifferentiated mélange that loses much of its grasp upon the
present. The orientation and meaningfulness which memory confers
to life are thus becoming attenuated and a continuously expand-
ing present, ambiguous and without clear boundaries, imperceptibly
installs itself at the heart of daily living. (2010)

This is not a new synergy of media and mind and memory, but rather
memory hostaged to the constantly shifting digital platform (apps, files,
 Andrew Hoskins 31

accounts) through which the link to either the human mind or the
organized setting as active, core and driving agents of memory are
made increasingly tenuous. This is part of what Kallinikos (2010) calls
‘living without lives’. By hostaged I mean the envisioning of total mem-
ory as indicative of a shift, partly through digital media, and partly
through the explicit selling (and the fetishization) of the quantified self,
from reliance to dependency on ICTs (see Floridi, above) for what were
once seen as already functional (enough) aspects of human life such
as memory. But human digital memory platforms such as the DigMem
system can be imagined and designed because of the already perva-
sive devices through which peer-to-peer (P2P) networks can be created.
The routinized collection and combination of data of the quantified
self builds on and links with an established array of social media and
P2P messaging and archiving services. It is these that forge a web of
hyperconnectivity that has not only entrapped participants in a digi-
tal present, but which prevents the future from becoming through any
(human) means outside of this media ecology.
The technological management of the self has become an end in
itself as we live increasingly aggregated lives by virtue of the irresistible
entanglements of humans and data. As suggested above, Crary (2013,
p. 43) sees the individual as an application in itself of these systems of
control. This is a social reality that is contrived as not only something
worth striving for – like the state of total memory – but as something
that is irresistibly and inexorably part of what it is to be hyperconnected.
Equally, all that cannot be brought under the purview of digital man-
agement is devalued and marginalized for fear of not keeping up. And
through such pursuits of infallible or total memory, it is forgetting that
is devalued and marginalized. This is not based on a radical new perspec-
tive, but rather feeds off of: ‘a commonly held view that remembering
and commemoration is usually a virtue and that forgetting is necessarily
a failing’ (Connerton, 2008, p. 59). But trends in the quantified self, and
in wearable tech such as lifelogging, rather than delivering a panacea
of aids to remembering, instead actually corrupt both remembering
and forgetting through undermining the messy but vital functions of
human-scale memory.
The misguidedness of the current technological embrace for all our
memorial ends is part of a trend that Evgeny Morozov (2013, p. 280)
calls ‘solutionism’: ‘Solutionism will not relieve us of the messiness of
decision making for one simple reason: technology cannot provide an
easy answer to morally intractable dilemmas about what we ought to
remember and what we ought to forget.’ Put differently, the archiving
32 Memory in a Mediated World

of the self heralds a state of the smothering of these very dilemmas, as

Terje Rasmussen (2010, p. 109) argues: ‘Compared to contemporary and
all-encompassing digital media, former normative criteria for remem-
bering and forgetting seem to have eroded.’ The mediality of memory
circumvents such concerns: we are already too embedded in its web.
There is a kind of radical ambiguity to this state of affairs: the more we
attempt to make memory manageable, controllable and complete, the
more the shadow archive comes to exert control over us. There does not
appear to be an exit strategy but only an ever-greater investment and
trust in solutionism, in Morozov’s terms (above).
The more complex the systems for capturing, storing, retrieving and
sharing data, and the greater our entanglements in them, the more
precipitous the memory of the self becomes. Lifelogging is made from
and through media and technologies eminently hackable, copyable and
spreadable, as well as prone to deletion, corruption and incompatibil-
ity with inevitable updates and upgrades, which all together render a
much less predictable basis for a future of memory. For instance, it is
not until the last few lines of Dobbins and colleagues’ article on the
creation of human digital memories through pervasive mobile devices
that the authors reflect: ‘If devices are stolen, and false memories cre-
ated, then this affects the user’s entire HDM store’ (2013, p. 36). The
pursuit of total memory and self-tracking, as further entanglements of
the digital self, constitute a very insecure basis for attaining any kind
of guarantor of one’s past. At least with social media, the vagaries of
hyperconnectivity and the accidents of emergence are of postings and
profiles that are already filtered and created with a public audience in
mind, albeit, as we have seen in some cases, a less public one than
originally envisaged.
However, life-tracking and life-journalling digitally entangle a kind
of pre-conscious self, a sprawling auto/biography that is yet – or even
may never – be fully realized by the individual. Again, as I have argued,
this development should not be read as a greater synergy of digital
and human. Rather, it is not an exaggeration when Hoffman (CEO of
Memoir) describes the tracking of the ‘in-between’ (the intended for
a public’s consumption, i.e. Facebook) tracked moments, as ‘literally
memory replacement’. This is a ‘living without lives’ (Kallinikos, above),
but it also affords a potential remembering without memory. To Archive
Me in this way is not the media extension or distribution of memory
from the human across social and cultural settings, rather it is mem-
ory’s alienation from the self, and the unmaking of a society without
memory.
 Andrew Hoskins 33

Notes
1. See Pereira, A., Ghezzi, Â. and Vesnić-Alujević, L. (eds) (2014).
2. Seth Fiegerman, ‘Memory machines: The quest for a better digital record
of our lives’, http://mashable.com/2014/01/07/memory-apps/ (accessed
10 January 2014).
3. http://timehop.com
4. Eric Meyer, ‘Inadvertent algorithmic cruelty’, http://meyerweb.com/eric/
thoughts/2014/12/24/inadvertent-algorithmic-cruelty/ (accessed 12 January
2015).
5. http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/03/introducing-on-this-day-a-new-way-
to-look-back-at-photos-and-memories-on-facebook/ (accessed 13 April 2015).
6. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/31/facebook-on-this-day_n_36830
35.html; (both accessed 13 April 2015). see also: http://www.huffingtonpost
.com/2012/09/24/facebook-bug-private-messages-timeline_n_1909813.html
(both accessed 13 April 2015).
7. Parmy Olson, ‘Teenagers say goodbye to Facebook and hello to messen-
ger apps’, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/10/teenagers-
messenger-apps-facebook-exodus (accessed 13 December 2013).
8. Ibid.
9. Dennis Phelps cited in ‘Snapchat: The self-destructing message app that’s
become a phenomenon’, Guardian ShortcutsBlog, http://www.theguardian
.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/jun/26/snapchat-self-destructing-message
-app-phenomenon (accessed 17 September 2013).
10. http://decipherforensics.com/index.php/blog-landing-page/56-snapchat
(accessed 2 January 2014).
11. ‘Snapchat’s expired snaps are not deleted, just hidden’, http://www.the
guardian.com/media-network/partner-zone-infosecurity/snapchat-photos
-not-deleted-hidden (accessed 3 January 2014).
12. ‘Snapchat hack affects 4.6 million users’, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
technology-25572661 (accessed 2 January 2014).
13. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/russia-reverts-paper-nsa-leaks
(accessed 15 July 2013).
14. Ibid.
15. Wikileaks is an organization devoted to disclosure via online publication
and archiving of confidential, secret and classified information, sourced
anonymously.
16. Gordon Bell speaking on Newsnight, BBC2, broadcast 1 November 2013.
17. http://memoto.com (accessed 23 April 2013).
18. The resonance of work of Bartlett is indicated by the re-issuing of his classic
text Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, 63 years after
its original publication.
19. According to Neisser (1978/2000), debates over the nature and use of
‘schemata’ in psychology were revived in the 1970s after many years of being
largely ignored.
20. By ‘mediatization’ I mean the process of shifting interconnected individ-
ual, social and cultural dependency on media, for maintenance, survival and
growth (Hoskins 2014: 662, cf. Hoskins and Tulloch 2016) and here ‘schema’
being brought under the influence of media logics.
34 Memory in a Mediated World

21. http://www.yourmemoir.com (accessed 10 December 2013).

22. Fiegerman, ‘Memory machines.’
23. Chris Baraniuk (2013) ‘Take it easy: Make the fridge track all your snacking’,
New Scientist, 11 January 2014, p. 21.
24. See Marcel Proust, letter to Antoine Bibesco (1912) in Letters of Marcel Proust
(1950) (Translated and edited by Mina Curtiss), London: Chatto & Windus,
p. 189.

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2
Memory, Media and
Methodological Footings
Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley

Introduction

In this chapter we focus on the question of methodological procedure

in the investigation of personal and public memory and the manifold
relations between them. We do so because issues and concerns relating
to methodology have been largely neglected in memory studies.1 There
are various reasons for this neglect, but among them is the perceived
need for an emergent field first and foremost to establish its theoret-
ical credentials and develop its key conceptual tools. We agree that
this is an important task, and over the years we have read with inter-
est, and contributed to, the theoretical discussion and debate that has
taken place over the relative merits of terms defining particular dimen-
sions of memory as well as the alleged consequences for memory, in its
different dimensions, of such developments as the commodification of
memory artefacts or the globalized production and distribution of cul-
tural goods and services.2 Such debate has proved useful in helping the
field to come together and in refining our understanding of what is at
stake in changing aspects of public remembering, but at some point we
have to face the problem that without being empirically grounded in
some way, any area of debate remains speculative, its claims not given
any concerted demonstration, its assertions made without substantive
evidential backing. At some point in any research project conceptual
tools have to be applied, theories tested and challenged. It is precisely
at this point that the neglect of methodological issues and concerns
becomes most evident. You can check this easily enough by turning to
the indexes of various books in the now burgeoning literature on mem-
ory. If you are looking for the words ‘method’ and ‘methodology’, which
you could then follow with a suitable link to pages within the main

36
 Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley 37

body of the book, you will be disappointed. These words are generally
absent. This is just one confirmation of their neglect, and in seeking to
redress it we shall begin by giving a broad outline of why thinking about
methodological approaches and practices will help in further developing
the field of memory studies and moving it towards greater coherence.
We base this around three key issues.
The first of these concerns the many academic disciplines and areas of
enquiry that contribute to the field and inform the interests of particu-
lar scholars. These range across the humanities and social sciences, and
increasingly refer to work on the neurological as well as cognitive func-
tions of remembering. Developing the methodological premises and
purposes associated with memory research is one way in which the
field can be made more interdisciplinary, rather than simply displaying
a swag-bag multidisciplinarity.3 Though a fully synthesized field may be
an unrealizable ideal, and even an undesirable aim, interdisciplinarity
is a state worth aspiring to if it not only brings contributing disciplines
more closely together but also transcends current limitations and trans-
forms at least some of the intellectual components which characterize
the current arrangements within a field of study.
The second key issue involved in the significance of methodology
for the field is that memory, in its various dimensions, is mediated
more and more by one or other form of communications technology.
The manner and scale of such mediation obviously varies according to
what the technologies afford, and how they operate, with a major issue
being the relations between memory production and consumption. Per-
haps the most important distinction that needs to be drawn here is that
between media involving few in concentrated production catering for
many in widespread consumption, the media conventionally associated
with the term ‘mass’, and media involving few in production and few
in consumption, the media conventionally associated with vernacular
culture.4 Today this distinction remains important but is increasingly
blurred. For example, photographs of past or recent events carrying dif-
ferent kinds of memory luggage may be posted on any among a range of
dedicated photo-sharing websites and so seen by far more people, across
far broader spatial distances, than used to be the case with family pho-
tos housed in albums or shoeboxes, while a blog intended only for the
eyes of a few friends may rapidly go viral and lead to many unintended
consequences, not least those of entering the public record and becom-
ing part of public memory. The Washington blog of Jessica Cutler is a
telling case in point.5 Nevertheless, what may be accomplished by the
internet and social media does not mark a sea change in how cultural
38 Memory in a Mediated World

technologies mediate our ways of communicating and remembering.

There is no irrevocable divide between pre- and post-digital media.
To give just one from among a possible host of examples, we still show
each other images of what we have done or where we have been in dig-
ital forms as we did with print photography and analogue home video.
The format may differ; the practice doesn’t, at least in principle. This
has clear methodological implications because in studying remember-
ing we do not need to adopt a quite different methodological arsenal as
we move across the analogue/digital shift. Indeed, using the same meth-
ods may help illuminate, in sometimes quite subtle and nuanced ways,
the continuities as well as alterations which inform the practices and
processes of remembering associated with the different media involved
in this shift.6
The third, and for us most significant, reason why attending to
methodological issues and procedures is important in researching mem-
ory concerns the relations between individual and collective memory.
What is involved in these relations has preoccupied memory studies
over the past quarter century, not least because of the different positions
that continue to be taken around them, building out from engagement
with the early 20th-century work of Maurice Halbwachs in the sociology
of memory and Frederic Bartlett in the social psychology of memory.
Neither of these scholars paid much attention to media, and this con-
trasts with more recent memory studies where the role of media in
memory transmission has become a major area of inquiry, but how we
may both conceive and explore the relations between closely interper-
sonal remembering and remembering on a broader public plane remains
far from resolved. We cannot do this either solely in theoretical terms or
entirely by developing finer terminological distinctions between differ-
ent forms and modalities of remembering. We need to combine such
efforts with more concerted attention to methodological approaches
and then, most crucially, through the application of particular methods
in order to develop a closer-in, empirically demonstrated understand-
ing of how individual and collective memory are interrelated as well
as distinguished from each other. Indifference to this need is no longer
defensible. Indeed, it is high time it was radically challenged, so making
the methodological tackling of the three issues we have highlighted rise
higher on the agenda of memory studies and thereby attain a greater
sense of urgency and significance in how we research what we research.
In outlining why thinking about methodological approaches and
practices will help memory studies advance and become more coher-
ent, we have assigned greatest importance to the relations between how
 Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley 39

individuals remember and how societies remember. We do so because,

without attending to them, memory studies would collapse or at least
lose much of its defining purpose and promise. In recognition of this, we
now move from the ‘why’ to the ‘how’ question and ask in what ways
turning our minds to methodological approaches and practices will help
to foster such purpose and promise. Our answer to this revolves around,
firstly, the transformations of and the myriad complications to the scalar
dynamics of remembering in modernity, as these are in some way or
another associated with the transmission of memory by communica-
tions media; and secondly, the consequences of these transformations
for both individual and collective memory and the many ways they cor-
respond with each other as well as remaining differentiated across the
spatial and temporal scales in which they are manifested. In the next
section we shall elaborate more fully on what this entails.

Interscalarity as a methodological approach

As a point of analytical principle, we start from a threefold methodolog-

ical premise:

• There is no form of individual remembering that is not informed,

conditioned or shaped by the frameworks of collective remembering
and the collective forms of association and belonging in which we all
participate.
• There is no form of collective remembering that is not engaged by,
participated in or interpreted by specific persons with their own indi-
vidual pasts, interests, and ways of seeing and understanding the
social world they live in.
• The relations between individual and collective remembering are
thus dialectical in the sense that they influence, interpenetrate and
alter each other in ongoing, mutable and ever-shifting ways.

The most significant issue which follows from this threefold premise is
how we may proceed to examine the dialectical relationship it involves
in both spatial and temporal terms. Our response to this is to build the
scalar dynamics of remembering in modernity directly into our method-
ological approach. The intention is to avoid both individualist orienta-
tions to remembering processes and their flip side, those reifications of
the collective dimensions of memory which deny the agentic capacities
of remembering subjects. We achieve this by conceiving of individ-
ual/collective relations along a continuum from micro (subjectivity and
40 Memory in a Mediated World

the sense we all have of a personal self/personal memory) through meso

(intersubjectivity and the awareness we all have of situated remem-
bering in the multiple social groups to which we belong in modern
societies) to macro scales of remembering (national or transnational
memory transmission and the reference we all make to memory phe-
nomena in some sense involving whole societies such as France or
the United States, and broad regional contexts like Scandinavia or the
Maghreb). Mediated forms of memory attain their contemporary scope
through these various contexts of remembering, but the continuum
which movement across them involves is neither unilinear nor irre-
versible. It can operate across different lines of mnemonic transmission
and communication; it can have upscale and downscale movements;
and it can involve shifts and alterations of meaning, value and signif-
icance in the memories which are transmitted across its differentiated
scales. Continuities and variations across these scales are always medi-
ated – and so defined and given form – by any of a number of
communicative modalities and technologies, as for instance when we
move from language and speech in interpersonal relationships, through
changes in the purpose and intended effect of language and speech in
commodified cultural products like television and film, to the more
comprehensive, though differently oriented, rhetorical uses of lan-
guage and speech in advertising and promotion, or in state-orchestrated
spectacles of commemoration and other such grand-scale rituals of
remembering. We use the examples of language and speech here sim-
ply because they are primary forms of mediation in all realms of human
communication, but in thinking about memory and remembering in
modernity we have to add the whole series of technological media-
tions that have conditioned and facilitated processes and practices of
remembering, across both spatial and temporal scales. Studying these is
central to what goes on in the field of memory studies, and again, that
is why it is crucial to attend more fully and in more refined ways to the
question of methodological procedure, for such procedure is of neces-
sity integral to how this may be accomplished in an interdisciplinary
fashion.
Some mediated memories may not change much as they move
between scales, while others may shift a great deal in what they sig-
nify; some may lose in significance, some may gain enormously, while
others will gather value unto themselves because of the variations in
significance which are registered as they resonate across different spa-
tial and temporal scales. What is mnemonically signified is nevertheless
always influenced by these intercrossings, for by definition they induce
variation and change. Such variations may of course occur at any one
 Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley 41

scale, for different events or experiences – as when we remember a street

orator shouting and brandishing his fist, go over and over in our minds
our witnessing of someone’s sudden death, or watch on television the
documentary reconstruction of living through a past war – will, inter
alia, be interpreted differently according to our involvement in or prox-
imity to them. In this sense, interscalar transitions are not prerequisite
for mnemonic variation. Memory is always located, but never fixed.
This point is fundamental to adopting interscalarity as a methodolog-
ical principle. It means that we should attend either simultaneously or
alternately to how remembering occurs in particular places, both for
individuals and within groups, and to how memories mutate in sense
or quality as they move across differential scales of remembering. Such
scales also coincide with hierarchical social levels that are attached to
variously accredited sources of power and authority, sources which are
able to give greater salience or sense of legitimacy to certain memories
and discredit or marginalize others. Interscalarity as a methodological
orientation should enable us to see more precisely and intricately how
this happens. It is, for example, enormously important when study-
ing the contextual uses of memory in social struggle and activism, for
then the meanings and values associated with past actions and occur-
rences become points of conflict and contestation, even if they were not
previously.
Our point about the locatedness but lack of fixity in memory applies
not only spatially but also temporally. Distance in time from an event or
period affects how we remember it, while memories themselves change
over time, according to the present situational contexts and timescales
in which they are reconstructed, and the purposes which such recon-
structions serve, as for example when memories are used retrospectively
or prospectively (or are made to register backwards and forwards simul-
taneously). Memories are always monitored and reconstructed in time as
well as space, and as this implies, they move across time as well as space,
and in doing so vary in how or what they signify. So timescales are as
important as spatial scales, with memories changing as temporal scales
change. In principle, of course, this applies just as much to, say, tele-
vision remembering as it does to personal or interpersonal vernacular
remembering, but at whatever scale we are investigating the operations
and orientations of remembering processes, we need to consider what is
at stake in what they bring to the present, or rather the whole chain of
present times across which they have moved, and in moving, changed.
We also need to consider what they may augur for the future. Only
by taking our bearings from the transactional relations between past,
present and future will we gain a full understanding of the temporally
42 Memory in a Mediated World

scalar dynamics of the ways in which anything is remembered, both in

time and over time.
Here it may seem that we are methodologically defeated by the phe-
nomenological experience of time and temporal distance seeming in
our remembering to be suddenly abrogated. We then feel transported
from here to there, now to then, as for example when a father recalls
his young daughter asking ‘Why are there stars?’ and simultaneously
catches sight of the moon, ‘a pale morning moon hanging above the
city, sinking, drowned out by day. And at once time dissolved and he
flitted to a moment when, as a boy, he saw the surface of the moon
through a telescope, pitted and shadowed, a tangible landscape.’7 But of
course this experience derives its affective force from its very fleeting-
ness compared with the inexorable addition and reduction of temporal
scales as we move forward through life. That force arises as well from
the abiding knowledge that what we appear to see through the telescope
of memory changes as we change, during the course of our lives, with
the consequence that the interscalar movement of memory across time
is indissolubly linked to how it is interpreted and understood in time,
at any stage in the future. Memory, even in these flashbulb moments,
is temporally interscalar because of always being socially and histori-
cally situated, the instance of recollection modulating how we see and
traverse the pitted and shadowed landscape of the past as we bethink
ourselves backwards and anticipate forwards. Simultaneously, acts and
processes of remembering are spatially designated as we move between
the variably scaled relations we have with loved ones, friends and
acquaintances, celebrities and public figures, all the way to those distant
others we may encounter only transiently in a historical documentary,
but nonetheless are intensely moved by.
It follows from our threefold premise that all memory is social, but
social in varying ways at the different levels in which it is manifested.
The methodological consequence of this is that work can be done at
any particular level, whether this involves grassroots memorialization
or cross-regional broadcasting of a commemorative event. This scalar-
specific work is very important, but should not detract from the key
principle of interscalarity as a methodological approach. For this rea-
son, when applying it in memory studies research, we need to attend
to how both small-scale and large-scale manifestations of remembering
practices coexist and cross-refer. This is true also of the relations between
memory and historical conditions and processes, for we will not be able
to gauge the gradients between them unless we attend to the temporally
scalar dynamics through which those relations are realized, for both
 Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley 43

individuals and small groups in vernacular contexts on the one hand,

and institutions and social formations in national and transnational
contexts on the other.
One of the leading purposes of interscalarity as a methodological
approach is to ensure that this broader ambit is attained and main-
tained. It is designed to help us gain a better sense of the different forms
of interaction and sociality associated with remembering practices at
and across the differential spatial scales in which they occur, move and
change, and of the different forms of temporality that inform and help
define those remembering practices at and across the differential points
of past, present and future in which they occur, move and change. There
is of course often potential slippage between what is intended and what
is achieved, and it is here we need to turn to what may stymie the
realization of interscalarity’s purpose in this respect.
We can of course begin at any one location and proceed upscale or
downscale according to the event, act or object of remembering, but
across the overlapping and interweaving distinctions we have made
between micro, meso and macro social scales, there needs to be con-
tinuity of method, or at least a strong and sustained degree of it, if
we are to expand and refine our understanding of what happens when
memory traverses these scales and so negotiates, among other things,
the relations between the personal and the political. Such continuity
has not yet been properly realized, and this has not helped attempts
to overcome the still rather fragmentary nature of memory studies as a
field. If we take work on vernacular remembering, for example, this com-
monly deploys such methods as one-to-one semi-structured interviews,
focus groups, group interviews, diaries, oral history and self-interviews.
Through such methods detailed information is gathered relating to, say,
the significance of particular childhood memories for subsequent adult
self-identity, the mnemonic intersections of personal experience and
national events, or the uses of various media in aiding and abetting
memories within and between various social groups. However, while
there is often a fair degree of continuity of methods across micro and
meso levels, this is not the case between these levels and macro scales
of remembering. Much of the work on national or transnational mem-
ory has relied excessively on modes of textual/visual analysis in looking
at how, for example, ceremonial commemorations are reported or state
funerals are staged on television. The ways in which these macro-level
acts of remembering may mutate as they move through meso and micro
levels and meet with different perspectives, outlooks, interests and
motivations for remembering is then inferred from the textual readings
44 Memory in a Mediated World

that have been made. While this is often the case, there are some salu-
tary alternatives. For example, Ann Gray (2013, p. 95) is somewhat
exceptional in basing her methodological approach to televised remem-
bering on the premise that each point in the circuit of production,
distribution and consumption can demonstrate the dynamic making of
memory. Another important exception to the shortcoming we are iden-
tifying is Brian Conway’s multi-level analysis of the commemoration of
Bloody Sunday, the occasion in 1972 when 13 civilians were shot dead
by British soldiers in Derry, Northern Ireland, while peacefully protest-
ing against internment. Conway takes into account the interrelations
between different scales of remembering, though he does tend to assume
a hierarchical model in which the higher institutional levels of remem-
bering necessarily possess the greatest power. This may or may not be so
in any particular case. The methodological approach we are advocating
requires empirically discovering the nature of the modulations between
different scales of remembering, rather than assuming that they would
perforce conform to a preconceived theoretical paradigm.8
This problem is by no means unique to the field of memory studies,
but it would at least be alleviated if the intermixture and follow-through
of methods from one scale to another was understood as necessary not
only in building up a more detailed picture but also in ensuring that
what textual analysis reveals is assessed against how people receive,
interpret and feel about those acts of macro-level remembering. Wher-
ever possible, supposition concerning their influence should be checked
against data deriving from their assimilation through a number of inter-
subjective, subjective and cognitive filters. An example of what this
begins to involve occurred in a semi-structured interview we conducted
with a white British woman in her early 70s. Susan left school at age 14
and married at age 21; she raised two children and has several grandchil-
dren. She is retired from a career as a social worker for the blind. In the
interview we discussed television and public memory. Susan’s view was
that television’s construction of the past is unable to ‘take in all the
complications’ or situate ‘it all in its context’:

You’ve got to simplify because you’ve got to present the past on

television in small batches that are just not very accurate gener-
ally . . . I quite enjoy the illusion of what the Victorian or Edwardian
period was supposed to be, but I know damn well that it was nothing
like that at all. It’s wonderful entertainment, but you’re just being
fooled. They do get some of the more recent stuff not too bad.
It all depends on who’s doing it and what perspective they have.
 Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley 45

Often it’s someone with a middle-class perspective. If it’s working-

class life . . . they never seem to get it quite true. I do compare it with
my own experience but you shouldn’t compare, they’re completely
different. You can’t judge them on that because they are different
people looking at it from a different album.

Susan uses the metaphor of the photograph album here in order to

register the different perspectives on the past and the different sub-
ject positions from which historical representations are constructed.
In doing so she recognizes that representations of the past are recon-
structions and that the very perspectives from which they are created
are partial and selective. She emphasizes the absence of one true past
against which representations of memory can be measured. This doesn’t
prevent her from evaluating these representations, but she does so in
self-conscious recognition of her own and other interpretive filters and
of the need for varying criteria of assessment. In talking about television
remembering and how she views it, Susan demonstrates a keen sensitiv-
ity not only to the historical specificity of particular experiences and
unstable memories of them, but also to the class perspectives that are in
play in their public representations and the ways in which those repre-
sentations are constructed. She allows for both identification with, and
rejection of, mediated forms of memory in the process of consumption
and assimilation, and is fully acceptant of the existence of multiple and
possibly conflicting representations circulating across spatial and tem-
poral scales at any one time. While fully acknowledging the perils of
making comparisons across these scales, Susan uses her personal, micro-
scale mnemonic perspective critically to interpellate public, macro-scale
constructions while at the same time noting that enjoyment and mis-
representation are not mutually exclusive. She even goes further than
this in suggesting that their seemingly irreparable contradictoriness can
be overcome in their critical and reflexive identification.
This is of course only one example, but as such it shows a sophisti-
cated understanding of the interrelations of history and memory and
the perilous steps by which they are in some manner mapped together.
It also shows what we might miss if we attend to interscalar move-
ments only in a top-down manner – as, for instance, in the middle-class
perspectives that may prevail in television constructions of public mem-
ory – whereas with interscalarity as a methodological orientation we
are enjoined to see all such movements as interactive and so two-way,
with what occurs at one level of social remembering mediating, but
not determining, what occurs at another. We cannot second-guess such
46 Memory in a Mediated World

intermediations across the scales of remembering, and that is why mem-

ory studies work informed by the multifaceted optic of interscalarity
would necessarily supplement and complement work in textual, dis-
course and visual analysis at the level of production with such methods
as interviews, surveys, focus groups and so on at the level of con-
sumption, with even a sensitively applied quantitative content analysis
accompanying the more qualitative analysis of media representations in
order to establish, among other things, the degrees of salience and the
telling lacunae that may exist over time in the reporting of an event
that has attained national significance and been repeatedly turned to in
news discourse.
We are of course not calling for a diminution in the analysis of media
texts and representations that perform the function of remembering
and so recapitulate the past within the present. Such analysis is vital
to memory studies work. We are also not suggesting that such analy-
sis should never be produced solely for the sake of what it may yield,
for it can of course be singularly illuminating, and in any case there
are times when it is impractical to extend work beyond such analy-
sis. What we are advocating is the need to reach and manage a more
stable balance of methods and techniques across the work of the field,
and more importantly across the differential social and historical, spatial
and temporal scales which memory traverses. This is in part a problem
stemming from the academic disciplines which scholars primarily work
from in studying individual and collective memory. Though we can only
speak tendentially, those whose work is mainly or wholly reliant on
textual analysis of some kind often come from literary and/or film stud-
ies, while the use of more ethnographic methods are more commonly
associated with those who are trained in sociology or anthropology.
Admittedly this distinction is crudely drawn, but the overriding point
is that developing the methodological approach of interscalarity will
help to offset tendencies to become over-reliant on any particular set
of methods and techniques, both in the generation and the analysis
of data, and by the same token help to mix up and meld a good deal
more the different inputs into the field which humanities and social
science disciplines together bring. Interscalarity as a methodological
approach is, in other words, a recipe for, though not a guarantee of,
interdisciplinarity.
In being conducive to continuity of method across the different scales
at which memory operates, interscalarity as a strategy may also help off-
set the tendency that appears in some memory studies work to conceive
of communicative and cultural memory as if they are sharply divided.9
 Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley 47

We would argue that this tendency is inherent in the distinction

between these two concepts, for it is not as though communicative
memory, consisting of generational and intergenerational memory of
a finite historical period (the memory which oral history draws upon in
its data generation) is not informed by cultural memory, whoever the
custodians of this may be, and it is not as though cultural memory,
consisting of longer-term, trans-biographical, symbolic ritual, mythi-
cal figurations and traditional framings is not engaged with in relation
to lived experience and everyday communicative exchange, as well
as within particular historical horizons. Communicative memory is
cultural, and cultural memory is communicative, both in vernacular
milieux and in the communications media with which cultural mem-
ory becomes increasingly associated under conditions of modernity.
We need always to bear in mind the ways in which they are inter-reliant
and manifest across the different scales at which social remembering
takes place, especially as social media and digitally networked commu-
nication enable movement across these scales to become increasingly
integrated in our everyday lives.
That of course is only ever a first step, a step which involves recogni-
tion of multiscalarity, but in densely interconnected and interdependent
societies these different scales of remembering relate to each other in a
variety of quite complex ways, and as already suggested, when memo-
ries move between them they become modulated and meet with varying
degrees of interest, sympathy and engagement. Such scales are not in
themselves static, operating in fixed locations or in relation to one-track
routes, for they themselves interpenetrate. The daily newspaper lands
on the door mat each morning and at times carries stories from the
past; television enters the living room and brings us historical film and
drama, or documentaries drawing on people’s memories of a particular
past decade or a national disaster that has become part of public mem-
ory. Individuals are quoted in those documentaries and stories from the
past, even if what they say is altered by the journalistic or televisual
framings in which they are rearticulated. Beyond that, of course, in order
to be communicable personal memories have to draw on publicly shared
frames and discourses, while broad-scale media representations of the
past are received and interpreted at an individual level in a temporally
specific as well as temporally extended manner.
Here we should perhaps address a possible misapprehension, for mem-
ory in modern society does not move regimentally up and down a series
of ladders fixed between different levels. This is an impression we may
inadvertently have given by deploying the somewhat mechanical term
48 Memory in a Mediated World

‘level’ and referring to the rather static-sounding distinctions between

different scales, but these are metaphorical figures intended to convey
some sense of the interconnectedness as well as differences in the
manifold forms and processes of communication in modern societies.
The key point is that while we must begin with recognition of the mul-
tiscalarity this involves, we need to see as crucial the ways in which
different social scales of remembering are interwoven with each other,
and so are articulated both within and between the spatial and temporal
spaces in which remembering processes are realized. Such articulation is
multiple and dynamic, and interscalarity as a methodological approach
attempts to gain some analytical measure and sense of its spatially oper-
ative manifestations and historically variant patterns. It is in this way
that the interrelations of individual and collective remembering can be
most fruitfully understood.
We have perhaps spoken so far with too little discrimination between
memories. Some shared memories carry a much greater emotional bur-
den than others, for example, or move to a higher scale of evaluation
as people continue to weigh up their significance in their own continu-
ing lives. Some memories traverse a greater range of scales than others,
while some have only limited spatial reference or a short time span.
Remembering can also be influenced by both our immediate contexts
of living and the overarching historical period we are living in; again,
a question of scales. If, for example, this period is fraught with con-
flict and crisis, it may affect not only how we remember it but also
how our memories of periods prior to it are drawn on and given new
currency in a changed present. Troubled times often entail troubled
memories, or enhance the memories of a seemingly more settled period
in the past. Investigating memory in troubled times, memory shaped or
inflected by experience of death, strife and social disruption, may raise
issues and concerns that usually do not arise in more routine, day-to-
day remembering, the kind of remembering that may be involved in
retaining an image of your daughter’s entry into the school gates ear-
lier in the morning, or in mulling over a curious figurative expression
used by someone at a party a fortnight or so ago. Memories of disasters,
or memories involved in mourning and bereavement, are quite differ-
ent to this, not necessarily in scale but certainly in the degree to which
they disturb or in the psychological depth to which they sink. The same
applies to any exploration we might make of, for instance, the conse-
quences for remembering of the systematic violation of a community’s
cultural credentials legitimized by a belief in the racial inferiority of
those inhabiting it.
 Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley 49

Where we are investigating memories of these kinds, we need to be

extra sensitive to how they may affect, or have affected, those who bear
them and attempt to communicate them. We need to assess the freight
of pain or distress those memories may carry, and the ability of any par-
ticular person to articulate them in, say, a face-to-face interview. This is
not an easy task, and in light of the ethical issues it involves and the
methodological challenges it has created in relation to our own empir-
ical research, we have devised the new social science method of the
self-interview which, in the context of painful pasts, is often a preferable
alternative to face-to-face interviews, not least because the informant is
in charge of the ‘pause’ button on a digital recorder, and so can come
and go from the process of recording their memories according to their
own feeling or knowledge of when this is appropriate.10 There are other
advantages to the self-interview in these circumstances, but when we
are procedurally in the hinterland of painful pasts where, despite any
difficulties this may entail, people are able to put them into narrative
form, it is the ethical consideration which prevails, and it is this which
should guide our methodological options.
In human experience there is a wide-ranging spectrum of painful pasts
and subsequent responses to them, and so far memory studies has not
produced anything like the range of empirical studies we need if we are
to gain a more comprehensive sense of how they are remembered within
specific communities, and within specific social and historical contexts.
Among other things, this would enable us to refine our knowledge of
how in troubled times the difficulties thrown up in the transformations
of experience as process into experience as product are dealt with, and
at times overcome in the interests not simply of ‘moving on’ but also of
revising past ways of social life and finding new, more cooperative ways
of rubbing along with each other. Along with this broad spectrum we
need to attend methodologically to the different scales on which painful
pasts are remembered and given discursive presence, for these too work
between micro and macro social scales, and again we need to bear in
mind our major point about their interpenetrability so that, for exam-
ple, in any one instance we would need methodologically to look across
these scales into how the past is represented, negotiated within certain
social frameworks and through certain social practices, and then inter-
preted by particular individuals. The ethical and political implications of
studying painful pasts depend on the scale you are starting from in your
research, and how you then move on to other scales of remembering,
always attending in this move to the ways in which the meanings of
the past-in-the-present emerge through the interpenetration of scales,
50 Memory in a Mediated World

along with the political and ethical issues that particular difficult cir-
cumstances may entail. But, as a key point of emphasis, it is especially
when exploring how painful memories are narrated by particular indi-
viduals that we need to be most sensitive, never assuming, for example,
that such memories can be equated with the ways in which they have
been represented elsewhere, along different social scales. So often the
point of investigating the painful pasts of particular individuals is to
assess the match or mismatch between them and their media treat-
ments of one kind or another, especially where such treatments make
claims to representativeness across all the social scales to which they
assume they can speak. Against those claims we need not only counter-
arguments but also counter-evidence, and that again is precisely why
a good deal more ethnographic work is required in studying how indi-
viduals and groups within specific local contexts do or do not come
to terms with troubled memories. Making sweeping assumptions about
this as a result of studying how aspects of troubled times are represented
at different social scales, removed from those realms of social experi-
ence where they were immediately felt and are now remembered, is
simply not good enough. In this respect memory studies needs to be
more evidence-driven and evidence-led.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have set out to convey a set of methodological

considerations attendant on personal and public remembering and
the relations between them. We have sought to bring these together
around a particular methodological approach that is designed to help
us research more effectively, and understand more comprehensively,
on the one hand how individual and collective modalities of remem-
bering differ yet interrelate and make each other possible, and on the
other how situated and mediated forms of remembering converge and
diverge, sometimes acting in concert and sometimes in conflict. The
approach we have advocated is based around a conception of mem-
ory operating at and between different spatial and temporal scales, with
these scales in themselves coexisting and cross-referring, and with mem-
ory in its movements across scales being continuously reassessed and at
times reinterpreted as, for instance, we look back on an earlier period
of our lives, maybe work with second-hand inherited remembering, or
try to accommodate shifts and displacements in the temporal scales
of intergenerational remembering.11 We have developed this approach
because, despite the preoccupation with collective memory in the field
 Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley 51

of memory studies, we still lack in close-grained knowledge of how it

operates across the different scales of collective social life, and of how
individuals and collectivities interact in processes of everyday remem-
bering. We have argued that this lack is in part at least due to insufficient
empirical work and to insufficient attention to the methodological
approaches and principles that would facilitate it. Our contribution
to addressing this deficiency has been to outline one such approach
designed not only to foster a more refined understanding of the rela-
tions of individual and collective remembering, across a wide range of
different mnemonic forms and practices, but also to encourage a greater
integration of methods across the various disciplinary interests and
inputs into memory studies, and so supersede the unargued-for dom-
inance of one approach here, another there. Where this balance isn’t
achieved, we may find specialist discussion, but we won’t find the cross-
cutting sensibility, sharply attuned to the broad range of transactions
between past and present, which we believe it should be the aspiration
of memory studies to develop.

Notes
1. We have recently tackled this neglect elsewhere, in a volume dedicated to
key questions in memory studies methodology (see Keightley and Pickering,
2013; and see also Keightley, 2010).
2. For our contributions in this respect, see Keightley and Pickering, 2007;
2012; Pickering and Keightley, 2012, 2013c, 2014.
3. This point is elaborated in the introduction to our edited collection, Research
Methods for Memory Studies (Pickering and Keightley, 2013a).
4. See, for example, chapters on televised remembering by Ann Gray, and ver-
nacular remembering by Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley, 2013b, in
Keightley and Pickering, 2013, pp. 79–96 and pp. 97–112 respectively.
5. Poerksen and Detel, 2014, pp. 47–59.
6. We have tried to show both continuities and alterations in the shift from
analogue to digital photography in Keightley and Pickering, 2014.
7. Lively, 1992, p. 2.
8. Gray, 2013, p. 95; Conway, 2010.
9. Assmann, 2008.
10. For more on the self-interview and what it involves, see Keightley et al.,
2012, and Allett et al., 2011.
11. On these examples, see Pickering and Keightley, 2012

References
Allett, N., Keightley, E. and Pickering, M., 2011. Using Self-Interviews to
Research Memory. Realities at the Morgan Centre: http://www.manchester.ac
.uk/morgancentre/realities/toolkits/.
52 Memory in a Mediated World

Assmann, J., 2008. Communicative and cultural memory. In Erll, A., Nünning,
A. and Young, S. B. eds, Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
pp. 109–18.
Conway, B., 2010. Commemoration and Bloody Sunday. Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Gray, A., 2013. Televised remembering. In Keightley, E. and Pickering, M. eds„
pp. 79–96.
Keightley, E., 2010. Remembering research: Memory and methodology in
the social sciences, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 13(1),
pp. 55–70.
Keightley, E. and Pickering, M., 2007. Les DeuxVoies du Passé: Le Ressouvenir,
Entre Progrès et Perte, Cahiers de Recherche Sociologique, 44, September 2007,
pp. 83–96.
Keightley, E. and Pickering, M., 2012. The Mnemonic Imagination. Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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remembering in analogue and digital photography, New Media and Society,
16(4), pp. 576–93.
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in social science research, International Journal of Social Research Methodology,
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of transmission, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(1), pp. 115–31.
Pickering, M. and Keightley, E., 2013a. Methodological premises and purposes.
In Keightley, E. and Pickering, M. eds., pp. 1–9.
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E. and Pickering, M. eds., pp. 97–112.
Pickering, M. and Keightley, E., 2013c. Trauma, discourse and communicative
limits. In Richardson, J., Krzyanowski, M., Machin, D. and Wodak, R. eds,
Advances in Critical Discourse Studies. London and New York: Routledge,
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Pickering, M. and Keightley, E., 2014. Retrotyping and the marketing of Nostal-
gia. In Niemeyer, K. ed., Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and
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ology, forthcoming.
Poerksen, B. and Detel, H., 2014. The Unleashed Scandal: The End of Control in the
Digital Age. Exeter: Imprint-Academic.
Part I
Rejoining through States of
Emergency
3
Towards a Memo-Techno-Ecology:
Mediating Memories of Extreme
Flooding in Resilient Communities
Joanne Garde-Hansen, Lindsey McEwen and Owain Jones

Introduction: From ‘Emo’ to ‘Memo’

In Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet (2013), Garde-Hansen

and Gorton textually analyse the online debates around climate change
media that entangle the threat of bad weather with fears over race rela-
tions, war and political dissent. Drawing upon Brian Massumi’s work,
which combines extreme weather and war into a discursively connected
‘threat-form’ of ‘the suddenly irrupting, locally self-organizing, system-
ically self-amplifying threat of large-scale disruption’ (2011, p. 20), the
authors propose the concept of an emo-techno-ecology. This addresses the
way these changing-environment fears exist ‘trans-medially’ as well as
at ‘hyper-local’ levels. Thus, they argue that ‘we need to understand
our mediated ecology along two wavelengths simultaneously: as local
and global emotions’ or as ‘global emo-scapes’ in which citizens are
affectively connected to their environment as ‘technologically enabled
infotainment producers/consumers’ (2013, p. 128). More broadly, Brace
and Geoghegan (2011), writing in the context of human geography,
argue that climate change is encountered holistically, not just in how
it is understood ‘top-down’ through the communication of scientific
discourses but relationally at a local level:

Climate change can be observed in relation to landscape but also felt,

sensed, apprehended emotionally as part of the fabric of everyday
life in which acceptance, denial, resignation and action co-exist as
personal and social responses to the local manifestations of a global
problem.
(Brace & Geoghegan, 2011, p. 284)

55
56 Rejoining through States of Emergency

Thus, any response to extreme weather in a specific region of the world

is mediated along two axes, which can be considered important for
understanding community flood memory. The first is through a ver-
tical axis or mode of transmission as Pickering and Keightley (2012)
define it in their appreciation of the work of Karl Mannheim (1959).
Here there is ‘a transmission of memory over time, in which the past is
drawn into the present and reworked creatively in the interests of the
future’ (2012, p. 117). That this axis draws upon memories of flooding
that pre-date climate change discourse is important, because learning to
live with extreme weather conditions is not simply a contemporary phe-
nomenon. Community flood memory has ‘a vertical relation through
time with what came before us and what may come after’ (Pickering &
Keightley, 2012, p. 117).
Second, we encounter historical and remembered changes in weather
on a horizontal axis, being remembered in time (through modalities of
archives, print media, oral stories, scrapbooks, anecdotes, home movies
and regional news, many of which are mobilized into new digital for-
mations). When shared in the moment of, and directly after, a flood
event (horizontally), we connect these memories with the vertical axis
of deeper time community memories of extreme flooding. This was
achieved in our research through close and detailed analysis of empir-
ical findings (interviews, videos, blogs and textual and documentary
material) from the ESRC Sustainable Flood Memories project,1 in order
to understand new forms of communicating extreme weather and its
consequences. In what follows, we present our uncovering and analy-
sis of the ‘social technology of memory’ (Worcman and Garde-Hansen
forthcoming) for catching and sharing affective experiences of the 2007
UK floods, and the subsequent use of social media for mapping flood
memory. Our mixed-media approach represents what we are defining
as a memo-techno-ecology of remembering and forgetting environmental
crises. This interdisciplinary chapter allows us to present an innovative
way of drawing together geography, memory and digital media studies
into a critical reflection upon how individuals/communities use medi-
ated memory practices to remain resilient through remembering and
forgetting.
In their introduction to the collection Geography and Memory (2012),
Jones and Garde-Hansen draw together the new conceptual and empir-
ical emphases upon performative and embodied practices of everyday
life through their attention to the work of Nigel Thrift (1999, 2004a,
2004b, 2008). Thrift’s (1992) early ideas on globalization have devel-
oped into an application of affect within cultural geography that has
 Joanne Garde-Hansen et al. 57

been important for resituating global concerns as not simply abstractly

social-constructionist. Rather, ‘care, risk, fear, responsibility, content-
ment, self-control, anger, shame, desire and hate’ come to re-emphasize
‘affective personhood’ to address ‘local, national and global calls for
individual and connected practices that are creative, sustainable, open,
shared’ (Jones & Garde-Hansen, 2012, p. 5). Thus, emotional geographies
should be understood as, first and foremost, the affective dimensions
of home, space, place, landscape, area, environment and atmosphere as
a priori experiences that move us, and that we move in and through.
They are mobile emotional geographies. However, while traditional
broadcast media may remember these emotional responses through
human-interest stories fixed in time and space, individuals in their own
communities and contexts record their experiences of extreme weather
on a personal level and connect those memories on a range of scales,
regionally, nationally and globally, keeping the memories mobile and
anecdotal (that is, as anecdotes that demand to be told).
Therefore, for communities to come to terms with grief, loss and fear
as a result of extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves,
tsunami, hurricanes) in the places they live, requires a rethinking of
the discourses of resilience and sustainability couched solely in the sci-
ences to include the mediatization of emotional and human security
in the environment. The importance of personal and social memory
practices for developing everyday resilience in communities is critical.
In our most recent research for the ESRC Sustainable Flood Memories
project, one aspect we focused upon was to understand new forms
of communicating extreme weather that could be shared both verti-
cally and horizontally in the ways set out. Thus, in this chapter we
draw together examples of intergenerational communications (oral his-
tories, newspaper archives, family narratives/albums and collections)
and ‘event’ representations (television news reports, blogs, Flickr pho-
tos and tweets) into a mixed-media ecology approach to communicate
resilience through remembering. We shift the ‘emo’ prefix to ‘memo’ in
order to include personal memories of the 2007 UK floods that created a
crisis and its incorporation as much in the domestic sphere of the home
as in the environment, the economy, the governance matrix and the
infrastructure landscape of human development (Cabinet Office, 2008).

Remembering and forgetting the 2007 UK floods

In the light of Paul Connerton’s adumbration on seven types of for-

getting (2008), it is timely to understand flooding (like many other
58 Rejoining through States of Emergency

disruptive events) as an environmental crisis that is simultaneously

remembered and strategically forgotten in seemingly equal measure.
In order to move on (after severe weather events), the recently flooded
communities we researched for the ESRC Sustainable Flood Memories
project used media hyper-locally (that is, focused on messages pro-
duced and consumed in a specific location for a geographically defined
audience within a floodplain). While new modalities emerged, of dig-
itally recording and using online media to learn and participate in
extreme flood narratives, other differentiated parts of the communi-
ties actively forgot flooding for personal and economic reasons. Thus, a
big data approach to natural disaster mapping may overshadow hyper-
local memories or the desire or will to forget – that is, if forgetting
is ever really achieved. The latter is not surprising when we consider
that floods can be catastrophic at the individual, community and state
levels. The materialization of these and their impact on personal lives
and on material goods often demonstrates that they bring a collec-
tive into existence, with increased possibilities for being social as a
flood community (see Jencson, 2000; Oliver-Smith & Hoffmann, 1999).
This is evidenced through media by the community ‘pulling together’
narrative template, but also after the event, through the establish-
ment of flood action groups that often work on an issue for three
or so years until it is resolved. However, while the collective mem-
ory of flooding in the UK may well be alive and attached to feelings
of resilience, as some of our interviewees attested (for example, the
‘Dunkirk spirit’), in one section of a floodplain, further downriver, per-
sonal memories of past floods may be traumatic, exciting or resistant to
accessibility.
Flood materialization can be defined as the very varied practices by
which flood memories and associated knowledge (lay or expert) are
physically captured for assimilation, archiving and sharing by indi-
viduals, communities or organizations – whether through physical or
‘known’ points of reference, oral histories, memorialization, visualiza-
tion through archives of photography or newspaper cuttings, or through
the everyday engagement with resilience measures around the home or
in the landscape (see McEwen et al., 2012a/b). Clearly, the materializa-
tion of flood remembrance (in photographs, flood marks, personal and
official archives) depends upon the social, cultural and material condi-
tions and practices of the collective in the geographical area at flood
risk. These practices we will draw upon below. Yet, a flattening out of
the flood-scape into a globally connected mediascape finds social media
mapped onto water in ways that illuminate human interaction with
 Joanne Garde-Hansen et al. 59

the environment as mediatized. Within the dominant narratives of the

mediascape, floods are recorded and represented nationally and globally
as human stories of natural disaster that may issue forth a politics of
vulnerability and/or triumph. They may even be made into memorable
data as tweets that become mappable along a floodplain (see ‘Digital
trails of the UK floods – how well do tweets match observations?’ The
Guardian 2012). However, in this national/global communications artic-
ulation of the flooded environment, the human story is less important
than the trace that human story has left on a data-scape. Thus, in this
context, geographies of climate change find highly differentiated com-
munities and personally mediated memories becoming both forgotten
and digitally (yet unevenly) networked.
Recent academic research that critically reflects upon floods and their
representation addresses such increasingly contested or competitive
mediations of flooding within nations and regions during and after
events. The tsunami of 2004 (see Hastrup, 2008); Hurricane Katrina in
2005 (see Littlefield & Quennette, 2007; Robinson, 2009); the Pakistan
floods of 2010 (see Murthy & Longwell, 2013); or the representation
floods from the 1950s to 2000s in the United Kingdom (see Escobar &
Demeritt, 2012; Furedi, 2007) find researchers approaching flood stories
from the perspectives of local, national and global agendas in order to
connect the human-interest narratives within wider discourses. In what
follows, we offer a theoretically informed analysis of remembering and
forgetting practices that mediate extreme floods in the UK as a form of
resilient and painful remembering and forgetting.
In terms of remembering, homes, gardens, streets, businesses,
churches, riverbanks, urban infrastructure and personal relationships
were mediated using photography, home video, broadcast media, social
media and, overall, the internet, and thus changed into a social and
technological memory bank of stored flood knowledge that could be
mobilized by journalists, citizens, communities and archives. In terms
of forgetting, we have found these same spaces disavowing a watery
sense of place (changes to street names, removal of flood marks, flood
image fatigue and loss of archival images and footage). Thus, one out-
come of our research was an understanding of the role of strategic
forgetting in sustainable flood memory, which we have written about
elsewhere (see McEwen et al., 2012a; Garde-Hansen et al., forthcoming).
For the purposes of this chapter, we wish to draw upon the mediated
strategies for remembering the 2007 UK floods in negotiating natural
disaster and providing future communities with an archive of resources
on resilience.
60 Rejoining through States of Emergency

About the ESRC Sustainable Flood Memories project

Elsewhere, we have written about the concept of ‘sustainable flood

memory’ (see McEwen et al., 2012a). This is an approach to mem-
ory work that is community focused, archival, integrating individual/
personal and collective/community experiences, involving intergener-
ational (vertical) and intra-generational (horizontal) communication,
and concern for its future. Such memory is ‘sustainable’ in the sense that
it creates and supports the conditions for its furtherance, acknowledges
finitude and deletion, and has strong attention to intergenerational
exchange and social learning, thus using associated lay knowledge
in delivering on future resilience needs in relation to other forms of
knowledge – particularly scientific and institutional.
It is clear that water (its abundance and/or scarcity, sometimes at the
same time, i.e. ‘drought–flood continuum’) will become an increasingly
politicized issue in the mediated public spheres of many nations in this
century. Floods in the UK continue to impact adversely on human well-
being and livelihoods, highlighting both the limitations of ‘expert’ flood
knowledge and the potentials of lay knowledge in flood risk manage-
ment (hereafter FRM) (McEwen & Jones, 2012). Moreover, there is a
need to link ‘elite strategies to daily life’ such that local, national and
global messages in the political economy of disaster and risk manage-
ment take account of the cultural and personal memories within at-risk
communities (see Jones & Murphy, 2009, p. 5).
In the case of recent catastrophic events such as the 2007 UK floods,
the control of what we will term the elite production and consump-
tion of flood knowledge by the government, agencies and national
broadcast media saw the emergence of a more visible, distributed flood
awareness through social networks drawing upon mobile and situated
memories (such as Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and reflected on Twitter,
which was only emergent in 2007). This suggested to us that those
new communication technologies for remembering and connecting
flooding are emerging as critical to flood risk management, not sim-
ply in disaster response as an extension of broadcast infrastructure but
emotionally and personally through sustaining remembering. In the
light of this, we determined an urgent need post-2007 to evaluate the
extent to which, and in what ways, community flood memories con-
tribute to local/lay flood knowledge through specific reference to the
media production and consumption of flood images and stories. This
was addressed through interviewing media stakeholders (consumers
 Joanne Garde-Hansen et al. 61

and producers), and drawing upon survey data and visual ethnography
findings. It was the emphasis upon flood memory that was unique to the
way we designed and executed the research, not only through analysis of
extant flood heritage and materialization in the flood-affected areas, but
as produced by the participants in our research as stakeholders, actors
and followers of flooding. While below we draw upon one mediated
memory strand of our research that emerged, it is first necessary to very
briefly outline the main body of the project.
The UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded inter-
disciplinary research project ran from 2010 to 2014 and comparatively
studied four floodplain settings in the lower Severn Valley, UK, after
the extreme July 2007 floods.2 These floodplain groups had differ-
ent histories, forms and levels of past flood experience, and different
degrees of community development. The project sought to evaluate
the extent to which communities with a history of past flood events
are more resilient to future floods than communities with no previ-
ous flood history or floodplain groups without any shared memories
of flooding. Similarly, we were also interested in the emergence of
new digital technologies for recording, sharing and then remembering
flooding.
In total, 65 residents were interviewed in depth across the four
case-study areas over the first three years, using snowballing techniques
and a quota approach to sampling on the basis of gender and age to
identify interviewees. The semi-structured interviews covered record-
ing, communicating and maintaining or discarding flood memories,
and their perceived relationships to community resilience. Emergent
and recurrent themes were explored using Nvivo, and thematic nodes
were used to pattern the responses to make visible the reiterated themes,
such that we could undertake a thematic analysis. As part of enrich-
ing the interviews, we drew together a range of ‘flood stakeholders’
who advised us to target what we will define as flood memory agents.
These are, as Anna Reading defines them, those ‘mainstream organisa-
tions or state and corporate memory agents’ whose use of ‘mobile and
connective technologies [. . .] to “witness” such events’ connects ‘pro-
sumers’ [producer-consumers] through ‘trans-medial glocalised mobile
connectivities and mobilisations’ (2012, p. 23). We argue below that
this occurs vertically and horizontally and draw upon the interviews
with flood memory agents and citizens, as well as the media they create,
to unpack the two spatial configurations that a memo-techno-ecology
operates through.
62 Rejoining through States of Emergency

Vertical axis 1: The media mash-up of 1947 and 2007 flood

memories

This region and this period of time were important for our research
for two key reasons. Firstly, the floods of 1947 (previously the largest
historic flood on the lower Severn) and 2007 had been intensely
mediatized through print newspaper and video respectively, with many
narratives, media reports and images connecting both events.
They were being re-mediatized as connected across time and space
and in terms of collective memories that often incorporated ‘the Blitz
spirit’.3 Many of our older interviewees referenced the Second World
War, which only ended two years prior to the 1947 floods, as an impor-
tant marker of British resilience to disaster. This historical connectivity
interwove ‘living with water’ as both a continuous activity and an exten-
sion of a wartime morale that must be quietly maintained. This primed
the flood narrative of 2007 to be a template of resilience in terms of
British national identity that conjoined flood memory with war memory
within the container culture of the nation:

A gentleman walked up to me and said in a German accent, ‘Tell

me, what is the difference between Germany and [Setting 1]? Four
years ago we had massive floods and there was looting and fighting.
I come to [Setting 1] and everybody has a smile, they’re out sweeping
the streets, emptying their houses of water. It’s so different – why?’
I said, ‘It’s the Dunkirk spirit!’
(Male, 66, Setting 1, describing the floods of 2007 for a
digital story)4

The floodplain residents of the areas we were focusing on were a source

of living and potentially transmittable memories of resilience, some of
whom had access to long histories of flood materialization (for exam-
ple through family or local community means). This materialization
was sometimes referred to by flood memory actors such as journalists
who would re-mediate images of the town’s abbey surrounded by water.
Thus, oftentimes stories of crisis and resilience were produced from
templates (as Andrew Hoskins (2004) defines mediating war through
templates) drawn from past mediations of crisis and disaster. Defined as
a ‘boom time’ for stories, the 2007 UK floods drew upon media archives
of flooding from 1947 onwards, in which regional television news orga-
nizations would use their local and embedded knowledge to re-mediate
their archival footage and repeat images over time. They also drew upon
their own previous stories from databases, repeated images and footage
 Joanne Garde-Hansen et al. 63

from past floods that they kept in their ‘treasure chests’ of rapid content.
As one television news journalist recalls:

We keep all the archive, we consolidate what we have; otherwise, we

have shelves and shelves of tapes, so what’s left on the shelf at the
moment [points to shelf] . . . which is . . . . we’ve probably got about 15
to 20 tapes which are in date order and so on there. We’ve got day 1
right though to a few months later about the destruction of a major
wildlife reserve from flooding.

We’ve got loads of this from 2007, the road always gets closed off and
cars always drive through it and they always get stuck. So it’s com-
monplace, we keep footage like this, in fact I think [shows footage to
researcher] so obviously now there’s a transit van coming through,
you can see, his engine burns out because it’s the waters going in
the engine. So you can see all the smoke piling out the back, so you
know, it’s TV gold really.
(Interview with BBC Media Producer,
15 May 2013, our emphasis)

This notion of media stories as treasure (a valuable archive) means that

previously constructed narrative templates are retrieved and reused in
the face of new crises.
Here the journalism connects vertically with the desire to mash up
human resilience and human crisis into memories of war (national
scale), the human spirit (personal scale) and regional stoicism (local
scale). The search in the media car for empty water bowsers finds a mes-
sage on one: ‘[W]e have a two-week old baby, we have no water, if you
have any let us know.’ This leads to an interview with a man without
water, but the search for another empty bowser that would fit the media
narrative of crisis proves difficult:

We had a deadline at lunchtime and we were driving back to the

office and I saw a little old lady sat in a deckchair reading a book with an
empty bucket next to a bowser and it was like a gift! And we went and
interviewed her and she was brilliant; it just really made the piece
because it was all about human interest.
(Interview with BBC Media Producer,
15 May 2013, our emphasis)

Constructing flood stories in 2007 was, for media organizations, a

matter of seeking out individuals who were able to connect memories
64 Rejoining through States of Emergency

vertically in time (through inter-scalarity) and draw them into a

spatial demonstration of crisis-resilience. While other researchers have
analysed the textual representations of flooding in news media, our
research with news producers required them to reflect critically upon
their practice. In his analysis of flood narratives in the UK, Furedi
calls for ‘a more systematic engagement with the historical dimen-
sion of disaster consciousness’ as an opportunity to ‘illuminate the
distinctive features of the contemporary response to adversity’ (2007,
p. 250). Rather than focus upon how flood narratives produce a disaster
consciousness historically and archivally through reference to textual
examples, we revealed how the response to adversity was produced
along a vertical axis by journalists keen to mash up a 1940s Blitz
spirit with a 2007 resilience (which our research showed was far from
reality):

I filmed him going through his house and the water had gone away so
it was all full of mud and goodness knows what and we were pulling
out drawers and the water would fall out and he pulled out a little [. . .]
and he said, ‘Oh God, that was my army . . . I was given in the Second
World War and you know, first thing you’ve got great television, great
emotion and he just laughed and went “so what can I do?” He said “I can’t
get upset about these things, it’s happened, if you got upset about it you’d
screw yourself up” and I think it’s important to show that resilience as
well against a guy who fought in the Second World War for God’s sake
so a bit of flooding isn’t going to help him but you had that tangible
human story that he was losing prize possessions and he was saying
at least I’m still here, I’m alright, and those stories are really strong.
When it comes to flooding I think those are the stories people want to hear.
They’re the people who have been affected and it’s all about human
interest.
(Interview with BBC Media Producer,
15 May 2013, our emphasis)

Vertical axis 2: Inheritable flood memory

In the process of the research, we encountered a whole range of means

of materializing memory and flood narratives. These differing means
were practised by and between individuals, families, small businesses,
local organizations, and various state and NGO agencies. They were
not necessarily connected to one another during a flood event in
 Joanne Garde-Hansen et al. 65

a horizontal mode of transmission, but were often made inheritable

within their specific contexts of production in their vertical transmis-
sions. All were capturing, with the potential for sharing, flood memories
through a range of modalities and with differing (even competing)
but related motivations. Many individuals had collections of images –
of their property (inside/outside), and of the floods in their locality.
These were variously captured by phone, digital and film camera and
stored on devices and/or in disconnected collections. They were often
‘archived’ more or less formally for retention, access and/or display
in a range of ways, and were readily shared with the researchers as
an opportunity to re-live, remember and anecdotalize the flood event
and its aftermath as an experience that was traumatic, exciting and a
spectacle. Photographs were, in some cases, part of a ‘scrapbook’-type
collection which included newspaper clippings and other material (for
example, archived in several flood-affected public houses), or were orga-
nized as evidence for loss adjusters and the insurance company. Other
more surprising and visceral means of materializing memory were also
evident.
One interviewee kept a decanter on her table which contained (after
over five years) a volume of turbid water from when the flood had
entered her property. As a memento this bottled floodwater was an
unexpected materialization of flood memory, but it demonstrated a
desire to literally catch the flood, to contain and incorporate it, and use
that memento as a story that demanded to be told. In other instances
people kept flood-damaged goods on display (especially books).
The very striking example of keeping floodwater in a decanter
bottle on the sideboard – objects normally associated with pride,
pleasure, celebration and hospitality – seemed a very private means
of remembering not easily shared across the community. Such pri-
vate remembering of flooding takes on micro-discursive and anecdotal
proportions that becomes intimate remembrances with researchers.
These materialized memorializations of flood events need to be
seen in a longer history of collective, very public, and local flood
remembering. For example, dated, publicly shown flood marks in
Setting 1’s abbey (see Figure 3.1), on town walls, commercial build-
ings and in public spaces were joined post-2007 by unofficial flood
marks of residents inside and outside their homes and gardens (see
Figure 3.2).
Photographs of maximum water level marks old and new – often near
each other, or with fingers pointing to where water had risen to – were
66 Rejoining through States of Emergency

Figure 3.1 Setting 1’s abbey flood level 2007. Official mark. Dated 22 July 2007
Source: Andrew Holmes

Figure 3.2 Unofficial flood marks of residents inside and outside their homes
and gardens
Source: Andrew Holmes

common icons of domestic flood photography and readily shared with

researchers. In some instances images of the water itself – of the most
distressing moments – rather than just its recorded level, were retained
and shared (see Figure 3.3).
 Joanne Garde-Hansen et al. 67

Figure 3.3 Screen capture from a home video July 2007: flood water surges
through the kitchen and living room of his house in [Setting 1]
Source: Courtesy of Jeff Clarke

I think that there is great value in re-telling the stories, having the
records. I just said to [husband] that, when we die, our kids are going
to fight over these folders. You know, they think it’s great . . .
(Female, 64, Setting 4)

Other material evidence of local flood history – in the form of flood

defence structures/technologies in local landscapes, both temporary
and permanent (stage boards, gauges, barriers and large flood walls),
add to the ongoing visual articulation of flooding as a local narra-
tive in the environment, drawing together past events with future
risks.
The challenges of really engaging with how people remember, how
memory works in the practice of everyday life, are daunting because
of the sheer richness of the processes involved and the increasing con-
nectedness of always-on media broadcast systems to citizens’ smart
phones. This means the affective, emotion-soaked and increasingly
technology-articulated business of moment-to-moment becoming in
situ is increasingly stored and accessible. Complex though this is,
it is clear that memory functions are not only in people’s heads
(a purely individual and mental process) but traced through inherited
and collective networks, and between the individual, their body and
68 Rejoining through States of Emergency

the devices, objects, texts, online information, the media and the wider
environment of bodies of water during a flood event.
In a forthcoming publication (Garde-Hansen et al.), we cover in more
depth the visual aspects of how flood memories are formed, captured
and shared in everyday life and how they change – how they might
fade away, or how they might be sustained, in particular landscapes
over time. This draws upon Pink’s (2001) notion of visual ethnography
to research the ecologies of memorial connections between people,
things, landscapes, images and text. Suffice to mention here, objects,
marks, texts, images (print and digital), the material landscape itself, all
impinge on memory function in ecological cycles of reinforcement and
contradiction. That this takes place differently in different contexts of
individual, family and community life and in specific places is evident
even if the flood event appears all-encompassing. The material land-
scape and the marks it bears are, we feel, one of the foundations of a
‘sense of place’, where, for example, the town of Setting 1 is seen to be
shaped by the river it stands on, as can be seen from the photos being
shared through Flickr and Facebook (for example the images at https://
www.flickr.com/groups/gloucestershire_floods/) during the event itself.
Thus, on the emerging horizontal axis of sharing flood memory in time,
we find a more connective, mobile and digital memory producing a dif-
ferent form of community resilience. According to José van Dijck, the
camera phone ‘permits entirely new performative rituals’ that deeply
affect ‘the way people socialize and interact and, by extension, the way
they maintain relationships and consolidate them into personal mem-
ory’ (2007, p. 110). Likewise, we found that the 2007 UK Floods offered a
nascent contribution to the practice of using social media to find flood
friends across and outside the region affected, as well as offering new
mediations for maintaining an intimate relationship to landscape, place
and water.

The horizontal axis: Connecting flood assemblages through

flood friends

Through online searches for photographs of flooding, we located images

from residents’ and tourists’ camera phones. These were not broadcast
quality and were unlikely to be selected for print media. They do pro-
vide a repository of remembrance for the event and were shared publicly,
and this sharing means that citizens can co-mediate the watery places
in which they live. Residents in two of our settings captured their mem-
ories through audio-visual modes and shared these on social network
 Joanne Garde-Hansen et al. 69

sites. Meaningful to them, they later archived these as images as part

of a Facebook group, which was then joined by over 200 members
(mostly from the local region, with some from other parts of England
as well as abroad). The researchers captured the narratives of 20 group
members and interviewed them two years later, on their memories
of flooding and their motivations for creatively remembering flooding
through Facebook and Flickr. The Facebook group The Un-appreciation
of the Gloucestershire Flooding Society was mostly for the benefit of the
members and their personal networks, as a means to share images and
messages of support and humour. It is important to note that social
media as a form of news and witnessing was in its infancy in 2007 and
unevenly distributed in the Settings. Young to middle-aged professionals
between 20 and 45 years old (an age group our previous interview-
ing technique struggled to engage) predominantly created much of the
imagery and commentary pertaining to the floods to be shared among
friends locally and globally.5
Much of the connective work across media was being undertaken by
individuals keen to re-purpose their flood imagery for multiple viewers.
As a female 37-year-old Business Process Analyst stated:

I sent some digital images of the first flood to BBC Gloucestershire

to be displayed on their website. I used some of the images I took
(printed copies) for insurance purposes but I still have all the digital
images on the hard drive of my computer as well as back up copies.
I have also displayed a small selection of images for each event in
albums on my Facebook page.
(Email questionnaire, 10 January 2011)

In our research, we found that like the flood marks materialized on

walls or the images on public display in public houses, the photos shared
online produced social effects. As one 27-year-old male IT manager
stated of the photos and video he captured on his phone:

My images were done for frivolous reasons, time-wasting uses rather

than for any documentary reason, so they may not be of much use
for the future . . . that said taking them has meant I’ve met up with
some of the other members of the group in ‘real life’ and gaining
friends is always a reason to do something.
(Email questionnaire, 14 January 2011)
70 Rejoining through States of Emergency

We have argued elsewhere, in our analysis of early modern accounts of

flooded landscapes alongside contemporary versions, that the practice
of connecting creatively with the landscape through embodied practices
of recording and remembering is not new:

As in the case of early modern examples of shared narratives, remem-

bering becomes the responsibility of a situated individual who then
is compelled to share those narratives inter-generationally and across
communities. The medium may be less important than the message
and yet the tools are used to maintain memory and landscape in a
creative relationship.
(Krause et al., 2013, p. 138)

Thus, our research of the horizontal axis of technologically enabled

flood memories derived from mobile phones and video cameras in
the domestic sphere and connected online to circulate as mobile per-
sonal accounts and perspectives found that citizens can be seen to
participate in creating common or customary – if often conflicting –
narratives and memories. Critically, it is for researchers to connect these
two axes such that the media and social technologies (flood mark-
ers, records, stories and images) that people use to record and share
memories of flooding are maintained in a mobile and creative rela-
tionship. Moreover, to consider water, flooding and wet landscapes as
culture(s) in themselves, and as vehicles for the flows and frictions of
cultural and communicative memory, offers new possibilities for envi-
ronmental policymakers seeking to engage communities in resilience
and flood risk.

Conclusion

One danger for ‘flood communities’ (if a community can be defined

in terms of flood risk) is that their memories and lived experiences
of flooding retreat into the background as time marches on. The
temporal pressure from government bodies, the insurance companies,
business/industry, healthcare providers and the marketplace, to move
forward, means that forgetting makes resilience affordable in the short
term (see Connerton, 2008). Alongside these factors, personal, emo-
tional and lived experiences of flooding are devalued vis-à-vis much
longer-term, scientific temporalities. With this in mind, one key area of
our research that we will explore in future is how, during the natural dis-
aster event and its immediate aftermath, citizens use social and online
media to create and connect stories of crisis and resilience as a form of
 Joanne Garde-Hansen et al. 71

community memory on a horizontal axis, but connected to the vertical

axis of deeper time, archival memory as an ongoing living with water as
a form of hydro-memory. In this chapter we have explored how experi-
ences of flooding are materialized and memorialized through complex
ecologies of practices, processes, devices and systems which span indi-
viduals, families, groups and institutions, and cross realms of landscape,
the web and domestic spaces, and how these ecologies have both verti-
cal (over time) and horizontal (in time) dimensions. They also connect
globally, as water circulates, flowing through nations.
The sheer variation and complexity in all this is challenging but also
necessary to embrace if we are to understand resilience on a range of
scales. As Rothberg (2009) has argued in another context of memory
studies, the vertical and horizontal modes of transmission, which we
have referred to through recourse to Pickering and Keightley’s (2012)
work, might be considered operationalized as ‘multidirectional mem-
ory’. Here, we would argue, the memo-techno-ecology of flood memory is
very much about ‘ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing and borrow-
ing’ (Rothberg, 2009, p. 3). This, suggests the low resource, high par-
ticipation, social impact of a sustainable flood memory starts with the
person and their developing relationship to stories of water. This does
not ignore the deliberate forgetting within flood communities, but it
does accept that new modes of retrievable flood heritage (in more acces-
sible, shareable and digital modalities) is now at work and can be grasped
at, recaptured and recirculated in the moment of flood crisis and after.
Such re-articulations of time as spatial (the vertical and horizontal axes
we have explored above) will be necessary if people increasingly perceive
disastrous events in terms of temporalities that far exceed their human
horizons. If communities’ memories of flooding, drought, extreme
weather, flood heritage and water histories are being deliberately for-
gotten by some in order to ‘move forward’, how can flood memory
be sustained, if not through increasingly mobile, dynamic and digital
memory technologies that become uncontained by media and memory?

Notes
1. The interdisciplinary research ran from 2010 to 2014 and comparatively
studied four different floodplain settings in the lower Severn valley,
Gloucestershire, UK, after the extreme July 2007 floods (hereafter ESRC
Sustainable Flood Memories). The project integrated the team’s expertise in
flood risk management, cultural geography, media and memory, social anthro-
pology and oral history.
2. The four floodplain settings comprised: (a) an ‘established’ community which
had a significant history of episodic extreme floods, regular experience
72 Rejoining through States of Emergency

of flooding and corresponding flood memories (Setting 1); (b) a ‘newer’

community which had had no previous history of flooding (built after pre-
vious extreme floods) but which was flooded in July 2007 (Setting 2); (c)
one floodplain city ward with a past history of extreme flooding including
recent experience in 2007, but with significant transient or intermittent resi-
dential patterns (Setting 3); and (d) a rural village setting with an established
community and a long history of flooding (Setting 4) over many centuries.
3. The Blitz is shorthand for that period (1940–41) during the Second World War
in which the German Luftwaffe bombed major British cities.
4. In terms of anonymity, we have changed names in this paper to basic details –
for example, ‘Male, aged 66’. We use a uniform/code description such as the
‘sex, age, setting’ system that is Setting 1, Setting 2, Setting 3 and Setting 4 to
reflect the regions of research that mapped onto the catchment areas.
5. In 2007 journalists did not yet have the speed of editing reports and sending
them to news organizations from a laptop, but instead had to use the satellite
van. The following year, they were tweeting more and sending reports from
their own laptops. Thus, the convergence of mobile memories of flooding and
the national and global media representations was not yet possible in 2007,
as it would be during the 2013–14 Somerset Levels floods.

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4
Digitizing the Memorial:
Institutional and Vernacular
Remembrances of the Taiwanese
921 Earthquake and Typhoon
Morakot
Chiaoning Su and Paige L. Gibson

Remembering natural disasters

Although advances in meteorology and seismology continue to improve

warning technologies, natural disasters remain a threat. Asia is the con-
tinent hit most often by natural disasters. Located in both the Pacific
Rim seismic zone and the western Pacific typhoon zone, Taiwan shares
the threats of its Asian counterparts. In the past two decades alone,
Taiwanese people have been faced not only with the 921 Earthquake
in 1999, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake that took 2,455 lives and caused
US$10.9 billion in economic losses; they also experienced Typhoon
Morakot in 2009 and saw its massive rain-triggered landslides, burying
more than 700 people in several rural villages and causing US$1.5 billion
in economic losses (Huang, 2009). Dubbed the ‘disasters of the century’
by the media, the 921 Earthquake and Typhoon Morakot were not only
responsible for the highest economic losses, physical destruction and
death toll of any natural disasters in Taiwan’s recent history, but they
also left a painful and unforgettable scar on both the landscape and the
people of Taiwan.
Many efforts have been made to respond to Taiwanese citizens’ needs
for memorials to grieve the communal loss caused by these two disas-
ters. For example, the 921 Earthquake Museum of Taiwan was built in
Wufeng District in 2001 as a national educational site to advocate infor-
mation on disaster prevention and self-protection. The Paper Dome, a

74
 Chiaoning Su and Paige L. Gibson 75

church building constructed using paper tubes as structural elements,

was completed in 2006 in Taomi Village (the epicentre) to mark the
devastation of the 921 Earthquake and to rejuvenate the damaged
area. A special multimedia exhibit ‘Recovery and Reconstruction after
Typhoon Morakot’ also became a permanent section in the National
Science and Technology Museum in 2014 to celebrate the undefeat-
able Taiwanese spirit in times of crisis. All these place-based memorials
exemplified the traditional practice of collective memorializing where,
by visiting a physical space, citizens mourn the passing of lives, search
for a moral justification of the event and restore the sense of security
and identity (Linenthal, 2001).
However, a new practice of collective remembering mediated by com-
puter networks has emerged in recent years and became especially
evident in 2009 after the development of two websites – the 921 Inter-
net Museum and 88news, an alternative journalist platform turned
memorial.1−3 Created on the tenth anniversary of the earthquake by
a government-sponsored foundation, the 921 Internet Museum can be
seen as an extension of the ‘ideological state apparatus’ (Althusser, 2009)
through which institutional mnemonic agents created a coherent narra-
tive to serve as the official memory of the 921 Earthquake. In contrast,
88news – developed immediately after the typhoon and maintained by
a grassroots movement – became the embodiment of multivocal, ver-
nacular voices in remembrance of Typhoon Morakot. While the two
memorials are not in direct competition with one another as they
memorialize different natural disasters, the juxtaposition nevertheless
illuminates the different ways retrospective and prospective memories
can be employed.
Using narrative analysis to examine the content and architectures of
the 921 Internet Museum and 88news, this chapter explores the polit-
ical function of retrospective and prospective memories. Created ten
years after the initial disaster, the 921 Internet Museum employs ret-
rospective memory as it reconstructs the past based on the needs of
the present. In doing so, the digital memorial pushes a message of
renewal through departure, a rupture created with the past in order
to move forward to the future. On the other hand, 88news, created
immediately after Typhoon Morakot, employs prospective memory to
archive the present for future remembrance. Thus 88news advocates
a message of remembering to recover, which reminds the future to
fulfil present promises. Consequently, this chapter contends that the
mnemonic agents (Zerubavel, 1996), the state and citizens, use the
digital memorial to serve the purpose of their particular prospective
76 Rejoining through States of Emergency

agendas by (re)creating the retrospective memory of a past disaster and

by archiving a present disaster, respectively.

Social memory from place to space

Remembering is a collective action of viewing a constructed past from

the lens of the present (Halbwachs, 1992). Zelizer (1995) contends that
collective memories ‘help us to make connection to each other over
time and space and to ourselves’ (p. 226). They help us forge a cohesive
narrative about our personal and collective self through time – past,
present and future. Collective memory does not simply exist in the
mind but is reified through communication (Zelizer, 1995; Zerubavel,
1996). Language was the first ‘tool’ enabling what Zerubavel (1996) calls
mnemonic transitivity, or the ability to share memories with others.
All collective memories are, thus, mediated in some way (Kansteiner,
2002). These memories become narratives, ‘which in turn may lead to
ritualized action – remembrance – and/or manifest object – memorial’
(Gibson & Jones, 2012, p. 112). In other words, collective memory is
experienced through the senses. Objects too transmit and store memory
(Zelizer, 1995), and this materiality makes it possible to access memories
beyond our personal experience (Landsberg, 2009). One need not have
had first-hand experience to lay claim to memory. Much of this mate-
rial culture serves no other purpose but to act as a mnemonic for future
generations (Zerubavel, 1996).
Memorials, the reification of memory into a material object, are foun-
dational to cultures around the globe. Often these memorials embody a
nation’s ideology (Blustein, 2008; Young, 1993) and therefore have the
political function of gaining and keeping power, the social function of
forming and solidifying a collective, and the cultural function of engen-
dering meaning-making processes (Zelizer, 1995). Traditionally, memo-
rials have been bound to place; they rely on immovable built structures.
However, remembrance, ultimately tied to narrative (Young, 1993), has
become increasingly portable. The evolution of space-based memorials
began with the written word and quickly evolved to include photog-
raphy, film, television and mobile technologies (Morris-Suzuki, 2005;
Zelizer, 2001). As Huyssen (1999, p. 205) contends, the ‘[migration] from
the real into the image, from the material into the immaterial, and ulti-
mately into the digitized computer bank’ was an inevitable evolution in
our (post)modern times.
The digital memorial, a category of space-based memorials
that includes commemoration on the internet, shares certain key
characteristics with physical place-based memorials but differs in
 Chiaoning Su and Paige L. Gibson 77

important ways. Three features are worth noting, namely durability,

intertextuality and interactivity. At first glance, both place-based and
space-based memorials appear indelible; however, both memorial types
have a life cycle, and digital memorials must contend with the par-
ticular lack of stability offered by the internet, which flows from viral
trend to viral trend. As Winter (2010) explains of place-based memo-
rials, which connote permanence in their physicality, sites of memory
are transitory and dependent upon commemorative acts. Without peo-
ple who practise remembrance, sites lose their link to the past, their
meaning and ultimately their ‘life’. Winter (2010) thus argues that the
life cycle of memorials can be conveyed in three stages of ritual: peo-
ple (1) give a site ‘commemorative form’ (p. 322) (that is, construct a
memorial and/or tie a ritual action to place), (2) routinize ritual actions
(that is, partake in that action at given intervals of time) and (3) either
transform or abandon the site of memory. The third stage repeats itself
until the memorial, ‘like the rest of us, inevitably fade[s] away’ (Winter,
2010, p. 323).
Like their place-based counterparts, space-based memorials also
require continued ritualized action for their maintenance. This is partic-
ularly difficult to accomplish with digital memorials, as the surface level
of the internet – the areas with which we engage regularly – gives prior-
ity to the new and novel, the latest viral trend rather than retrospective
memorials. In addition to this cultural maintenance, Foot, Warnick
and Schneider (2006) note the technological maintenance memo-
rial websites require, such as backups and platform migrations. Thus
both place-based and space-based digital memorials are ‘simultaneously
durable and fragile’ (Foot, Warnick & Schneider, 2006, p. 78).
Digital memorials are distinct, however, in the levels of intertextuality
and interactivity they can exhibit. Although place-based memorials
are also increasingly intertextual, the multimedia experience of digital
memorials, which is accomplished with greater ease and less expense
than place-based memorials, has the added advantage of a multilay-
ered experience of engagement offered by the hyperlink function. For
instance, one can select clips by theme and therefore become the curator
of one’s own personalized remembrance experience. The order in which
one experiences these memorials is not set in stone in the metaphor-
ical or literal sense. Furthermore, hyperlinks allow people to stumble
endlessly from one commemorative space to the next. Thus these sites
create an increasingly interconnected memory cluster. In this way, dig-
ital memorials hold to Rose’s (2011) contention that new media, as
content and mechanism, create a new genre of storytelling that is
nonlinear and participatory.
78 Rejoining through States of Emergency

Interactivity has also marked digital memorials in unique ways.

Whereas early iterations of the internet acted merely as ‘a new deliv-
ery mechanism for old media’ (Rose, 2011, p. 3), Web 2.0 constituted a
dramatic shift from static and univocal presentations of information to
an interactive co-construction of a variety of content (DiNucci, 1999).
The open, participatory capabilities of online memorials can transform
their visitors from spectators and co-celebrants into co-producers of
remembrance (Foot, Warnick & Schneider, 2006). Unlike the univocal
master narratives of so many traditional place-based memorials, digi-
tal memorials have the potential to give dynamic vernacular voices a
greater chance to be heard (Gibson & Jones, 2012; Hess, 2007; Petray,
2011). For example, Gibson and Jones (2012) argue that the technology
of digital memorials affords a more egalitarian plane of memory inter-
action in which participants partake in the (re)construction of memory
and re-mediation of their own collective identities. However, the tech-
nological possibility of such interactivity does not guarantee its practice.
The mnemonic battle (Zerubavel, 1996) between official and vernacular
interests (Bodnar, 1992) continues to be waged in online spaces. Early lit-
erature on digital memorials indicates three possibilities: empowerment
of vernacular memory (Hess, 2007); mutual influence of official and ver-
nacular memories, in which official and vernacular memorializing can
no longer be clearly distinguished (Foot, Warnick & Schneider, 2006);
or the tight boundaries of official memory remaining largely impene-
trable despite the technological possibility of engagement (Liew, Pang
& Chan, 2014). It is the underlying architecture of the digital memo-
rial that greatly determines which of the three possibilities comes to
fruition.
Based on the aforementioned theoretical foundation, this chapter
seeks to explore how digital memorials use retrospective and prospective
memory to remember natural disasters. Since most memory research has
focused on mass mediated man-made tragedies from a Western perspec-
tive, the findings of this research will add critical insights to current
social memory studies by expanding the still developing literature on
digital memorials, venturing into a largely underrepresented area of
natural disaster memory, and shifting the geopolitical focus of study
to Asia.

Digital memorial as narrative

This study relies on an in-depth comparative narrative analysis to assess

the ways in which the 921 Internet Museum and 88news construct
 Chiaoning Su and Paige L. Gibson 79

the meaning of the disasters for the Taiwanese people. Drawing on

Walter Fisher’s (1984) narrative paradigm, narrative analysis – which
combines components of structuralism/post-structuralism, critical the-
ory and hermeneutics – is based on the idea that humans are ultimately
storytellers shaping history, culture and character. Thus a narrative does
not denote a fictive storytelling format, but rather ‘a theory of sym-
bolic actions, words and/or deeds, that have sequence and meaning
for those who live, create, and interpret them’ (Fisher, 1984, p. 2).
To understand the meaning-making function of digitized commemo-
rative narratives, in which both the 921 Internet Museum and 88news’
architectures must also be understood as narrative, this study draws on
Foot, Warnick and Schneider’s (2006) conceptual framework of web-
based memorials. Foot, Warnick and Schneider (2006) propose seven
dimensions: (1) The object or focus of commemoration – Is the sub-
ject of the memorial general/specific, micro/macro, abstract/concrete?
(2) Coproduction – Is the memorial the result of single or collabora-
tive efforts? (3) Voice – Does the memorial provide a singular master
narrative or a multivocal narrative? (4) Immediacy – Was the memorial
carefully planned over time or a spontaneous reaction to the event in
question? (5) Fixity – Is the content of the memorial static and fixed or
dynamic and fluid? (6) Intended audience – Who is the target audience
of the web memorial? (7) Relational position of victim – Are victims
imagined or positioned as an individual loss or a generalized other?
With the use of narrative analysis and the conceptual framework out-
lined above, this study examines how the mnemonic agents use the
narratives of digital memorials for their prospective agendas. How does
the Taiwanese state use the narrative of the 921 Internet Museum to
(re)create the retrospective memory of the earthquake, and for what
prospective agenda? How do the Taiwanese people use the narratives
of 88news to construct a memory of the present recovery from the
typhoon for their future prospective agenda?

Serving the future through retrospective and prospective

memory

Emphasizing different digital memorial characteristics, the architectures

of these sites construct different narratives that shape the way the
content is created, used and remembered. Using Foot, Warnick and
Schneider’s (2006) framework, similarities can be identified between the
two sites. For example, they both place their focus of commemoration
at the macro-social level that is typically directed at a general public
80 Rejoining through States of Emergency

audience. However, they differ on the points of coproduction, voice,

immediacy, fixity and relational position of the victim. Examining these
differences, this analysis will elucidate the ways in which the sites con-
vey a different understanding of the past, its role in the present and its
uses for the future.

The 921 Internet Museum: Remembering to forget

The 921 Internet Museum is a government-owned (that is, owned by the
Taiwanese Natural Disaster Relief Foundation) website created for the
tenth anniversary of the 921 Earthquake, in 2009. Within the site, dis-
aster memory serves both informational and public relations purposes
for the government. The inclusion of a logo/slogan, an opening Flash
video and a 27-minute film in the 921 Internet Museum, manifests the
web producer’s strategies and resources of using intertextual media to
construct the official 921 Earthquake memory.
Upon navigating to the site, the visitor first encounters the logo of
the 921 Internet Museum, which consists of three elements. On the
left side is the numerical number 921 written in the Chinese calligra-
phy style with ‘1’ replaced by the silhouette of Taiwan. This seemingly
trite substitution critically reflects the agenda of one nation, one nar-
rative, one memory. The right side of the logo echoes the physicality
of a place-based museum as the three Chinese characters of museum
( ) are artistically set in relation to the two characters of the inter-
net ( ) in a manner that suggests a built structure (that is, the Internet
wraps in cable-like fashion around the museum, creating an architec-
tural frame). Importantly, the built structure symbolized is that of a
house, which speaks to the common notion of the nation as a fam-
ily as well as a reflection of the individual homes that were primarily
affected by the earthquake. Finally, the bottom slogan reads, ‘Move for-
ward from 921 and see the new Taiwan’, which sets the tone for the
official narrative of renewal through departure, a retrospective use of
memory.
The logo gives way to a Flash video, a carefully organized vignette
scored by a quietly hopeful melody and accompanied by an inspira-
tional text, which further supports the message of renewal visually,
textually and audibly. In the opening scene, visitors see a series of debris
photos, deliberately presented in black and white to heighten its affec-
tive function, bringing them back to 1999. Visitors are thus invited to
‘enter’ a particular temporal and spatial arena of remembrance. The fol-
lowing text is emotional but also instructional as it frames how the 921
Earthquake and its aftermath should be remembered. It reads:
 Chiaoning Su and Paige L. Gibson 81

We all wish for a happy and peaceful life. This wish seems to be so
ordinary but became so difficult to achieve after that cruel disaster
happened in 1999. In a matter of seconds, we lost our loved ones
and our home. Most importantly, we lost hope. With the love and
support from so many selfless people, we finally found the courage to
stand up and move forward. We become the flowers blooming out of
the debris.

Using words like we and our, this text establishes a very particular
form of remembrance for the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1982),
in this case the Taiwanese, commemorating abstract loss and heroism
rather than specific and personal grief. Even though the textual descrip-
tion seems to suggest an anonymous loss or generalized victims and/or
heroes, a close reading of the visual presentation reveals a political fram-
ing, as representations of ordinary citizens are lacking. The images of a
generalized other as seen through a hunchbacked elderly citizen stag-
gering down damaged roads and a group of orphaned children give way
to a political face as seen through images of the President weeping, the
Premier comforting the relatives of the deceased, and the Mayor and
a congressman celebrating a survivor’s birthday. As Choi (2008) sug-
gests, ‘narratives are functional devices through which past events are
efficiently politicized to accommodate power relations in the present’
(p. 371). Inserting the political face helps the state reassert itself as the
authority to tell the story as well as redeem itself from imperfect disaster
management and reconstruction.
The short film When the Rain Is Over, prominently featured on the site,
further adds to the narrative of renewal through departure. Through a
fictional character who represents the generalized victim, the film fol-
lows the protagonist in her struggle but ultimate triumph of moving
forward to put forth a metaphor of national renewal. The film starts
with Sunny ( ), a young girl who lost her parents and home to the
earthquake, being adopted by a family friend, a photographer. In the
beginning, Sunny struggled to see herself as part of this new family
and kept going back to the ruins of her former home in search of
objects of memory. Ten years later, Sunny has overcome her traumatic
past experience and asks to take a ‘family photo’ with the photogra-
pher’s family before her departure to a new city, where she will go to
university.
This film was tailored to fit and reiterate the official memory of
the 921 Earthquake. Narrating the natural disaster through the routine
cycle of Mother Nature (for example, the sun will rise after the storm),
82 Rejoining through States of Emergency

this film makes the inexplicable massive death and loss caused by the
earthquake digestible by having the viewer engage with a single indi-
vidual. However, in doing so, the narrative distracts the viewer with a
sanitized version of disaster remembrance – perhaps made acceptable
by the temporal distance from the event (ten years). Sunny seems to be
the only one affected by the 921 Earthquake. The photographer’s house
remains neat and untouched by the natural disaster despite its proxim-
ity to the epicentre. The boys from the neighbourhood play in the ruins
as if they have already moved past the shock of the earthquake. Despite
her initial struggle, Sunny also leaves the traumatic past behind and
becomes a symbol of renewal – conveyed in her name, her acceptance
of a new familial setting, as well as her departure from the family scene
for the next stage of life. It is the distinct departure from the past that
becomes the core message of the official memory of the 921 Earthquake.
It is remembrance with the aim of forgetting upon which the notions of
recovery, rebirth and a foreseeable future depend.
Other key features in the 921 Internet Museum include (1) an archive
of governmental documents – organized by governmental agencies
including the President’s Office (for example, the official state of emer-
gency declaration signed by the President, the President’s diary and so
on); (2) a selection of news stories culled exclusively from the Taiwanese-
owned China Times; and (3) interviews with key contributors covering
various power positions in Taiwan, including the then President Lee
Teng-hui, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Superintendent of
a leading hospital, the Captain of the National Taiwanese Rescue Team,
and other political and religious leaders. These narratives are archived to
expand the horizon of the disaster memory. However, given their insti-
tutional nature, they supplement the grand narrative of renewal without
adding dynamic vernacular local meanings.
The 921 Internet Museum does attempt to mimic interactivity and
engage vernacular voices, but the effort suffers from both site-imposed
and self-imposed censorship. Following the prominent banners for both
the film and the interview sections (with political figures), a small box
prompts citizens to ‘Write your 921 story and make it part of history’.
A separate comment section, which is relegated to the bottom cor-
ner of the website, allows visitors to post comments, but the viewer
is first met with a lengthy list of rules and restrictions. Among these
rules are proscriptions of tone and content (that is, comments can-
not be of a negative nature) to help form constructive lessons from a
destructive disaster. Neither attempt successfully incorporates vernac-
ular voices. The contributions to the ‘write your story’ project were
 Chiaoning Su and Paige L. Gibson 83

only briefly featured on the site; and inevitably the comment section
suffered from lack of participation, as a total of only 21 comments were
posted, most of which have now been hidden from view. Visitor con-
tributions therefore did not become ‘part of history’ after all. Similar to
Liew, Pang and Chan’s (2014) findings for a state-initiated digital memo-
rial in Singapore, the 921 Internet Museum may, then, be considered ‘as
a more distanced and anonymous official channel where users would
feel more guarded in sharing and depositing their digital memories’
(p. 770). The missed opportunities for public engagement need not nec-
essarily be malicious (that is, the state apparatus intentionally silencing
dissenting voices), but could simply reflect the bureaucratic difficulty
of encouraging diverse voices and technological issues of maintaining a
web presence.
The 921 Internet Museum has undergone minimal revisions since its
launch in August 2009 and remains a largely static memorial site. The
state’s failure to successfully incorporate the vernacular voice ensured
its abbreviated life cycle; the commemorative acts Winter (2010) argues
are so vital to the life of a memorial were largely absent. Thus the 921
Internet Museum remains a static part of a digital landscape of remem-
brance, which is there for those who seek it out deliberately, but which
is otherwise forgotten. Perhaps the very character of the singular mono-
lithic memory narrative the site proffers led to its early demise. In other
words, pushing a message of renewal through departure may in fact have
discouraged the ritual action needed to keep the digital memorial alive.
Remembrance was built upon a script of forgetting, and the future it
imagined depended on a rupture with the past; it remembered in order
to forget.

The 88news: Remembering to recover

A small group of journalists quickly created the 88news after Typhoon
Morakot (8 August 2009) in order to record the aftermath and recon-
struction in rural villages – a largely underrepresented topic in the
mainstream media. Running on viewer donations, which went toward
the salaries of three full-time journalists, the site produced 1,545 news
articles and engendered 8,524 comments over four years. Unlike most
digital memorials, which are filled with retrospective memory and com-
memorative narratives, 88news has been future-oriented and forward-
looking since its inception. These alternative journalists, consisting of
professors, student volunteers and freelance journalists, had three aims
in creating the site: (1) they sought to provide a space for the voices
of the victims to be heard; (2) they wished to operate as a think tank
84 Rejoining through States of Emergency

for reconstruction, with the hope of forging understanding between the

government and the affected people, especially aboriginal tribes; and
(3) they wanted to act as a source for governmental response to future
disasters. Thus 88news functions as a human-interest and advisory
mouthpiece, aimed at the government and the victim communities, for
consideration in future reconstruction plans.
The first feature visitors notice upon entering the site is a box with
three short columns of text offset from the rest of the front page by
shape and color. The first panel features a counter, counting the num-
ber of days since Typhoon Morakot. Next to the counter one can read
the slogan, which consists of four Chinese characters, ‘Remain watch-
ful. Help each other’ ( ). Using a full stop between these four
characters, the producer of the text dissects the Chinese idiom into two
parts. The former part is used to refer to the greater mission of journalists
who are constantly on the lookout for ( ) and seeking out ( ) news sto-
ries, while the latter indicates the formation of a community based on
mutual support ( ). Together this first panel reveals the fundamental
position of 88news as a space by and for community (that is, alternative
journalists looking to rebuild affected communities).
This community, however, is not the abstract and anonymous online
community the 921 Internet Museum summoned. Whereas the 921
Internet Museum aims to (re)construct a general Taiwanese community,
88news reversed the power hierarchy and created an alternative offline
community with the victims and their social circles at its core. Thus,
looking at the third panel, an RSS feed of the most recent comments,
the contour of this community is formed through user comments. Mes-
sages in this panel are posted in reverse chronological order, with the
most recent topping the list. A clear narrative shift can be found if
one reads the messages from the bottom to the top. The oldest com-
ments consist of self-protection information for the typhoon season
combined with bitter critiques of the government’s inefficient disaster
management. Over time, the comments demonstrate how users became
aware of the site through friends, which speaks to the larger impact
this site had in offline communities. The most recent comments are
filled with gratitude and appreciation from visitors to the site’s produc-
ers for their valiant efforts in archiving the disaster from an alternative
(that is, bottom-up) perspective. As the more than 1,500 articles and
8,500 comments attest, 88news helped forge a virtual community cen-
tred around the victims and citizens impacted by and recovering from
Typhoon Morakot rather than the power elite so dominant in the 921
Internet Museum.
 Chiaoning Su and Paige L. Gibson 85

The middle panel, ‘Mutual Construction of a Community’, which

is highlighted in bold red, further reinforces the online space as part
of an offline community recovery effort. Here the webmaster features
announcements and articles publicizing sales of seasonal jams and pas-
tries made using ingredients from damaged farms to help these farming
communities return to their pre-disaster levels of production. Thus
88news tells a story of recovery rather than rebirth. The goal is to
help the community return to its pre-disaster way of life, to heal the
past rather than depart from it. Similarly, the narrative is one of re-
establishing continuity rather than the narrative of renewal through
departure so heavily pushed by the 921 Internet Museum.
Other key features of the site include the news coverage of survivors’
daily lives in the aftermath, which is organized geographically by vil-
lage, community reconstruction efforts, special anniversary coverage,
and interviews with survivors and victims’ families. The most promi-
nent among these, however, is offset by bright yellow and announces
the transformation of the site from a vibrant platform for citizen news
to a sombre digital monument. Indeed, three years in, 88news slowly
ceased to provide updates before officially stopping the production of
new coverage with the fourth anniversary of the typhoon on 27 August
2013. Although the contributions have stopped, the creators of the site
write that what they have produced over the last four years ‘will con-
tinue to stay in our hearts and become an eternal archive’. Much like
Gilewicz’s (2014) examination of newspaper final editions, 88news uses
this final post as a self-reflexive space with the aim of creating a prospec-
tive memory, a call for the future to look back at this site to ‘[remember]
to accomplish that which has not yet been accomplished’ (p. 4). How-
ever, the last user comment, made on 25 August 2014, questions the
hopeful sentiment left by the web producers in their departing post.
The user writes,

This announcement has been made about a year ago and slowly the
memories here are being lost.
This also indicates the difficulty of the [offline] memories of eighty-
eight slowly fading away to the forgotten.

The commemorative acts of news production and community discourse

on the site gave 88news its life and meaning for the victim communities.
With ritual acts of production stopped, it has lost its life and become
another static blip on the landscape of digital memorials. While the
transformation of 88news from a vibrant community to a monument
86 Rejoining through States of Emergency

signalled the end of its life cycle, it still remains as an archive of

vernacular voices and a model of natural disaster remembrance.

Concluding remarks

Despite its employment of intertextuality, the 921 Internet Museum, a

carefully planned commemorative online space, parallels the univocal
and often sanitized remembrance of state-initiated, place-based memo-
rials. On the other hand, 88news, which had no intention to act as a
digital memorial in its inception, vibrantly archives the disaster through
vernacular voices, capitalizes on the interactivity afforded by the dig-
ital memorial and fosters the connection between online and offline
communities. Although both memorials ceased to provide new content
and dialogue, indicating the fragile durability of digital memorials, and
became static in the digital landscape, these digital memorials provide a
unique opportunity to understand the construction of retrospective and
prospective memories of natural disasters.
Creating the master narrative of renewal through departure, the 921
Internet Museum eulogizes the difficult past to serve the present needs
of strengthening the Taiwanese imagined community and thus elim-
inate any dissent. Indeed, the 921 Internet Museum set out from its
inception to provide an exclusively epideictic rhetoric, particularly the
ceremonial speech from the state. As Polletta (2003) has argued, the divi-
sion of epideictic and deliberative rhetoric so often performed by the
state works to depoliticize (that is, tame) memory. Epideictic rhetoric
gives the event being remembered a sense of finality – puts an end to
the dissent those memories represented – and leaves the political elite
unchallenged (Polletta, 2003). ‘Merely remembering is as dangerous as
forgetting’ (Polletta, 2003, p. 213, emphasis in original). Commemora-
tion should not replace political action; it should inspire it (Polletta,
2003). However, the 921 Internet Museum presents the institutional
inclination to mimic the power relationship of physical memorials in
an online space and fills this closed system with overused symbols and
tropes of epideictic speech.
The overuse of epideictic rhetoric on the 921 Internet Museum
impedes a critical understanding of the past for present and future
remembrance. Erasing all the essential elements of the past (for example,
the voices of dissent, the victims’ testimonials), it remembers in order
to forget – a phrase introduced by Zelizer (1998), but used quite literally
here as an effort to bring closure to the past so a new future may begin.
 Chiaoning Su and Paige L. Gibson 87

In effect, this digital memorial ‘do[es] the work that we expect eulogies
to do’ (Pramaggiore, 2010, p. 81). Once remembered, the past is buried.
In other words, the 921 Internet Museum uses retrospective memory to
impose discontinuity and open a new chapter.
In contrast, 88news seeks to repair the rupture caused by Typhoon
Morakot with a message of remembering to recover. This digital memo-
rial does not provide a monolithic, cohesive narrative in the way the 921
Internet Museum does. Instead it works through the multivocal vernac-
ular narratives to provide a sense of connectedness that helps survivors
find their place in the disaster memory. 88news is a space by and for
the people; it enters the communities – living, offline communities –
most impacted by the disaster. In doing so and emphasizing their mun-
dane life in the aftermath, it speaks to individual losses and the real as
opposed to ideal progression of life after disaster. Unlike the 921 Inter-
net Museum, which has the luxury of time past and simply contains
the trauma of the earthquake in the past, 88news works as an archive
of the present, which is still very much defined by the task of mending
wounds and recovery efforts.
Establishing itself as a resource for future disaster management efforts,
88news constructs the present so that future Taiwanese may look back
and use the site as a ‘[reminder] of collective commitments, promises,
and intentions’ (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2011, p. 216). Thus 88news
exemplifies the concept of prospective memory – present constructions
of the present for future memory uses (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2011).
However, despite its efforts to engage users and provide a space for delib-
erative speech, the call for future remembrance has largely remained
unanswered. Activity on the site has become almost non-existent since
the final post on 27 August 2013. This begs the question, is it still
prospective memory when the future for which the present was archived
does not return to fulfil the commitment? Is prospective memory simply
the product of wishful thinking? The presentist nature and ephemer-
ality of new media certainly complicates digital memorials’ usage of
prospective memory.

Notes
1. http://921.gov.tw/.
2. http://www.88news.org/.
3. Alternative journalism provides a space to discuss events not otherwise cov-
ered in mainstream media or offers different perspectives from mainstream
journalists on issues that are covered (Hass, 2004).
88 Rejoining through States of Emergency

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5
Geolocating the Past: Online
Memories after the L’Aquila
Earthquake
Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi

Remembering L’Aquila from below

Since the early ‘90s, the widespread adoption of digital media has had
a profound impact on the form, content and ways of distribution of
individual and collective memories. The new ICTs and the internet
have exponentially increased and facilitated sharing, storing and retriev-
ing data, experiences and memories. Social platforms provide space for
voices that would not reach the broader public through traditional
mainstream media, offering a unique opportunity to understand a cer-
tain event from a non-institutional point of view, and in this way,
challenging the hegemonic narratives of the past.
In this chapter, we focus our attention on ‘Noi, L’Aquila’ (in English,
‘We, L’Aquila’ – http://www.noilaquila.com), a local memory website
created in L’Aquila (Italy) some months after the 2009 earthquake,
where city dwellers can write and share memories, stories and pho-
tographs. In contrast to the excess of mediated depictions of the tragedy
and its aftermath produced by the national and international news
networks, this project aims to collect the narratives of ordinary peo-
ple directly through their voices and thus contributes to preserving the
social memory of the city before the disaster.
In order to explore the users’ practices and investigate the role of
‘Noi, L’Aquila’ in storing, processing and sharing community memo-
ries after a collective tragedy, we collected and analysed all the posts
written on the website from the launch of the platform until the end of
November 2011 (N=278). Through an integrated approach, based on a
quantitative and a qualitative analysis of the narratives, we carried out

90
 Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi 91

a content analysis to identify the most common categories of discourse;

investigate the narrative characteristics of the memories and their rela-
tionship with the past; and examine the kind of location individuals
find important to remember.
The chapter is structured as follows: in the next section, we outline
the current literature on digital memory and summarize the theoretical
framework used for analysing the findings from ‘Noi, L’Aquila’. We then
present the key characteristics of the local memory website and the
aims and methods adopted in the research. Finally, we illustrate the
main results that emerged from the content analysis of the platform and
draw conclusions that might help in developing similar, future memory
projects.

Mediated memories in the internet age: A literature

overview

The spread of the internet has introduced significant changes in the

process of negotiation, circulation and storage of the collective mem-
ory, giving a renewed impulse to the debate regarding practices and
strategies of sharing and collecting narratives. Moreover, the availabil-
ity of digital spaces for publishing content, both narrative and visual,
has favoured an online ‘memory boom’ (Assmann, 2010; Hoskins, 2011;
Winter, 2000), which is characterized by new features: (a) personal
memory, considered as a cognitive process, is largely externalized and
supported by practices oriented to seek information; (b) the process
of remembering can be shared and co-constructed with other users,
even if it is about personal experiences; and (c) a progressive process
of dematerialization of tools traditionally associated with the practice
of remembering (such as inkjet photos or standard videotapes), which
leads to an increasingly vulnerable and volatile memory. Van Dijck uses
the definition ‘mediated memories’ to identify these acts of memory
as well as the memory products that result from them (2007). From a
sociological perspective, the debate deals with how digital media inter-
vene in the process of construction, negotiation and sedimentation of
both autobiographical and collective memory. In this sense, it is pos-
sible to look at the Web and, in particular, at online social platforms,
both as a powerful archive of narrative fragments (De Carli, 1997) and
as a context of negotiation and co-construction of shared memory
(Ferron & Massa, 2011). In other words, the internet can be analysed
as a place of memory and a context of remembering. It represents a
space characterized by specific software architectures that afford the
92 Rejoining through States of Emergency

users a limited range of behaviours and are able to shape or enforce

certain practices, such as publication content (Lessing, 1999). According
to Burdick et al. (2012, p. 29), these ‘artifacts created by digital technolo-
gies [. . .] are comparatively different – in terms of material composition,
authorship, meaning-making, circulation, reading, viewing, navigation,
embodiment, interactivity and expressivity – from artifacts created by
the world of print’. This difference depends mainly on the properties
of the online content: persistence, replicability, scalability and search-
ability (boyd, 2010, p. 45). These characteristics affect the availability
of content and its preservation. Moreover, if we study digital memories
we must also consider the characteristics of the platform adopted by
the users. In fact, memory is, in some cases, a result of the practice of
browsing online, while, in other cases, it is the aim that guides the pub-
lication of content. For example, Wikipedia, the popular encyclopaedia
written and edited by the users, can be an unexpected space for the
negotiation and the participatory construction of memory. In such
context, ‘the collective memories are formed in a discursive and sit-
uated way, through the discussion, research and selection of relevant
information, the debate of different perspectives and the interaction
among users through the tools provided by the platform’ (Ferron, 2013,
p. 146).
Whether it is a mere opportunity for storage or a voluntary reconstruc-
tive practice, the internet hosts and provides opportunities for memory
visualization, as well as objectification and externalization of narra-
tives (Boje, 2001; Frostig, 2014). According to some scholars, thanks
to the possibilities of sharing narratives, web spaces encourage both
individual and collective empowerment in local communities and, as
highlighted by Rappaport, ‘the ability to tell one’s story, and to have
access to and influence over collective stories, is a powerful resource’
(1995, p. 802). Through digital social platforms, people can collaborate
in the creation of their own stories and, at the same time, partici-
pate in the discovery, creation and enhancement of their narratives,
at both a community and a personal level (Carpentier, 2009; Eekeren,
2012; Lambert, 2002). In fact, online social platforms offer a new con-
text for both individual and collective remembrances. As highlighted
by Maj and Riha, ‘although this memory is still personal or local, it also
reaches a global aspect creating new possibilities and threats for informa-
tion seekers, users or distributors. In this context, data storage becomes
more than just archiving – it acquires the power of knowledge’ (2009,
p. 2). This grassroots participation involves the incorporation of emo-
tional elements of self-expression into a creative content production and
 Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi 93

usually the users appreciate both the process of engaging in this kind of
production and the final results (Burgess, 2006). Furthermore, sharing
experiences online can have affective resonances and also contribute to
a growth in self-confidence (Klaebe & Foth, 2006) and self-awareness
(Foth, 2006), involving, at the same time, participants in new practices
characterized by a high democratic potential (De Kreek & Van Zoonen,
2013).
Some scholars argue that the contemporary explosion of memory
websites and, generally, of online spaces in which memories are medi-
ated, represents a reaction to the lack of offline real environments for
memory (Ringas et al., 2011) and a pivotal resource for the well-being
of the city and its residents (Stillman & Johanson, 2007). In this sense,
local memory websites, combining digital media, memory and local-
ity, offer citizens a space to collect and share their narratives about
particular places or experiences in their city, helping to maintain an
indigenous story (Lissonnet & Nevile, 2007) and contributing to the
social sustainability of a given community. De Kreek and Van Zoonen
(2013) have conducted a review of several case studies in order to sys-
tematize the terminology referred to in the benefits of the adoption of
local memory websites. In their analysis, they propose a framework that
summarizes the main aspects involved in the empowerment process
when people use this kind of collective platform. Their model (illus-
trated in Figure 5.1) identifies three levels of analysis, each of which
describes the effects of the digital participation and storytelling.
At the micro level, we find words referring to the sphere of individual
benefits, such as self-expression, pleasure, intimacy and self-confidence.
At the meso level, we distinguish expressions that describe group ben-
efits, such as the common sense of place and the sense of inclusion,
which are experienced by narratively describing and co-constructing
(and co-creating) the urban elements and contexts, such as squares,
streets, public buildings and so on. Finally, at the macro level, attention
is focused on community processes and benefits. More specifically, this
level includes the construction of the so-called ‘community memory’
which is ‘the collective representation of past events and experiences
that leave traces in the appearance of the built environment and con-
tribute to a shared socio-cultural understanding of residents in a given
locale’ (Klaebe & Foth, 2007, p. 145). Moreover, we can identify other
elements, such as cultural citizenship, in which it is possible to recognize
not only a look at the past, but also activation toward the future.
In this contribution, we apply the model proposed by De Kreek
and Van Zoonen (2013) to the analysis of a specific type of mediated
94 Rejoining through States of Emergency

MACRO

MESO
Inclusion Intimacy
Socio-cultural Cultural
Community understanding Reflective citizenship
Community identity
practice
memory Common MICRO
sense of Individual Creative
Historical
place consciousness
sense of Individual community
place identity
Self- Cultural
Social expression Pleasure value
history Intercultural
Vernacular Pride
literacy awareness
Social
Resilience Voice
Self- Self- Individual
connectivity
awareness confidence social
Ownership network
Social learning
Self- Presence in
Co-creation efficacy media
landscape

Social Collective
networks Social action
capital

Community
capacity

Figure 5.1 Three levels for analysing the effects of interventions using a local
memory website (De Kreek & Van Zoonen, 2013)

memory: the memory of natural disasters. These traumatic events shock

the inner core of community identity, highlighting collective needs and
leading to considerable and persistent changes (Farinosi & Micalizzi,
2013). We therefore argue that traumatic events may constitute serious,
collective stress situations (Barton, 1969) that compromise the regular
mechanisms of sharing narratives with other people. In cases of disas-
ter, trauma can cause memory obliteration (Stillman & Johanson, 2007),
and narratives are fragmented, incomplete and focused mostly on some
flashes (Brown & Kulik, 1977). Moreover, very often people involved
in the tragedy need a long time to process the experienced trauma.
In a narrative perspective, trauma, in fact, is a disruptive experience,
which constitutes a sort of turning point in a personal biography (Paez
et al., 1997). When a big disaster happens, it generates the paradoxical
 Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi 95

situation in which an unconscious need to share emotions, feelings

and anecdotes about the event (Paez et al., 1997) coexists with a
psychological block, caused by the trauma, that inhibits the ability
to speak about the specific experience (Benjamin, 1936). In the con-
text of big traumatic events, such as natural disasters, wars, genocides,
terrorism and so on, the interaction between individual memory and
collective memory constitutes a delicate element of analysis. Accord-
ing to Ventura, ‘After an earthquake there is both a form of collective
repression, necessary to continue to inhabit the earth, and an individ-
ual one, with the refusal to communicate the experience [. . .] in front of
an earthquake people remain passive, dismayed’ (2012, p. 25). However,
from a narrative perspective, storytelling can represent a powerful and
useful tool for the processing of trauma. Producing narratives, in fact,
constrains the subject to give order to the episodes, rethink them and
integrate the trauma into one’s personal biography (Demetrio, 1996).
Moreover, narrating, both at the personal and collective levels, is a way
to give sense and meaning to the event, to open new perspectives and
support personal and collective identity (Batini, 2009).
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that even when large groups of
individuals share traumatic psychological effects, the idea of collec-
tive memory regarding trauma is quite controversial. Kansteiner, for
example, suggests that the concept of trauma

neither captures nor illuminates the forces that contribute to the

making and unmaking of collective memories. Even in cases of so-
called delayed collective memory (as in the case of the Holocaust
or Vietnam), the delayed onset of public debates about the meaning
of negative pasts has more to do with political interest and oppor-
tunities than the persistence of trauma or with any ‘leakage’ in the
collective unconscious.
(Kansteiner, 2002, p. 187)

In fact, collective memory is always mediated and for this reason, tra-
ditional mainstream media have always had a great responsibility in the
process of its construction (regarding the specific case of L’Aquila, see
Hajek, 2013). In this sense, the internet can be perceived as a revolution,
providing a space to non-institutional actors and agencies to narrate
their experiences and be involved in the process of co-construction
of a shared memory made up of more scalable, replicable, searchable
and permanent fragments (boyd, 2010), which flank the official and
hegemonic narrative of the events.
96 Rejoining through States of Emergency

The local memory platform of ‘Noi, L’Aquila’

An earthquake represents a moment of destruction and deep crisis for

the entire community, a catastrophic event that subverts the normal
order of things, creating a widespread sense of uncertainty and a total
change in the daily routine (Cattarinussi & Pelanda, 1981; Dynes et al.,
1987; Quarantelli, 1998). Hitting both the personal and socio-political
sphere, an earthquake destabilizes the entire social system. In many
cases, such phenomena can also lead to the loss of traditional meet-
ing places that become unusable and/or inaccessible due to the damage
caused by earthquakes. This is exactly what happened in L’Aquila (Italy)
on the night of 6 April 2009, when it was hit by a 6.3Mw earthquake.
It caused the deaths of 309 people and did extensive damage to a large
part of the medieval centre, the social, political and cultural heart of
L’Aquila. In the days immediately following the earthquake, the city
centre was declared a ‘red zone’ and for security reasons was closed off
to citizens. Two years later the situation had not substantially changed:
most parts of the city centre were still under military control and access
was still denied to citizens (for an in-depth and more detailed analy-
sis of the post-earthquake situation, see Carnelli et al., 2012; Minardi
& Salvatore, 2012). In this dramatic scenario Google Italy, in collab-
oration with the City of L’Aquila, the ANFE (National Association of
Migrant Families), the University of L’Aquila and the British architect
Barnaby Gunning, decided to create ‘Noi, L’Aquila’ (in English, ‘We,
L’Aquila’ – http://www.noilaquila.com). Primarily based on a naviga-
ble digital map, it constitutes an innovative local memory platform, a
fusion between physical and digital spaces, which acquires greater rele-
vance when the mnemonic geographies reconstruct an area destroyed
by the 2009 earthquake that is still partially inaccessible to citizens.
According to its developers, ‘Noi, L’Aquila’ has a twofold objective:

to remember the past of the city and preserve the memory of L’Aquila
before the earthquake, in order to pass it down to future generations;
and inspire the future of L’Aquila, mobilizing the efforts of the Italian
and international community to boost the project of reconstruction
of the city through the use of 3D models.
(Noi, L’Aquila, 2011)

‘Noi, L’Aquila’ represents a pilot project of a larger global platform

that Google aims to make available in all communities affected by
similar catastrophes (Di Pietro, 2011; Longo, 2011). Providing 360◦
 Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi 97

street-level imagery of the damaged areas captured by Street View before

the earthquake, Google hopes to help dwellers to rediscover – albeit dig-
itally – the feeling of walking along alleys that are no longer viable,
to see again places and buildings that do not exist anymore, so that
in addition to allowing users to share their narratives, what has been
destroyed by the quake will not be forgotten. The greatest merit of this
project is to consider the city not as a mere geographical space, but also
as a network of relationships, life histories and desires, giving visibility
to personal stories and making the memories of that territory accessi-
ble to a vast public. Moreover, the narratives produced by city dwellers,
containing information about how people experience certain localities,
allow for assessing the impact of urban space in terms of emotions and
behaviours (Coverley, 2006; Otjens et al., 2014).
After the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, Google developed a similar plat-
form, called ‘Mirai e no kioku’ (in English, ‘Memories for the future’)
for the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami. However, ‘Noi, L’Aquila’
is not the first case of a local memory website created after a big
disaster. Two important previous examples are represented by ‘911dig-
italarchive’, the online collection of stories, images, documents and
sounds of the 11 September 2001 attacks, and HDMB (Hurricane Dig-
ital Memory Bank), created after Hurricane Katrina, which devastated
New Orleans in 2005.
The ‘Noi, L’Aquila’ website is composed of two different sections
(Figure 5.2). The first is ‘Explore and Remember’, which allows people
to virtually surf and explore the city as it was before the earthquake

Figure 5.2 A screenshot of the homepage of ‘Noi, L’Aquila’

98 Rejoining through States of Emergency

using the images previously captured by Street View. Users can select
a specific geographic location, represented on the map in the form of
a yellow hot spot, and share their memories, testimonies and feelings
tied to the place. They can also upload and share photos and videos
to remember the city and the days before the earthquake. The second
section is ‘Inspire the Future’, which allows those interested to engage
in the 3D modelling and reconstruction of the buildings as they actually
were before the quake, contributing to reviving the city’s heritage and
providing inspiration for its future real reconstruction.
Our analysis is focused exclusively on the first section of ‘Noi,
L’Aquila’, ‘Explore and Remember’, as it constitutes the only part of the
platform to have been populated with content produced by the citizens
at the time of our research. The other section, ‘Inspire the Future’, con-
tained only a set of instructions and video tutorials to illustrate how best
to use the 3D modelling software (Google Building Maker and Google
SketchUp).
The overall objective is to explore users’ practices and identify the
characteristics of the digital narratives. More specifically, we focused
our attention on: (a) the ‘locations’ of memory, in order to under-
stand which places in the city people find most important to remember;
(b) the narrative characteristics of the posts shared on the website; and
(c) the relationship with the past and the role of the temporal dimension
in the online narratives and in memory processing.
We collected all the posts (N=278) published on the website from
the launch of the platform until the end of November 2011 and
adopted an integrated approach, conducting first a quantitative anal-
ysis of the narratives, and subsequently a qualitative analysis (Corbetta,
2003; Marvasti, 2004; Silverman, 2011). This methodological approach
allows for simplifying and reducing a large amount of data into
organized segments (Marvasti, 2004). Regarding the quantitative anal-
ysis, we constructed a coding grid focused on the categorization
of space (public/private) and place according to specific categories
(houses/churches/streets/squares and so on). The grid has allowed us
to take a measurement of the frequency of memories related to a
certain place and identify which locations people find important to
remember, investigating whether they leave comments on more pri-
vate or public locations, if they add posts to places which are relevant
in relation to the specific event (such as collapsed buildings or tent
camps set up by Civic Protection) and so on. The qualitative analy-
sis then allowed for identifying the most common categories of dis-
course that emerged from the content of the posts, investigating the
 Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi 99

narrative characteristics of the memories and their relationship with

the past.
It is worth specifying that the content of the posts was particularly
heterogeneous. It includes excerpts of full-bodied text – rich both in
terms of content and emotions, with a strong autobiographical dimen-
sion – and text clearly taken up and re-mediated from other digital and
textual environments (for example, art history books), without a per-
sonal point of view, but nevertheless useful to provide the description of
a certain location. The observations that follow are the result of an inves-
tigation which aims at simplifying the variety and complexity of the
corpus of data, and, at the same time, seeks to provide an interpretative
model able to explain and imagine the possible paths of appropriation
of the local memory website realized by Google.

Exploring mediated memories on a digital map

‘Noi, L’Aquila’ constitutes an innovative case study because, as opposed

to other local memory websites (see, for example, ‘Geheugen van
Oost’, http://www.geheugenvanoost.nl/; ‘My Leicestershire History’,
http://myleicestershire.wordpress.com/; or ‘Bristol Stories’, http://www
.bristolstories.org/), it is based on a digital map used to socialize the
memory of the past and operate a creative process of rethinking the
future. The main idea of the website Google created was to offer an
online platform where citizens could share narratives related to the
collective trauma experienced in 2009.
As outlined previously, there are several points of evidence that
demonstrate how the storytelling, as interpersonal practice, has posi-
tive effects on the authors since it is a form of empowerment, a tool to
improve self-efficacy, a way to put in order traumatic events.
Starting from the model proposed by De Kreek and Van Zoonen (2013)
(Figure 5.1), we have investigated, through the analysis of the messages
published on ‘Noi, L’Aquila’, the differences and commonalities in the
adoption of local memory websites in the case of natural disasters.
Table 5.1 shows the frequency distributions of the locations of the
memories on the Google platform. At first glance, the public spaces –
places traditionally linked with the community memory of the city –
prevail over the others: it is a sign of the collective vocation of Google’s
project. An example is offered by the high number of messages related
to the churches, public buildings and fountains of L’Aquila.
At the same time, it is also possible to identify a significant percentage
of posts linked to biographical places such as streets, private buildings
100 Rejoining through States of Emergency

Table 5.1 Frequency distribution of the location of the posts (N=278) on

the map
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and houses where a single person has shared experiences and moments
of daily life with others. In this sense, using the model proposed by De
Kreek and Van Zoonen (2013), we can consider this kind of narrative an
expression of the individual and a common sense of place.
No relevance is given to the post-earthquake locations, such as the
tent camps that have hosted citizens during the first period after the
quake. In our opinion, this is significant proof of the value of the
platform whose main purpose is to offer a space for the reconstruc-
tion of both the urban and the community memory of spaces, as they
existed before the earthquake. From a narrative perspective, we can
interpret the ‘absence’ of posts about post-earthquake locations as a con-
sequence of the collective trauma. As suggested above, in fact, after a
shattering experience, we can expect a reduction of the narrative pro-
duction by the victims (Benjamin, 1936; Rimè, 2008). For example, in
‘Der Erzähler’ Benjamin (1936) describes the consequences of World
War I for the survivors and highlights how in the first period after
the collective trauma people tended not to speak about the event. This
phenomenon led to a reduction of the narrative production about the
common experience and it is line with the main theories of the psychol-
ogy of disaster (Paez, Pennebacker & Rimè, 1997) according to which the
increase of the circulation of discourses about a trauma is the first step
for processing it.
Furthermore, several authors show how the (digital) storytelling pro-
cess forces the narrator to follow the linear logic of the text and, at
the same time, to objectify a specific part of the personal story that,
 Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi 101

in the case of a trauma, is often confused, complex and rich in emotive

nuances.
It is worth highlighting that even if Table 4.1 represents the frequency
distribution of the posts on the basis of their geolocation, it is possi-
ble that a single message referred to more than one place. We define
this richness of reference to place as a ‘topographic dynamicity’ of the
memories of the city. For example, the user starts describing the lived
experiences in a specific street and then continues the story talking
about the path towards school, shared with friends and classmates, and
concludes the post saying something about his or her home and other
significant places of the downtown.
The qualitative approach was then based on a narrative analysis of the
posts, focused on three conceptual drivers. First, we focused on the time
of the narration, which is the time referring to the event described in the
post. In this case, we collocated the messages along an imaginary con-
tinuum that goes from the past, which for many authors coincides with
the time of childhood, to the present (the time after the earthquake).
The second driver was the subject of the memory. The posts present two
macro typologies of narrative focus: the ‘I’ narrator and the ‘We’, which
at times can represent the entire community, other times the group of
block mates, or, more generally, ‘L’Aquila’. Finally, the focus was on the
locative aspect of the memory, which coincides with the characteristics
of the place linked to the memory and classified on the basis of the
sociological distinction of public/private space.
Starting with these conceptual drivers, we distinguished four different
families of posts: (1) personal experience; (2) shared experience; (3) com-
plaint; and (4) historical reconstruction. It is important to specify that
these are only ideal-typical categories and are not always able to reflect
the complexity of the narrative fragments analysed.
Personal experience is the category of posts in which the subject of the
narration is the author of the post. There is a strong focus on the self and
a link with places considered private, marked by the use of possessive
adjectives, such as ‘my home’, ‘my street’ or ‘my classroom’. Some public
spaces, such as the school or a favourite pub, are subject to a process of
biographic reterritorialization.

My little square, my parish, my life during the adolescence . . . in this

church I was baptized in 1981 and I received the first Communion in
1991 and the Confirmation in 1996 . . . . How many times I spent my
afternoon playing soccer there.
(author: Cancer3.10; location: Church of Santa Maria;
date: 21 July 2011)
102 Rejoining through States of Emergency

With regards to the temporal dimension, the analysis is more complex.

In the case of posts focused on a personal experience, there is always
a strict link with the past, but with some differences. It is possible to
distinguish between a ‘crystallized personal experience’, in which the
memory is clear and focused on the past, and a ‘prospective personal
experience’, where the narration from the past arrives into the present,
and is characterized by explicit references to the current situation.

My first kiss with Francesca, my first real love. The soundtrack of

that memory was Franco Battiato and his song ‘Center of permanent
gravity’. At that time, no one had yet found it, but there were a lot of
expectations and projects for the future. Today, 50 years later – I was
16 at the time of the kiss – the staircase is still there, I chose a path in
life and Francesca a different one. Since that summer, we never met
again. But the memory I keep in my mind is always beautiful!
(author: valmarco62; location: Basilica di San Bernardino;
date: 15 June 2011)

Finally, in some cases, the personal experience is hidden under an imper-

sonal narrative construction (from an enunciative point of view). Here
it is possible to perceive the presence of the subject and the personal
link with the place analysing the chosen adjectives. We consider this
form of narration a way to preserve the personal experience from exter-
nal glances and maintain a strictly personal memory that is not to be
shared with others:

House Tartari, 5 years of university, hundreds of friends, unfor-

gettable evenings, unique episodes, sometimes paradoxical, always
incredible days!
(author: Simone goingo; location: Casa Tartari;
date: 12 July 2011)

The shared experience includes the narratives in which the use of ‘We’ – a
choral subject of the story – prevails. These messages refer to a period of
the past and describe places and spaces considered ‘public’ and shared
with others. In this case, the use of the plural has different meanings:
sometimes the ‘we’ refers to the strict circle of people affectively tied to
the author of the post, such as relatives, block mates and so on; some-
times, it is used to describe specific social categories such as ‘the student
people’. In those cases, the pronoun ‘we’ is generic: it includes all the
people that share the same social condition.
 Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi 103

This is the house that hosted us for all our university years . . . until
6 April 2009. If those walls come to life, they would speak about
us, the girls of Chiassetto alley, who lived the house completely and
were able to create moments of pure fun and happiness. They would
talk about us, the girls that continue to keep in touch, although the
distances.
(author: scmia!; location: House of Tolerance;
date: 24 June 2011)

Less present, but equally significant for our analysis, are the complaints.
Probably, the lack of this kind of post is not so much due to a widespread
absence of disapproval and criticism for the post-quake situation of
L’Aquila, which was characterized by several protests (see, for exam-
ple, Farinosi & Treré, 2010; Farinosi & Fortunati, 2013; Padovani, 2010,
2013), but rather to the nature of the Google platform itself and to
the fact that its main purpose is the collection of memories of the city
dwellers.
In this case, the narration is focused on an impersonal ‘we’, such as
the city, and the posts are related to the current situation of the city
and describe public spaces. They are characterized by a strong sense of
belonging to a community identity, expressed by the focus on urban
aspects linked to specific pieces of history. Very often, texts are bitter and
short and the emotive involvement is expressed by the use of numerous
exclamation marks or capital letters:

That day the main square was LIVELY thanks to the street market and
the PEOPLE who frequented it. When will it return to LIVE???
(author: Islauta; location: Santa Lucia square;
date 23 June 2011)

Finally, there are the historical reconstructions, whose narratives are

focused on L’Aquila, considered to be a medieval town, with evident ref-
erences to the past of the city. These kinds of posts are purely descriptive
and impersonal, referring to public spaces of cultural interest. How-
ever, these messages also have great importance in the process of digital
preservation of the past of the territory. Using the definition proposed
by Namer (1996), we can consider the posts related to historical recon-
structions as an example of ‘confirmation memory’, a narrative that
confirms a shared and approved version of the history of the city, offer-
ing a new social space, in this case digital, to share and store that
memory.
104 Rejoining through States of Emergency

MACRO

MESO
Inclusion
Socio-cultural Intimacy
Community understanding
Cultural
Reflective citizenship
identity
Community practice
memory Common MICRO
sense of Historical
Individual Creative
place sense of Individual community
consciousness
place identity
Social Self- Cultural
history expression Pleasure value
Intercultural
Melancholy Vernacular Pride
literacy awareness Social
Resilience Voice connectivity
Self- Self- Individual
awareness confidence social Nostalgia
Ownership network Social learning
Self- Presence
efficacy in media
Co-creation
Suffer shape
Social Collective
networks action
Social
capital
Anger

Community
Personal experience
capacity Shared experience
Complaints
Historical reconstructions

Figure 5.3 Application of the framework proposed by De Kreek and Van Zoonen
(2013) to the analysis of ‘Noi, L’Aquila’

If we apply the four typologies of posts that emerged from the anal-
ysis to the model proposed by De Kreek and Van Zoonen (2013),
according to the narrative characteristics, we obtain a new schema
(Figure 5.3).
It is evident that the historical reconstructions (green) are collocated
at a macro level, where the collective practice of re-construction of the
community memory prevails. Complaints (blue) and shared experiences
(red) are distributed at the meso level, even if they are focused on dif-
ferent aspects. In fact, the narratives referring to a complaint stressed
effects such as social connectivity, ownership, cultural value and social
capital. The shared experiences are focused on a sense of inclusion, a
common sense of place, community identity and co-creation, in this
specific case the future of L’Aquila. Finally, the micro level includes
mostly personal experiences (orange) since this kind of narrative is
 Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi 105

strictly linked to several dimensions of the self, such as self-intimacy,

self-expression, pride and pleasure.
There are some concepts of the models that we decided not to include
in any categories because they have not emerged from our case study
(a platform created to narratively reconstruct an area after a natural
disaster). Instead, we have added some further concepts: ‘sufferance’,
‘melancholy’, ‘nostalgia’ and ‘anger’. These terms are closely related to
the sphere of emotions. As they emerged from the quotes extrapolated
from the platform, the posts, probably more than in other local memory
websites, are rich in emotive nuances and in most cases negative, caused
by a general sense of frustration and impotence that affects city dwellers
two years after the disaster.
A further aspect to take into account is that the digital narratives
published on ‘Noi, L’Aquila’ constitute forms to process the collective
trauma caused by the earthquake: it led to a disruption of the everyday
life in which people lost their social and urban references. The practice
of publishing online messages and linking them to a specific place can
be considered a form of virtual transposition of memories and expe-
riences. In this way, the platform becomes a digital space where the
messages are shared, stored and broadcast on the Web. However, it is
worth highlighting some other aspects. Even if the project proposed
by Google was very innovative, from a quantitative point of view it is
evident that it was not able to collect and spread a large number of
messages, both textual and visual. The great majority of the posts were
shared on the collective memory website in 2011, shortly after some
strong promotional activity by Google, but, at the end of this cam-
paign, only a small number of users spontaneously decided to adopt
the platform. This phenomenon can be interpreted in the following
ways:

• Citizens were not ready to share messages and memories about

L’Aquila because they had too little time to systematize their
thoughts around traumatic events. ‘Noi, L’Aquila’ was created when
the time was not yet ripe and only a small minority of people were
ready for storytelling and trauma processing;
• This kind of platform is something new for the Italian landscape and
culture; people probably do not yet feel at ease in adopting it. Its
use was not a spontaneous act and only occurred for a minority of
the population after a strong promotional campaign. Furthermore, it
is worth noting that the internet adoption rate in Italy is decidedly
106 Rejoining through States of Emergency

lower than that of most other European countries (Eurostat, 2014);

and
• The platform proposed by Google reflects a typical top-down
approach. Even if it shows great potential, it fails to fully involve
the local population. It is perceived as a tool proposed from the top
and not coming from a spontaneous process of co-production, from
below. It does not answer a specific need of the population of L’Aquila
and hence, even if it is still online and active, only a small number
of city dwellers use it.

Conclusions

By exploring the connection between narrative practices and new tech-

nologies, we have seen that the Google project, after the earthquake,
led to sharing and preserving four typologies of mediated memo-
ries: (1) personal experience, (2) shared experience, (3) complaint and
(4) historical reconstruction. The findings of our analysis demonstrate
that currently digital media and social platforms have an important
role not only in sharing everyday life experiences lived in ordinary
situations, but also in the narration and socialization of traumatic expe-
riences, confirming what has emerged in previous studies (Farinosi &
Micalizzi, 2013; Farinosi & Treré, 2014). The material reality and the
digital one are dialectically co-constructed, defining the boundaries
of what can be defined as ‘the augmented reality’ (Jurgenson, 2012,
p. 84).
The practice of sharing short narratives about the personal past,
strictly linked with the urban history and memory of the city, repre-
sents a way of working on the future, operating a re-construction and
co-construction of a shared memory of the territory. Geolocating per-
sonal memories in a digital space can be compared to the practice of
putting together single pieces of a mosaic where the final image is not
established previously, but emerges from the choral expression of urban
memories. Moreover, our findings show that the virtual architecture of
‘Noi, L’Aquila’ constitutes a space of discovering and experiencing the
resilience (marked in the model with a circle since it was a transversal
dimension), which is not a synonym of resistance, but rather a way to
rethink the past and invest projectively in the future.
Finally, the platform created by Google is also a place in which users
can track personal time maps (Zerubavel, 2003) by browsing, search-
ing and exploring the mark points. Future research should aim to
explore other local memory websites created after collective traumatic
 Manuela Farinosi and Alessandra Micalizzi 107

experiences and understand if it is possible to identify analogous media

practices by the users.

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Part II
Reforming States of Affairs
6
Disrupting the Past, Reframing the
Present: Websites, Alternative
Histories and Petit Récits as Black
Nationalist Politics
Sarah Florini

Introduction: Contesting the past

In May of 1973, three members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) –

Assata Shakur, Zayd Shakur and Sundiata Acoli – were stopped on the
New Jersey Turnpike by New Jersey State Troopers Werner Foerster and
James Harper. At the end of the ensuing conflict, State Trooper Foerster
and BLA member Zayd Shakur lay dead, Harper and Assata Shakur
wounded. As a result, Assata Shakur was tried and found guilty of two
counts of murder and six assault charges and was sentenced to 26 to 32
years in prison. In November 1979, with the aid of several BLA mem-
bers, Shakur escaped prison. After several years of evading authorities
in the US, in 1984 she made her way to Cuba, where she was granted
asylum and remains to this day. In 2005, the FBI placed Shakur on their
Most Wanted list and then in 2013 on their Most Wanted Terrorist list.
Together, the FBI and the New Jersey State Police are offering a total of
two million dollars for her return. This story, of one woman’s life over
four decades, stands as an example of righteous resistance to some and
of brutal criminality to others. Whether Assata Shakur and her com-
panions were violent criminals or freedom fighters in the tradition of
Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr depends on what version of
the US past is used to contextualize their actions.
The dominant history of the US holds that the Civil Rights Move-
ment – primarily the ‘heroic’ period between 1954 and 1965 – ended
white supremacy and ushered in a new era of racial equality. Embedded

113
114 Reforming States of Affairs

within this understanding of the past, it is easy to see why the FBI has
branded Shakur a ‘domestic terrorist who murdered a law enforcement
officer’ (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2013). It is impossible to inter-
pret her actions as resistance to institutionalized and governmentally
sanctioned racial oppression if such oppression ended almost a decade
prior to the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike. To conceive of Shakur,
instead, as a woman fighting systemic injustice imposed upon her by the
US government, her actions must be contextualized within an alterna-
tive history, one in which the Civil Rights Movement was merely one
moment in a long continuum of resistance to white supremacy, rather
than its end.
In the US, the dominant historical accounts of the Civil Rights Move-
ment are often characterized by the themes of reconciliation and the
redemption of the US from past wrongs, reinforcing the meta-narrative
of US exceptionalism and the inevitability of its progress towards
ever-greater freedom and justice. Supported by this historic account,
mainstream US racial politics in the post-Civil Rights Movement era
have been increasingly dominated by neo-liberal discourses of ‘colour-
blindness’, and in recent years many have claimed the country has
entered a ‘post-racial’ era (Elder, 2009; Keen, 2008; McWhorter, 2008;
Zernike & Sussman, 2008). Such assertions frame racism as a relic of the
past and obscure contemporary racial injustice. The election of a man
of African descent to the office of the President has made this ideolog-
ical framework even more recalcitrant. Consequently, merely making
structural and institutional racism visible requires significant labour, as
it entails the refutation of well-entrenched historical narratives that are
bound up with fundamental issues of national identity.
The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), one of the largest
contemporary US-based Black Nationalist organizations, resists the
notion that the US is ‘post-racial’ by undermining the history on which
that belief rests. Founded in 1990, the MXGM’s ideologies, discourses
and historical narratives are derived from Black Nationalist organiza-
tions of the Black Power era, such as the Republic of New Afrika (RNA),
the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA).
The MXGM’s website, www.mxgm.org, is the organization’s most widely
available and consistently used platform for mass communication. Cre-
ated in 2001, the site contains information about the organization,
event announcements, news and commentary on current events. Addi-
tionally, over the last decade the site has served as a space in which
to contest the racial past and, thereby, reframe contemporary racial
politics.
 Sarah Florini 115

In this chapter, I employ discourse analysis to examine the content

of the MXGM’s website between 2001 and 2011 to explore how the
MXGM uses their website to make interventions into dominant histori-
cal accounts. The website serves as repository for alternative accounts
of mid- to late 20th-Century struggles for racial justice in the US.
Stories of individuals such as Shakur and her companions are interwo-
ven throughout the MXGM’s website, serving as evidence of post-Civil
Rights Movement oppression orchestrated by the US government and/or
law enforcement. In this way, the MXGM disrupts amnesic processes
at work in the dominant account and serves to undermine attempts to
depoliticize race as a contemporary issue by relegating racism to the past.
Combining critical/cultural media studies, cultural memory theory and
critical race theory, I argue the MXGM exploits the non-linear structure
of hypertext to deploy a series of petits récits, brief localized accounts of
the past, that disrupt the mainstream historical narrative that frames the
Civil Rights Movement as the end of institutionalized racism.
This chapter begins with a brief outline of the role of remembering
in shaping the racial politics of the US. I then examine how, given
that Western cultures predominantly construct and circulate versions
of the past as linear narratives, the non-linear architecture of websites
poses a challenge when recounting the past. Rather than creating a
competing grand narrative, the MXGM’s website instead creates a series
of petits récits that seek to disturb the dominant history. Finally, using
Bakhtin’s conceptualization of genres as orienting frameworks for inter-
preting utterances, the chapter concludes with an examination of how
the MXGM engages in online remembering through the strategic use
of a genre of petits récits I am labelling the ‘resistance story’. The resis-
tance story is not unique to the MXGM website, but appears throughout
dominant accounts of US history. By creating petits récits within this
genre, the MXGM is able to deploy well-known patterns and narrative
structures to tie the stories of activists like Shakur to a long history of
Black American oppression and resistance that pre-dates the Civil Rights
Movement. This creates a continuum of struggle that extends from the
pre-Civil Rights Movement era into the contemporary moment.

Remembering and race in the US

Memory studies is fraught with debate over the meaning and bound-
aries of memory and history (Erll, 2011, pp. 38–65). Here, I seek to
avoid the intricacies that arise from the proliferation of terminol-
ogy and instead, for the sake of clarity, use the term ‘history’, which
116 Reforming States of Affairs

I conceptualize as a narrative account of the past. I draw on Foucault’s

descriptors of ‘dominant’ versus ‘counter-’ to indicate how differing ver-
sions the past relate to larger sociocultural relations of power. I refer
to versions of the past that emerge from and perpetuate hegemonic
power relations and dominance as ‘dominant’ histories, while I term
accounts of the past that make visible and challenge these hierarchies
of power ‘counter-histories’. Neither dominant histories nor counter-
histories are monolithic, unified constructions. Both are complex, mul-
tilayered and contingent, and in constant dialectic interaction with
one another (Foucault, 1977, pp. 149–50). Given the role of remem-
bering in our interpretation of the present, the interactions and tension
between histories and counter-histories are central to maintenance or
transformation of social relationships.
The past acts as a frame through which we perceive and comprehend
current events, making remembering a powerful process that shapes
how we understand both ourselves and our social world. Remembering
is never a straightforward act of preserving or recounting the ‘truth’ of
what ‘really’ happened, but rather an active process of construction and
reconstruction. In the contingent process of remembering, both what
is remembered and how it is remembered involve selection (Erll, 2008).
Groups draw on and create versions of the past which, in turn, enable
patterns for self-interpretation that are legitimized by the past (Schwartz,
1996). This process of remembering transforms the past, extending it
into the present and reimagining it in ways that make it ‘usable’ for
addressing our contemporary needs and concerns (Casey, 2000).
Thus, remembering is never an end in its own right. Any ‘effort to
determine what is known and remembered about the past . . . is an effort
to claim and exert power’, making the past inseparable from social hier-
archies (Zelizer, 1995). Appeals to the past can be powerful strategies
for validating political traditions. However, the cohesion and stabil-
ity one group may derive from the past often comes at the expense
of marginalized groups (Zelizer, 1995). In selecting what and how to
remember, the powerful validate the social relations that keep them in
power, and marginalized groups often find their pasts erased or remem-
bered in ways that are unrecognizable to them. Thus, the recuperation
of counter-histories has long been a key concern of postcolonial and
minority movements, who see the reclamation of their pasts as an essen-
tial component of resisting mechanisms of oppression (Bhabha, 1994;
Fanon, 1986).
Perhaps no chapter of US history is more called upon to interpret
the nation’s racial present than the Civil Rights Movement era. Peniel
 Sarah Florini 117

Joseph argues that mainstream Civil Rights Movement history is focused

primarily on the ‘heroic’ period between the Supreme Court case Brown
v. Board of Education (1954), which desegregated publicly funded schools,
and the Voting Rights Act (1965), which insured equal access to the polls
(Joseph, 2010). These legislative successes, along with the non-violent
direct action of Martin Luther King Jr and his supporters, have become
enshrined as the moment of national triumph over the forms of institu-
tional and structural racism that have plagued the US since its founding
(Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Marable, 2009). Such a narrative allows Americans
to declare structural racism a historic, rather than contemporary, phe-
nomenon, preserving the United States’ national self-image as a bastion
of liberty and equality, while simultaneously obscuring, and thereby
protecting, the nation’s systems of race-based privilege and oppression
(Bonilla-Silva, 2010).
In US culture, historicizing an event often serves to depoliticize it and
allows for the creation of at least the ‘illusion of consensus’ (Kammen,
1991). By painting the heroic Civil Rights Movement era as the final
chapter in structural and institutional racism, the dominant history
effectively relegates such racism to the past, neutralizing it as a con-
temporary political issue. The themes of reconciliation and redemption
that characterize the dominant Civil Rights Movement history combine
with the historicization of racism to preserve the turbulence and injus-
tice of the racial past while rendering it ‘ideologically safe’ (Morgan,
2006). This allows Americans to believe that systemic racism has ended
and that the US nation state was ultimately on the moral and right side
of the struggle (Fuller, 2006).
The historicization and resultant depoliticization of racism relies on
the production of a collective amnesia (Kammen, 1991) in which facts
that do not conform to the preferred narrative are obscured (Edy, 2006).
Much of the racial politics of the mid-20th-Century US must be erased
in service of creating a historical narrative that asserts maximum tem-
poral distance between the country’s racist past and its contemporary
moment. One significant element of this process is the erasure or dis-
tortion of the activism of Black Power and Black Nationalist groups
that happened concurrently with the Civil Rights Movement or after
its asserted triumphs. Such groups are either erased completely, as with
organizations like the Republic of New Afrika, or, as with the Black Pan-
ther Party, remembered as angry, violent ‘thugs’ rather than rational
political actors (Rhodes, 2007).
The MXGM’s website, on the other hand, serves as a space to recu-
perate counter-histories about the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement
118 Reforming States of Affairs

era that have been erased from the dominant account. These histories
assert the persistence of racial injustice after the Civil Rights Move-
ment, emphasizing both governmental complicity in and coordination
of practices of oppression and terror. This undermines the conception of
the Civil Rights Movement as the end point of institutionalized racism
in the US, allowing the MXGM to assert the persistence of contempo-
rary structural racism, including police brutality, economic disparities
and unequal educational access.

Remembering online

In contemporary US culture, electronic media play an increasingly

central role in understanding the past and have become one of the
predominant ‘vehicles for the expression’ of histories (Edgerton, 2001;
M. White, 1989). Media are important in the construction and retention
of experience and can even shape the nature of memory itself (van Dijck,
2007). However, marginalized groups are often excluded from the pro-
duction of the mainstream media where much of dominant history is
now formed and transmitted. Because of this, marginalized groups must
find alternative spaces in which to create and circulate counter-histories
and guard against the organized forgetting of their pasts.
By increasing the opportunities for people to become producers and
not simply consumers of media, the internet offers an opportunity
to circumvent the mainstream commercial media and generates new
opportunities for marginalized groups to resist the dominant construc-
tion of the past. This access makes the internet an important site
where the processes of remembering and forgetting can be contested.
While the inequalities of the offline world are often reproduced online
(Carey, 2005), despite these limitations the internet is still an impor-
tant forum in global civil society (Castells, 2012). Such small-scale but
broad-reaching media can be used to preserve and disseminate recollec-
tions of the past that could otherwise disappear as a result of neglect or
deliberate suppression (Downing, 2001, p. 114).
The MXGM’s website takes advantage of the potential of the inter-
net. However, the affordances of websites as a medium hold challenges
for engaging in memory work. In Western cultures, accounts of the past
are most often conveyed through the use of linear narratives (H. White,
1973). However, hypertext, interconnected through a series of links, cre-
ates a very different set of reading and meaning-making conditions than
traditional linear text because ‘the matrix in which electronic text floats
is quite different – a flexible environment that allows multiple layers
 Sarah Florini 119

and n-dimensional reading variants. It is this polyvalent ability to enter,

amend and exit the text in a nonlinear fashion that defines hypertex-
tuality’ (Brody, 1999, p. 146). Thus, for a website to tell a large-scale
historical narrative in a unified fashion, the site would have to limit
the navigational options of the user and force her to read the narrative
in a linear manner uncommon with online texts. Rather than strug-
gle against the architectural aspects of web design, the MXGM instead
exploits them. The MGXM uses its website to present discrete, self-
contained petits récits that rupture the larger narrative of progress that
dominant US history asserts.
Rather than countering the dominant history with an alternative
large-scale narrative, the MXGM creates counter-histories through what
Lyotard termed petits récits, or little narratives. These petits récits are brief,
localized accounts that Lyotard theorized as the quintessential form of
postmodern knowledge, positioning them in stark opposition to the
grand narratives that characterize modern knowledge production and
legitimation (Lyotard, 1984, pp. 60–62). The petits récits conform to the
brevity that characterizes most online communication and, since they
can be self-contained on only one web page, work well within the fluid
and multiple navigational paths hypertext creates.
The MXGM disrupts the dominant historical narrative with indi-
vidual accounts of oppression that are distributed throughout the
website, allowing users to encounter them regardless of their naviga-
tional choices. In particular, the MXGM emphasizes the persecution
Black Power Movement leaders faced after 1965 from the federal gov-
ernment and from law enforcement at all levels. By showing Black
Nationalist groups as targets of harassment, unjust incarceration and
even assassination at the hands of the government and law enforcement
in the post-Civil Rights Movement era, these counter-histories under-
mine the historical foundations for the assertion of a ‘post-racial’ United
States. In doing so, the petits récits potentially pose a powerful challenge
to US national identity as the champion of democracy, freedom and
equality.

Petits récits, genre and remembering

One particular genre of petits récits deployed on the MXGM’s website
is what I have termed ‘resistance stories’. I use the term ‘genre’ here in
the Bakhtinian sense – not to refer to the formal features of a text, but
genre as an orienting framework that guides interpretation (Bakhtin,
1986, pp. 61 and 87–88; Briggs & Bauman, 1992, p. 143–47). The use
of a genre links an utterance to various discourses, speakers/authors
120 Reforming States of Affairs

and contexts, and thereby creates ‘indexical connections that extend

far beyond the present setting of production or reception’ (Briggs &
Bauman, 1992, p. 143). Genres serve to orient discourse historically
and socially and can also serve as means for ‘encoding and expressing
particular orders of knowledge and experience’ (Bauman, 2004, p. 6).
Throughout the MXGM’s website petits récits about individual impris-
oned Black Nationalist activists, whom the MXGM refers to as ‘political
prisoners’, are told using generic conventions that serve to historically
reorient the user/reader and offer an alternative interpretive framework.
This alternate framework repositions Black Americans and the US nation
state, implying a social relationship in which Black Americans are
oppressed, rather than full citizens, and the US nation state, particularly
the government and law enforcement, is their oppressor.
I use the term ‘resistance story’ to refer to a genre of historical
accounts that appears throughout the dominant history. In this genre,
a heroic figure, such as Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King Jr,
courageously defies government and law enforcement in the service
of moving the US towards the full realization of its ideals of freedom
and justice. These individuals, constructed as occupying the moral high
ground, are consequently unjustly persecuted by authorities, often suf-
fering arrest or incarceration. In the event that these individuals do
engage in illegal activity, they are framed as ethically breaking unjust
laws, such as Jim Crow segregation, rather than as committing criminal
acts. The US government and law enforcement, conversely, are cast as
immoral actors working to sustain an unjust regime, even to the point of
committing illegal activities, including physical violence, against those
who would challenge the status quo. While the activists are positioned
as embracing core American ideals of liberty and equality, government
and law enforcement are cast as acting counter to the egalitarianism that
is presumed to be at the heart of US ideologies. The genre is marked
by linguistic cues, such as the use of words like ‘struggle’, ‘freedom’
and ‘justice’. In the dominant historical accounts, the activities of cen-
tral figures of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the aforementioned
King, are routinely told using the resistance story genre. This makes it
particularly effective for the MXGM’s construction of counter-histories
because people tend to remember events in ways that fit already ‘familiar
patterns and narrative structures’ (Rosenberg, 2003).
The MXGM uses the resistance story genre to recount the activities of
Black Power era activists from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.
The generic choice of the resistance story repositions the Black Power
era activists and relocates them as heroes in a narrative of an ongoing
 Sarah Florini 121

struggle against racial oppression. Thus, using resistance stories to tell

post-Civil Rights Movement era events invokes the interpretive frame-
works and social positionings of the preceding period of US history, one
that is widely considered a time of moral struggle between the nation
state and many of its citizens. This sutures the pre- and post-Civil Rights
Movement eras together, destroying the temporal distance necessary to
see the present as ‘post-racial’.
The petits récits featured on the site do not give a linear account of
the past but rather, through their accumulation, serve to reinforce and
legitimate claims of ongoing historical patterns. The resistance stories
on www.mxgm.org focus on ‘political prisoners’, whom the MXGM
defines as ‘individuals who have been targeted for their political activ-
ity in support of struggles for self-determination, or for their affiliation
with organizations promoting liberation, or for resisting the racist and
classist policies of the government’ (Malcolm X Grassroots Movement,
2007b). The term ‘political prisoner’, by indicating that individuals
were incarcerated not due to criminality but because of their political
resistance, encapsulates the foundational framework of the resistance
story genre and encourages its use as an interpretive lens. The indi-
viduals labelled as political prisoners, terminology I will adopt for the
remainder of the chapter, are Black Power activists, such as former mem-
bers of the BPP, the BLA and the RNA, who were arrested, prosecuted
and incarcerated in the 1970s and 1980s, well after the legislative tri-
umphs of the Civil Rights Movement. This not only undermines the
heroic Civil Rights narrative of national redemption, but also impli-
cates the US at large in racial domination by highlighting the activities
of officials and authorities in perpetuating inequality. Additionally, the
contemporary circumstances of the political prisoners, many of whom
remain in prison, are used to demonstrate the continuation of officially
orchestrated racial oppression into the present, which serves to resist
efforts to create temporal distance between the contemporary US and
its racist past.

Resistance stories: Reimagining past and present

The resistance story genre appears via brief biographies of each political
prisoner and throughout the site’s many event announcements, reports
and political commentary. The original 2001 version of the MXGM’s
website included the biographies of seven political prisoners, a num-
ber that has now increased to 23 at the time of writing. The story
of each individual political prisoner is summarized in one paragraph,
122 Reforming States of Affairs

each appearing on a separate web page. The site also announces MXGM
events, many of which are held in honour of the political prisoners,
and provides commentary on current events, which is often tied to the
legacy of oppression and resistance exemplified by the political prison-
ers. Thus, regardless of how a user chooses to navigate the site, she is
likely to come across accounts that are dissonant with the dominant
construction of US racial history and, by extension, with the notion
that the country has entered a post-racial era.
The biographies of the political prisoners are told using the resistance
story genre, often beginning by positioning the individual as having
the moral high ground, sometimes by explicitly connecting them to
the Civil Rights Movement. For example, Abdul Majid, who along with
Bashir Hameed was convicted for murder and attempted murder of two
police officers in 1981, is described as dedicated to anti-poverty activism
and participating in ‘many of the community-based programs of the BPP
including the free health clinic, free breakfast foi [sic] children program’
(Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, 2009a). Rather than a dangerous
anti-government criminal, Majid is cast as selfless community leader.
The biography of Sundiata Acoli, the BLA member from the account that
opened this chapter, states that he left ‘a promising career at NASA as
a computer programmer’ in the 1960s to travel to the US South and
help Black Americans register to vote (Malcolm X Grassroots Move-
ment, 2009i). Thus, Acoli is framed as sacrificing an impressive career to
engage in activism around one of the primary issues of the Civil Rights
Movement, voting rights. This contextualizes his later activities as an
extension of such activism. Elsewhere on the site, in an announcement
for an art show, Acoli’s name is listed alongside Civil Rights icons like
Fannie Lou Hamer, James Baldwin and Ella Baker (Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement, 2011), again placing his actions in line with the undertak-
ings of people widely considered to be US heroes in the struggle against
racism.
Regardless of whether other aspects of their stories establish them
as dedicated to admirable forms of activism, the political prisoners are
always depicted, using the frameworks of the resistance story genre, as
having been unjustly arrested and/or convicted in efforts to silence and
destroy the movement. For example, Hameed’s conviction is described
as ‘a direct result of his political activity’ (Malcolm X Grassroots Move-
ment, 2009c). Similarly, Acoli’s biography claims his conviction was
a ‘historic and classic example of police and government attempting
to neutralize organizations by incarcerating its leadership’ (Malcolm X
Grassroots Movement, 2009h). Often the resistance stories assert that
 Sarah Florini 123

the legal actions brought against the political prisoners were illegiti-
mate because the individuals had committed no crime. For example,
former BPP member Geronimo Ji Jaga Pratt’s biography claims that
he was ‘framed’ and convicted of murder in 1969, after which he
was ‘kidnapped and held captive in California prisons for 27 years
despite the fact that police agencies had proof that he was innocent’
(Malcolm X Grassroots Movement 2009d). The MXGM’s site asserts that
Assata Shakur was specifically targeted by COINTELPRO, the counter-
intelligence programme run by the FBI from the mid-1950s to the 1970s
to surveille and disrupt activist groups deemed a domestic threat, includ-
ing the Civil Rights Movement. The site, quoting a statement from
Shakur, describes these actions as the US government attempting to
‘criminalize and demonize [its] political opponents’ (Shakur, 2007).
In the event that the political prisoner in question did engage in ille-
gal activities, the crimes are reframed within the resistance story genre
and depicted as being morally and ethically just, if illegal. For exam-
ple, Russell Maroon Shoats and Jalil Muntaqim were both arrested for
participating in shootouts with the police. In their biographies, these
events are described as the men responding ‘to the rampant police
brutality in the Black community’ (Malcolm X Grassroots Movement,
2009g) through armed self-defence and as engaging in ‘revolutionary
activities’, rather than crimes (Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, 2009e).
Albert ‘Nuh’ Washington, who was sentenced to life in prison after
being convicted of murder, is said to have been ‘captured while car-
rying out a military action in retaliation’ for the death of another Black
Panther Party leader who had been killed by guards in the San Quinton
prison (Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, 2001). Assata Shakur’s biogra-
phy acknowledges that a State Trooper was killed in the encounter with
Shakur and her compatriots on the New Jersey Turnpike, but argues that
this death was ‘at worst, a case of self-defence’ (Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement, 2009b). In a recent statement from Shakur that is posted on
the MXGM’s site, she rejects the title of criminal, instead describing her-
self as ‘someone who believes in peace and believes in freedom’ (Shakur,
2007).
These counter-histories not only use resistance stories to put forth an
alternative understanding of the social dynamics and power relation-
ships of the period immediately following the Civil Rights Movement,
they also bring those relationships to bear in the present moment,
reframing contemporary racial politics. The resistance stories of the
political prisoners are presented as ongoing situations of oppression and
injustice, allowing for the application of the interpretive framework of
124 Reforming States of Affairs

the resistance story genre to the present. Many of the political prisoners
named throughout the website are still imprisoned. The MXGM asserts
that their cases ‘reflect as yet unresolved issues of civil, racial and eco-
nomic justice of the 1960s and 70s, a time when thousands of people of
all races, young and old, women and men, formed militant movements
to demand fundamental social change’. Accounts of the US govern-
ment’s continued zeal in pursuing Assata Shakur exemplify how the
stories found throughout the site are used to assert that the repression
of dissent continues today (Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, 2007a,
2009f).
Assata Shakur’s current position as one of the FBI’s Most Wanted crim-
inals, despite the fact that the crimes for which she is wanted occurred
decades ago, allows for the extension of her resistance story into the
present. Nearly 30 years after seeking asylum in Cuba, US government
and law enforcement are still aggressively pursuing her. In the state-
ment from Shakur published on the site, she describes her current
situation: ‘I am proud to have been a member of the Black Panther
Party although the US government continues try [sic] to distort his-
tory and continues to persecute ex-members of the Black Panther Party’
(Shakur, 2007). She goes on to describe the contemporary moment, say-
ing, ‘Not much has changed, but the system of lies and tricknology is
much more sophisticated’. She argues that the dominant US culture is
‘actively seeking to preserve the old colonial order with a new face . . . ’
(Shakur, 2007).
Shakur’s statement was posted to the MXGM’s website in 2007 – the
year of the presidential campaign that would result in the election of
Barack Obama. This was the moment when the face of what Shakur con-
siders the ‘old colonial order’ could possibly become a Black one for the
first time in history. The MXGM’s website highlights the contemporary
prosecution of political prisoners to demonstrate that Obama’s election,
while representing a remarkable achievement, does little to change the
large-scale inequalities that characterize the social relationship between
the US nation state and Black Americans.

Conclusion

The MXGM, as a Black Nationalist group devoted to fighting for racial

justice, must battle not only racism, but also its invisibility. The belief
that the US is a ‘post-racial’ and ‘colour-blind’ society has become more
recalcitrant since the election of a person of colour to the office of
the President, a milestone often seen as definitive proof that systemic
 Sarah Florini 125

racism is a thing of the past. This belief has gained such legitimacy
in the US that in June 2013, the nation’s Supreme Court struck down
a key provision of the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act that required
states or districts with a history of race-based voter suppression to obtain
pre-clearance from the federal government before changing their vot-
ing procedures or requirements. Thus, the legislation that ostensibly
sealed the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement over racial inequal-
ity has been officially been declared so successful that it has rendered
itself anachronistic. This leaves organizations like the MXGM with the
conundrum of how to fight for racial justice in a sociocultural land-
scape that insists such justice is already a reality. Hope for a more just
future depends on the reinterpretation of contemporary racial politics,
a process that itself hinges upon the refutation of dominant historical
narratives that obscure present-day inequality.
The use of the resistance story genre allows the MXGM to project the
racial politics and power structures that exist in the dominant historical
accounts of the period prior to and during the Civil Rights Move-
ment onto the post-Civil Rights Movement era. This sutures together
the disconnect the dominant history creates between the racist past
and the present moment, allowing contemporary racial politics to be
interpreted as an extension of past oppression, the existence of which
is uncontested by the dominant account. To these ends, the MXGM
uses their website to deploy a series of petits récits using the resistance
story genre. These small narratives are distributed across the MXGM’s
website and, through their accumulation, further the construction of a
counter-history that elides the historical rupture between pre- and post-
Civil Rights Movement racial politics that is created by the dominant
narrative.
Through the use of a genre common in dominant historical accounts,
the MXGM, in effect, turns the dominant version of the past in on
itself, using its own terms and interpretive frameworks to call for resis-
tance to the power structure it is designed to support. This provides
the MXGM a foundation from which they can circumvent discourses
of colour-blindness and post-racialism and identify and challenge race-
based inequalities. To challenge and dismantle racism, it must first be
made visible. Disrupting the dominant historical narrative that obscures
contemporary racial inequalities allows the MXGM to assert the exis-
tence of ongoing racial oppression and provides the foundation for
the political activism that seeks to move the US towards a racially just
future.
126 Reforming States of Affairs

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7
Feminist Impact: Exploring the
Cultural Memory of Second-Wave
Feminism in Contemporary Italy
Andrea Hajek

Introduction

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 appli-
cations, including Facebook and Twitter. During the so-called Twitter
revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, for example, peo-
ple widely recorded events on their smartphones before sending them
around the world (Beaumont, 2011). Although we must remain criti-
cal 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 move-
ment discourses, to mobilize for direct actions online as well as offline,
to coordinate direct action and to self-mediate acts of resistance lead-
ing 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 communica-
tion have increasingly shaped both individual and collective memories,
placing them within and across national and global frames and allow-
ing 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

129
130 Reforming States of Affairs

with the community. In other words, new media empower people and
provide ‘advanced means to construct collective identities’ (van Dijck,
2007, p. 172), which is particularly relevant in the context of national
and global protest movements.
These bottom-up forms of communication offer an interactive rela-
tion to the past, present and future, which emerges in the mutual
shaping of media and memory, meaning that memories are not only
transmitted through media, but that the media also change the way we
remember (van Dijck, 2007, p. 21). Hence we can reframe McLuhan’s
famous phrase and argue that the medium is the memory, in that the
form of a medium not only embeds itself in the message, but also
influences the process and the production of memory. The ‘mediated’
memories that are thus produced travel across borders and circulate
beyond nation-states, as Astrid Erll describes in her work on travelling
memory (Erll, 2011, 2014), to be reconfigured in a global and digital
memory field (Reading, 2011a, p. 244).1 In the long run, however, the
cultural memory of events as they are shaped through texts, images, ritu-
als and memory sites, strongly contributes to the way people make sense
of the past, the present and the future. In other words, memories do not
enter the collective sphere through an explosion of media technologies
and applications alone, and it is my contention that the cultural mem-
ory of present-day activists – even if the latter continuously engage in
everyday lived experience and communicative exchange – informs their
actions and self-identification more than is generally assumed, in partic-
ular in those countries that have experienced iconic protest movements
or conflicts in the not too distant past. As Astrid Erll puts it, in order
to understand the present and the future, ‘we must naturally look at
certain mental, discursive and habitual paradigms that were formed in
long historical processes – via cultural memory, as it were’ (2011, p. 5).
If we are to understand how people make sense of the present, she con-
tinues, ‘then we have to acknowledge that many of the “hard facts” of
what we encounter as “economy”, “power politics” or “environmental
issues” are at least partly the result of “soft factors”, of cultural processes
grounded in cultural memory’ (ibid.).
In this chapter I argue against assumptions that time is acceler-
ating and the past compressed into ‘an extended present’ (Reading,
2011b, p. 308). Instead, I hope to demonstrate that memories ‘travel’
or ‘migrate’ across time and space (Erll, 2011, p. 12), and that past
events play a crucial role in the (re)construction of collective identities
of protest movements in the present. I will do this by exploring the cur-
rent cultural memory of the Italian women’s movement of the 1970s,
 Andrea Hajek 131

in a city with a significant feminist legacy (Bologna) and focusing on a

contemporary, local activist group which defines itself explicitly as ‘fem-
inist’. Drawing on visual and textual analyses of online material as well
as interviews with members of the group, while building on theories of
memory as ‘remediation’ and on the idea of ‘travelling’ memory (as a
metaphor for the continuous movement or ‘motion’ of people, media,
forms, contents and practices in the production of cultural memory,
Erll, 2011, p. 12), I will analyse the memories of second-wave feminism
in Italy, asking if and to what extent it works through in contemporary
feminist groups and what the role of social media in this process really
is. I will open the chapter, however, with a brief description of the wider
context of contemporary protest cultures in Italy and their remediation
of past protest movements, followed by an historical overview of Italian
second-wave feminism.

Remediation and travelling memories of protest

In their introduction to the volume Mediation, Remediation, and the

Dynamics of Cultural Memory, Erll and Rigney argue that, in addition
to the social factors that shape collective and cultural memories, rep-
resentations of the past also draw on ‘available media technologies,
on existent media products, on patterns of representation and medial
aesthetics’ (2009, p. 4). Cultural memories of the 1968 protests, for
example, have been shaped strongly by photography and its circulation
in the press and on television: the iconic photographs of the famous
blond woman carried on the shoulders of a demonstrator during the
French 1968 protests, or the Afro-American athletes holding up their
fists at the Olympic Games in Mexico, that same year, almost always
resurface in anniversaries and retrospectives, visually representing the
Zeitgeist of the 1968 years.
Of course it is no news that memory is not fixed but continuously
shaped in the present, and increasingly so through the use of media.
However, Erll and Rigney rightly observe that media are ever more
dynamic and unstable, constantly evolving in response to developments
in the media landscape and the changing uses of media (Erll & Rigney,
2009, p. 3), and this is not without consequences. Think, for example,
of the transition from analogue to digital photography on online com-
memorative websites or Facebook groups, and the implications this has
for individual and collective remembering. Erll and Rigney conclude
from this that new media refashion prior media forms, meaning that
mediations of the real are always mediations of other mediations, which
132 Reforming States of Affairs

are being ‘recycled’ and multiplied. This also applies to discourses and
stories that are re-narrated, or reiterated, in a new media context. Cul-
tural memory, then, cannot exist prior to mediation, and there can be
no mediation without remediation.
In sum, although memories have always ‘travelled’ across time and
space, cultural memory increasingly depends on the medial processes –
or as Erll has it, the ‘medial frameworks’ – that make memories collec-
tive and that circulate them. These medial frameworks allow collective
remembrance to take root in a community via the inter-medial reiter-
ation of a particular narrative across different platforms in the public
sphere (Erll, 2011, pp. 2–3). The idea of medial frameworks and the
remediation of memory proves particularly useful in the analysis of
contemporary protest movements, as I found in my previous research
project on the transmission of memories of protest in 1970s Italy to
the present (Hajek, 2013).2 This ‘memory transfer’ (Rigney, 2005) takes
shape not only in the remediation of visual memories of the 1970s
protests in the present. It also manifests itself in the transmission of
protest practices (for example university occupations and self-reduction
of prices, typical forms of protests during the late 1960s and 1970s which
continue to be performed by contemporary activists in more or less the
same way: see Hajek, 2012a); in rhetoric (slogans, in particular) and,
more generally, ways of speaking and acting, bodily aspects (most evi-
dently, the raised fist); and, of course, the narratives themselves, such as
that of the student’s death in 1977. Indeed, Erll observes that it is ‘espe-
cially the memories of political “impact events” which seem to develop
a great centrifugal force’ (2011, p. 13). Indeed, it is precisely the relative
lack of ‘impact events’ – such as violent deaths of protesters – in the
British experience of 1968, for example, that resulted in a far less sig-
nificant and less lasting protest movement than those in France or Italy
(Hajek, 2013, p. 28).
In fact, in the case of Italy a vast number of violent, sometimes fatal
incidents have produced shared images and narratives that have trav-
elled through time and space, and which – along with national and
transnational memories (and models) of conflict and resistance, most
notably the anti-fascist Resistance movement and the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict – have been appropriated by younger generations of protesters
in more recent times, as we will see in the next section. In this chapter,
however, I will test the concepts of remediation and travelling mem-
ory to an example of contemporary feminist activism. In order to do so
we first need to consider the overall legacy of second-wave feminism in
contemporary Italy.
 Andrea Hajek 133

Feminist legacies in Italy

The Italian women’s movement, which originated in the late 1960s, was
extremely heterogeneous, ranging from radical, autonomous collectives
to more institutionalized formations with links to political parties, trade
unions and the Church.3 It also changed across regions, and it is indeed
this regional diversity that partially determined the different ways in
which the women’s movement developed. Thus, if emphasis was placed
on theories of sexual difference in Milan, due in part to the impact of
the influential Women’s Bookshop of Milan and the famous writings of
Carla Lonzi, trade-union feminism dominated in Turin, whereas other
cities in the north and north-east predominantly adhered to the interna-
tional Wages for Housework network, which focused on debates about
domestic labour. Although the public memory of the Italian women’s
movement tends to privilege large cities such as Milan or Turin, second-
wave feminism also strongly manifested itself in Bologna, a city with a
significant student population as well as a long-standing left-wing polit-
ical tradition,4 making it one of the capitals of a new student movement
that erupted in 1977. It was also in Bologna, in the early 1980s, that local
feminists founded the Women’s Documentation Centre, which would
become one of the main cultural centres in Italy and which continues
to be active and influential. Here the women’s movement was predomi-
nantly occupied with issues of sexual difference and the discovery of the
self via the consciousness-raising practices that originated in the United
States in the 1960s, and consequently it was more concerned with strug-
gles for the right to sexual self-determination than with the domestic
labour issues or trade unionist feminism that characterized other cities
in the north, such as Padua and Turin. The women’s movement only
fully managed to form a united front in the battle for the law on abor-
tion, between 1975 and 1978. Eventually, though, the lack of unifying
goals and internal conflicts, not to mention increasingly severe repres-
sion from the authorities, brought an end to the women’s movement
as such.
Before considering how feminism has subsequently been remembered
in Italy, let us briefly go back to the protest movements of the late 1960s
and 1970s. Memories of these movements began circulating only in the
1990s, during celebratory and often nostalgic anniversaries (in particular
after the 20th anniversary of the 1968 protests, in 1988), in publications
and on the big screen (Hajek, 2013).5 If mainstream, national media
focused on the 1968 protests and – in a negative vein – on the polit-
ical violence that characterized the 1970s,6 which is attributed mostly
134 Reforming States of Affairs

to left-wing armed groups and terrorist organizations, on a local level

it is the legacy of the various groups of the New Left, among which
the autonomous groups, and of the 1977 student movement, that was
reactivated both by former members of the protest movements and by
younger generations of left-wing activists. This tendency increased with
the rise of the anti-globalization movement in the late 1990s, and man-
ifested itself in the city of Bologna among others. This reactivation of
protest memories was stimulated by the presence of an extremely pow-
erful political ‘impact event’, the above-mentioned death of a student
in March 1977, and by the fact that the Bolognese student movement
of 1977 manifested itself in a highly cultural and creative form, which
has extensively been documented by local photographer Enrico Scuro.
This second factor allowed for the construction of a celebrative and
often nostalgic memory that was revealed in particular during the 20th
anniversary of 1997 (Hajek, 2013), but which reached a climax with the
publication and dissemination of a series of online photo albums on
Scuro’s Facebook profile in 2011, entirely dedicated to the 1977 gener-
ation (Hajek, 2012b). In contrast to this celebrative memory of 1977,
former members of the more radical side of the student movement as
represented by Autonomia Operaia (Worker’s Autonomy) in particular,
together with younger generations of radical left-wing activists, have
instead promoted a ‘militant’ memory of the 1970s, where the first fac-
tor mentioned above – the student’s death in 1977 – plays a major role.
In both cases, however, a remediation of memories of 1977 and the
1970s at large takes place, as the example of the Facebook photo albums
(subsequently published in book form) demonstrates.
The transfer of a collective memory of feminism followed a very dif-
ferent pattern. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the lack –
fortunately – of violent incidents involving feminist activists, or any
other types of memorable, political impact events and, consequently,
the absence of commemorations or monuments linked to the experi-
ence of second-wave feminism,7 has made the women’s movement less
visible and indeed less ‘memorable’ than the protest movements of 1968
and of the 1970s, and the many – mostly male – victims of political
and police violence who have been remembered through monuments
and commemorative events. This relates directly to the type of activism
brought forward by feminism, as well as the fact that such activism was
performed by women: institutions were more reluctant to physically
attack women than men.8
As for the type of activism, feminists often operated on a private rather
than public level – for example in the practice of consciousness-raising
and self-help visits, which cannot entirely be considered protest
 Andrea Hajek 135

methods if these are defined as public acts of expressing one’s dissent

or disagreement. Other feminists enacted their political ideals in self-
managed women’s health clinics, far less ‘spectacular’ material for the
media as well as more difficult to represent visually. Significantly, it was
mostly the lively and colourful, public demonstrations of the women’s
movement, as during the famous pro-abortion law protests in the sec-
ond half of the 1970s, that gained the movement any lasting media
attention and which subsequently came to dominate the public memory
of second-wave feminism (Hajek, 2014).
Second, feminism was marginalized not only in the media but also
within the very protest movements themselves, which failed to give
priority to women’s issues. This means that within the collective mem-
ory of 1970s protest movements, as this has been transferred to the
present by the activists themselves, feminism is, once again, less visi-
ble. Many feminists continued their activism in the 1980s and beyond,
mostly through the creation of women’s archives, libraries, documen-
tary centres, bookshops and associations, with the aim of giving women
visibility and a voice. It is mostly in this context that any cultural
memory of feminism was produced and distributed through the vari-
ous women’s networks, which never really ceased to exist. These are,
however, highly localized experiences which, in addition to genera-
tional conflicts, complicate the memory transfer that is so evident for
the legacy of 1970s protest movements at large. Finally, there is only a
very limited number of films, novels and other cultural products that
place feminism at their core and which therefore reflect any culturally
mediated memory of feminism, in contrast to the situation with the
1968 and the 1977 movements.9
How, then, are memories of second-wave feminism transmitted? Can
we even speak of remediation, and how exactly does the cultural mem-
ory of 1970s feminism take root in feminist groups today? What role
do media play in this? Drawing mainly on the concept of travelling
memory, in what follows I will explore the way a contemporary femi-
nist group, Mujeres Libres Bologna, relates to the memory and legacy of
second-wave feminism. This will allow us to understand the workings
of generational memory and, more specifically, of feminist knowledge
as well as the role of digital and social media in the transmission of this
knowledge to the present day.

Mujeres Libres Bologna

Mujeres Libres Bologna (hereafter, MLB) is an all-female collective which

has been active in Bologna since 2007. It currently consists of some
136 Reforming States of Affairs

20 to 25 women aged between 20 and 35 years, mostly students but also

(student) workers.10 Since 2009, MLB has been running a blog and holds
a Facebook profile, and in my analysis I will draw both on online – tex-
tual and visual – analysis of the blog posts (typology and content) and,
to a lesser extent, of the Facebook profile. Finally, I will also use data
retrieved from interviews with some of its members.
In terms of identity construction, MLB explicitly identifies itself as a
‘feminist’ collective, which is relevant since the word ‘feminism’ has
taken a predominantly negative connotation in the recent backlash
against feminism as illustrated, for example, by the ‘Women against
feminism’ social media campaign in 2013–14. Often it is rejected even
by women involved in battles for women’s rights themselves.11 Sig-
nificant, in this perspective, is the fact that MLB’s physical base in
Bologna is inside the Women’s Documentation Centre, founded and run
by some of the leading local feminists of the 1970s generation. With
regard to its aims and objectives, MLB pursues battles similar to those
waged by second-wave feminists, in particular the struggle for sexual
self-determination and control, which is reflected in the organization
of public events, protests and campaigns in defence of the abortion law
and the improvement of birth control legislation. Indeed, the latter is
among MLB’s priorities as we can deduce from the collective’s blog: the
theme of sexual self-determination, contraception and abortion occu-
pies half of the total number of blog posts (approximately 30 out of 60,
excluding the more generic posts containing publicity for public events
or protests, brief reports on events and general news feeds, which brings
the total number of posts to 185). Most interestingly, MLB explicitly
declares its adherence to the practice of consciousness-raising, which is
one of its distinguishing factors.12 It is also the first of a list of common
interests and aims published on the ‘about’ page of the blog. As we have
seen, consciousness-raising was an important feature of the women’s
movement, in particular in the local context of Bologna. The question
here is, then, how the memory of second-wave feminism – which clearly
manifests itself in the reiteration of an explicit feminist identity, content
(self-determination and right to abortion) and practices (consciousness-
raising) – has been transmitted to the MLB generation. Can we speak
of remediation, where a memory of feminism is circulated via medial
frameworks, or does this memory travel in a different way?
In order to answer this question let us consider the means by which
MLB communicates in the online world. As mentioned above, MLB runs
a blog and has a Facebook profile. The blog contains a general feed dom-
inated by news reports, invitations to and publicity for future events as
 Andrea Hajek 137

well as brief commentaries on past events, complete with photographs

and links to videos, and logistic communications about meeting times
and locations. Blog posts that contain more specific content can be
divided into the following categories: the above-mentioned dominant
theme of sexual self-determination, contraception and abortion; gen-
dered violence; sexist representations of the female body (in the media);
austerity and precariousness. Moreover, the blog contains a documen-
tation section with links to articles on other websites, video recordings
of public debates and, most importantly, a series of electronic files that
contain practical information on a range of topics related to sexuality
and birth control in particular. The latter provide practical information
about delicate issues on which there is no or limited information in the
public sphere, and so to some extent reflects the social work of the self-
managed women’s health clinics of the 1970s, which aimed to provide
comprehensive and specialized care for women’s health issues, helping
women gain familiarity with their body and thus reclaiming control
over their reproductive functions (Bracke, 2013, p. 6).
The Facebook profile, in contrast, provides less in-depth analysis and
documentation material, being focused on the circulation of reports and
images of events. It contains links to online videos and to the blog arti-
cles, clearly in an attempt to draw audiences to the blog, and offers the
possibility for others to post on MLB’s profile. Hence, it aims more at
community building, networking and giving visibility to MLB’s public
initiatives.
Within these online platforms, the presence of any visual, textual or
other symbolic ‘traces’ of second-wave feminism which might represent
a cultural memory – and thus remediation – of feminism is minimal:
the blog contains only five black-and-white photographs either taken
during feminist protests in the 1970s or representing second-wave femi-
nism in some other way. Four of these photographs have no real purpose
other than to illustrate a logistical communication about (a change in)
the collective’s weekly reunion. Hardly any such photographs appear on
the Facebook profile. As for textual remediation, there does not seem to
be any active or explicit re-elaboration of feminist key texts or archival
material. As was also confirmed by my interviewees, this is a practical
feminism rather than one drawing on readings of feminist key texts
(except perhaps on an individual level).13 The question of commemora-
tive rituals is even less pertinent in that we have seen that second-wave
feminism has not produced any particular commemorative events or
memory sites that might transfer memories to future generations, as
was the case with 1970s protest movements in general. This confirms
138 Reforming States of Affairs

Eaton’s observation that social media are no more than a tool used to
get messages across and to build a community: there is no remediation
in the sense of old media – in the form of key texts, photographs or com-
memorative rituals – being ‘recycled’ via new media. This is not to say,
though, that memories of feminism do not circulate, and the very fact
that the members of MLB engage so explicitly in consciousness-raising
practices and self-define themselves as feminists implies that they have
probably heard of or read about or have some kind of knowledge of
what feminism entails.14 It is precisely this ‘already-there’ (Withers,
2015), this sort of feminist ‘heritage’ that constitutes their memory of
feminism, or perhaps we should say their feminist memory.15 In other
words, rather than a conscious or explicit remediation of concrete texts
and visual materials or symbols, we are witnessing the reactivation
of feminist contents (sexual self-determination in particular), practices
(consciousness-raising sessions) and more general forms of protest such
as public demonstrations, which imply that the cultural memory of fem-
inism travels less through ‘material’ artefacts than it does through ideas
and ‘lived’ practices.
Paradoxically, then, Mujeres Libres Bologna defines itself as a femi-
nist collective but refrains from making any specific references to 1970s
feminist texts, names, key moments or visual artefacts. It is feminist
in its practices, most notably that of consciousness-raising which links
it so strongly to the specific Bolognese context, in the content it is
most interested in, and in the forms of protest more generally. This
is a cultural memory that is not explicitly acknowledged, because it is
more than an appropriation of memory: it is a ‘living’, future-oriented
and progressive memory, with a political function and necessity in the
present, which goes beyond identification with second-wave feminism
and remembrance of things past. Effectively, here social media are not
much more than the tools of a new generation of activists, perform-
ing similar functions as the media that were at hand in the 1970s
(self-printed magazines, flyers, manifestos).

Concluding remarks

Although the concept of remediation proves to be an appropriate frame-

work in the analysis of the transmission of protest memories since the
late 1960s and 1970s, what I hope has become clear from my analysis
here is that it does not work so well for an understanding of the way
Italian second-wave feminism has been transmitted to the present. This
says much about the very different ways memories of feminism have
 Andrea Hajek 139

been shaped and, subsequently, have travelled through time. Clearly

this memory does not draw on any powerful ‘impact events’, nor has
it been given much visibility in the media, in contrast to the 1970s
protests movements (and their victims) at large. Of course, in some
cases this memory has undoubtedly been transmitted by feminist key
texts, which some of these younger women may have encountered
during their feminist formation, for example when studying women’s
history in the university, as I found was the case for interviewees from
other collectives that I interviewed, or in a process of self-discovery
and personal development following particular, eye-opening experi-
ences such as pregnancy, birth and motherhood.16 In other cases, there
is also a physical closeness to the protagonists of second-wave fem-
inism themselves, with MLB for example meeting up in the bastion
of feminist culture in Bologna. Nevertheless, we seem to be dealing
more with an ‘already-there’ type of transcultural, travelling memory,
which is simply ‘out there’, to use the words of one of my intervie-
wees.17 It is there in the collective memory of a community, ‘known’ or
‘known about’, ready to come forward when it is time to speak out and
(imp)act.

Acknowledgements

The data which underpins this article was collected for the purpose
of a research project supported by the British Academy, grant number
pf130101.

Notes
1. Mobile witnessing, for example, plays an important role in the immediate
construction and diffusion of collectively shared memories, as in the case of
the Arab uprisings between 2010 and 2012.
2. This relates to what Cammaerts (forthcoming) refers to with the term move-
ment ‘spillover’. In my chapter, however, I draw on concepts from the
memory studies discipline rather than on social movements theories, as I am
more concerned with issues of how memories of protest are transmitted to
the present, and what the role of social media in that process is, rather than
with the workings of social media in contemporary activism tout court.
3. For an overview, in English, of Italian second-wave feminism see Hellman
(1987), Wilson (2009) and Bracke (2013).
4. Bologna had been successfully run by the Italian Communist Party, the
largest Communist Party in Western Europe, since the 1960s.
5. Prior to this, memories of protest movements were predominantly captured
in testimonial writings and other texts written in the heat of the moment,
during or shortly after the events in question and mostly by former, male
140 Reforming States of Affairs

leaders in the movements, and in the political re-elaborations of existing,

theoretical texts in the following decade (Massari, 1998, p. 315).
6. This was due to the less controversial character of 1968, which was not
‘tainted’ by the traumatic memory of terrorism and political violence in
the 1970s. In addition, its reputation as a moment not only of political
ferment but also of cultural changes (sexual revolution, counter culture,
etc.) allowed for different, less politically charged interpretations that made
the 1968 experience more accessible to all. In Italy and France this led, for
example, to right-wing political groups attempting to inscribe themselves
into a public memory of 1968, during the 40th anniversary of 2008 (Hajek,
2013).
7. One exception is the death of 18-year-old Giorgiana Masi during a public
demonstration in Rome, on 12 May 1977. Although Masi’s death continues
to be commemorated in both alternative left-wing and feminist circles, Masi
does not seem to have become a major icon within the overall, collective
memory of feminism. Barilli and Sinigaglia, 2009.
8. Again, though, there are exceptions, as on International Women’s Day in
1977, when police savagely attacked women during an attempt to occupy
a building in Bologna. It was to be a prelude to the violent clashes that
occurred only a few days later. Hajek, 2013.
9. One exception is Alina Marazzi’s documentary of 2007, Vogliamo anche le rose
(‘We want roses too’, a reference to the famous feminist slogan, ‘We want
bread, but we want roses too’).
10. DS, communication via email, 24 November 2014.
11. The relevance of this choice becomes even more evident if we consider the
fact that, according to some of the women I interviewed from the collective,
there was an initial debate about whether to define the group as feminist at
all. Interview with AS and ER, 18 December 2014.
12. Interview with DS, 19 September 2014.
13. Interview with AS and ER, 18 December 2014.
14. This became clear from my interview with one of the members of MLB.
Interview with DS, 19 September 2014.
15. I would like to thank Joanne Garde-Hansen and Deborah Withers for their
suggestions and insight into the ideas of feminist memory and the ‘already
there’ concept.
16. Interview with AS and ER, 18 December 2014.
17. Interview with AS and ER, 18 December 2014.

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.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/25/twitter-facebook-uprisings-arab-libya
(accessed 8 December 2014).
Bracke, M. A., 2013. Women and the Reinvention of the Political. Feminism in Italy,
1968–1983. New York: Routledge.
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Practice and Cultural Heritage. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.
8
Echoes of the Spanish Revolution:
Social Memories, Social Struggles
Ruth M. Sanz Sabido

Introduction

This chapter examines some of the ways in which memory is used to

provide a framework that not only helps to make sense of the present,
but also enables the production of forward-looking actions and stances.
In addition to the argument that the past is central to the present,
the aim of this chapter is to emphasize the connection between past
events and current collective actions and motivations, and the ways in
which this link is used by politicized subjects in an attempt to improve
their conditions in both the here-and-now and in the (uncertain) future.
My discussion illustrates this relationship by focusing on the Spanish
socio-political context, where the right to remember the atrocities of
the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship is strongly contested. Arguing
in favour of using those memories in the formulation of future-oriented
actions, which seek social progress, the chapter specifically draws upon
the case of the Asturian miners and some of the protests in which they
have been involved since the 1930s.
The thread that links the three periods – past, present and future –
is partly based on the relentless continuity of time. While the passing
of time is unidirectional, memory studies challenges this natural direc-
tion by revisiting the past through the examination of memories from
the present moment (which, as it continues to move, means that the
position from which the past is analysed is also in flux). In this respect,
the process of investigating memory is backward-looking. However, the
rehearsal of memory is also forward-looking, because the meaning of
those memories and the ways in which they are used in the present
time may change depending on the needs that must be met or the
circumstances within which those memories are interpreted.

142
 Ruth M. Sanz Sabido 143

There are further complexities that emerge in the field of memory

studies. In the first place, the availability of intergenerational accounts,
which bring narratives about past events to the present, further con-
tributes to the blurring of any fixed temporal demarcations. The con-
current existence of different generations at any one moment in time,
and the resulting diversity of experiences (and memories) of older and
younger generations, means that the idea of ‘present’ or ‘contemporary’
must be a flexible one, as it is constantly re-elaborated (Soto Gamboa,
2004, p. 105). Secondly, the reproduction of past events in a variety of
mediated forms, including films, television series and news programmes,
broadens the opportunities for lived experiences to coexist with narrated
ones, further reinforcing the difficulty of attempting to fix precise time
limits between past, present and future (Soto Gamboa, 2004, p. 105). For
this reason, it is useful to think about time and memory not chronolog-
ically, but in terms of an ongoing socio-historical process that enables
individuals and collectives to look back at the past for cultural and his-
torical references so that they can deal with the present and prepare for
the future.
By understanding our object of study as a socio-historical process
which is constantly developing, rather than through the use of a strictly
temporal framework, we are accepting that there is an inevitable link
between what is past and what is present and, therefore, also with
what is yet to happen. In Aróstegui’s words, the historic is an inevitable
dimension of what exists, and not only of what has existed (Aróstegui,
1998, p. 2, cited in Soto Gamboa, 2004, p. 101). Within this process,
the role of memory is essential to maintain this link from the past into
the present and future, insofar as it allows us to remember past events,
which we can use to direct our present and future actions. This applies
to individual everyday circumstances (using one’s own past experiences
as a guide to one’s conduct) as well as to larger groups and communi-
ties (referring to collectively remembered events in order to construct a
framework that can be used to understand new developments).
This type of framework is particularly significant in contexts where
there is a growing need to engage in the systematic preservation of cer-
tain aspects of the past in order to ‘move forward’ or develop as a society.
This chapter is specifically concerned with the memories of the Spanish
Civil War and the revolutions that took place in Spain in the 1930s.
Spain is a post-conflict society with a relatively young democratic sys-
tem, and is characterized by a cultural identity which is still marked by
its traumatic history and by the enduring rift between the winners of
the conflict and those who suffered defeat. While other countries, such
144 Reforming States of Affairs

as Germany, Argentina and South Africa, have developed ways in which

to confront their pasts, in Spain there have been no such opportunities.
Against this backdrop, the importance of remembering and con-
fronting the past remains a contested field in Spain. Therefore, before
focusing on the role that memory plays in relation to the conception
of the future, it is necessary to begin by re-asserting the significance of
the country’s contested history within the consciousness of contempo-
rary Spain. This is the purpose of the opening section of this chapter,
which also provides some background for an idea that is covered more
fully in the second part of the argument – that the exercise of mem-
ory is part of an ongoing socio-historical process in which everything
that is past and future coexists in the ‘moving present’. I then pro-
vide a brief overview of the revolutions that developed in Spain in the
1930s, before analysing some online material concerning the protests
of Asturian miners in 2012. This material, which is produced by jour-
nalists, activists and the miners themselves, indicates the connections
that remain between the collective memory of the miners’ revolution-
ary past and current perceptions of their more recent campaigns. Their
contemporary protests illustrate the efforts made by a group of people to
achieve better conditions for themselves, their families and their com-
munities. More specifically, this chapter illustrates how the memory of
their previous struggles against the state informs their current efforts
and also their orientation towards a more hopeful future.

The ‘memory debate’ in Spain

On 30 May 2014, following the relative success of the new Spanish left-
wing party Podemos in the European elections of 25 May, a reader of
the right-wing newspaper La Razón wrote the following in a letter to
the editor: ‘The danger in all this [Podemos’ positive results] is the pos-
sible creation of a Popular Front. I do not want to alarm anyone, but
the risk is real. I cannot forget the history of Spain or 1936’ (Cartas al
Director, 2014, p. 8, my translation). Describing the favourable election
results of Podemos as dangerous, this reader makes an explicit con-
nection between the state of contemporary politics in Spain and the
election results of 15 February 1936 that brought the left-wing coali-
tion Frente Popular (Popular Front) to power. Five months after those
elections, on 18 July 1936, a military uprising marked the beginning
of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), which led eventually to the end of
the Second Republic (1931–36) and the creation of Franco’s dictatorship
(1939–75). Drawing on an analogy between the electoral victories of the
 Ruth M. Sanz Sabido 145

left in 1936 and 2014, this reader implies that there is a risk that a sim-
ilar conflict may arise now if the left-wing parties form a coalition of
comparable characteristics. There is also a further implication: the left-
wing victory (and not the military uprising) should be blamed for the
Civil War.
A similar reference to the past is observed in the opinion piece titled
‘¡Que vienen los rojos!’ (The reds are coming!), published by the right-
wing newspaper ABC (de Prada, 2014, p. 14). Although the article does
not refer to any specific events in the history of Spain, the word rojos car-
ries strong political connotations that, read by any Spanish citizen who
understands anything about the country’s historical and political con-
text, allude directly to the struggles that developed in Spain in the 1930s
during the Second Republic and the Civil War. These struggles contin-
ued during Franco’s dictatorship, when any remaining vestiges of the
rojos were persecuted and repressed. Although the author of the opin-
ion article acknowledges that the contemporary re-organization of some
left-wing factions is taking place as a consequence of what the main par-
ties have purportedly done wrong in terms of socio-economic policies,
the fact that it is entitled ‘The reds are coming’ echoes a discourse that
feeds on old hatreds and fears.
The excerpts above not only indicate the existence of a clear politi-
cal stance, opposed to what Podemos represents, but more importantly
illustrate the significance of the Spanish historical background in con-
temporary socio-political developments. That this heritage continues to
play a key part in current affairs is something that has already been dis-
cussed (Aguilar, 2008; Graham, 2012; Sanz Sabido, 2015). The argument
is that in order to understand Spanish politics and culture it is essential
that this heritage be properly considered. The articles discussed above,
and a myriad of other instances that often emerge in political discourse,
indicate that this is also recognized by politicians and other public
agents, in the certain knowledge that these references are understood
by the wider audience.
These observations are important because they help to describe
the context within which the ‘memory debate’ takes place in Spain.
By ‘memory debate’ I mean anything that relates to the physical
and/or discursive management of this socio-cultural heritage, from the
exhumation of mass graves to the struggle of Franco’s victims to achieve
a form of justice (Renshaw, 2011; Silva, 2006). This is a ‘debate’ because
the official political stance – particularly since the right-wing Partido
Popular won the national elections in 2011 – contrasts significantly with
that of the victims’ relatives, whose only real opportunity to advance
146 Reforming States of Affairs

their cause (whether locating their relatives’ graves or bringing the

culprits to justice) is to work with Memory Associations.
There are two broadly defined positions on how to handle the War’s
legacy. These points of view are often underpinned by distinct ideologi-
cal perspectives, and their declared goals and preferred methods should
serve to indicate the basic differences between them. One perspective
is held by those who argue that the past should remain ‘in the past’,
and that this is necessary in order to move forward socially and politi-
cally (Juliá, 2010). This stance is often motivated by a desire to avoid the
potential repercussions that an in-depth revision of the past could have
for those parts of society which appear to continue to sympathize with
Franco’s regime. An in-depth revision of the past would not only affect
(local and national) politicians and state operatives, but also a number of
trading companies that benefited from the regime’s repressive practices,
for example by using free, forced labour from Republican and anarchist
prisoners to build infrastructure across the country, in conditions that
have been described as ‘slavery’ and which often led to death (García
Soler, 2002). For them, the efforts to recover and maintain ‘historical
memory’ are unnecessary and undesirable, yet at the same time they do
not hesitate to use the past when it serves to reinforce their point of view
(as illustrated by the excerpts above). On the other hand, this ‘quietist’
standpoint is refuted by those who believe that it is not possible to move
on when the suffering of the defeated has not been recognized. They
emphasize the fact that those wounds are still open precisely because
these issues were not dealt with during the transition to democracy and
are therefore yet to be addressed (Richards, 2013; Torres, 2002).

Process, continuity and memory

The excerpts discussed above not only point to the centrality of past
events in contemporary developments in Spain, but also emphasize the
role that these developments play when trying to imagine the shape of
the future. Both the reader’s letter and the opinion article are grounded
in the fear of what may follow Podemos’ election results and, indeed,
future elections. It is remarkable that these fears about the present and
the future are informed by a particular reading of a significant historical
event to make sense of contemporary circumstances and the potential
consequences that these may have in the future. There is, therefore,
a nexus between past, present and future insofar as the memory from
the past is re-used and re-constructed in the present in order to forecast
what might happen next. This nexus highlights, and is defined by, the
 Ruth M. Sanz Sabido 147

continuity of a socio-historical process which is characterized, among

other aspects, by the impossibility of marking fixed boundaries between
the past, present and future: these three periods are not only constantly
moving, but the ability to review the past as often as necessary – depend-
ing on the various and multiple ‘needs’ of the present – contributes to
the blurring of any definite temporal limits.
The fact that there is an ongoing ‘memory debate’ which is concerned
with the relevance of the past in current and future affairs is also indica-
tive of the continuity of those memories and the extent to which they
still shape contemporary struggles. We cannot deny the fact that a given
action (especially of the magnitude of a military uprising and a three-
year-long civil war) always has consequences, which determine, at least
to some degree, the course of subsequent events. Accepting this basic
fact also involves recognizing that it is not possible to forecast the extent
of those consequences and at what point in time we can fix a boundary
between the past event and a moment in the future when the effects of
that event are no longer in evidence. The very fact that this is an ongo-
ing debate means that the whole issue remains relevant and, therefore,
that the question of the past has not been resolved.
As mentioned previously, it is useful to see the relationship between
past, present and future in memory studies as a process. At an individ-
ual or micro level, for the direct victims of the war and the dictatorship,
this is an ongoing process insofar as their demands for a just resolu-
tion are not met. In their case, the lack of definite actions to attend
to the wounds of the past has the effect of prolonging their anguish
into the future. At a social or macro level, a similar argument can be
made in abstract terms, taking into account the collective memory of that
period: the re-enactments of the old divisions (both in public and pri-
vate spheres) are part of a collective consciousness that is still painful,
constituting a minefield of enduring resentments and conflict. In the
social setting, the connection between past, present and future also
works as a process because it is through this prism of collective unfin-
ished business that social, cultural and political aspects of the war and
dictatorship are defined. The past is, consequently, only past in strict
temporal terms, since the social process within which it is embedded
still continues.
In a process that is defined by its continuity, contemporary memo-
ries enable the creation of an essential route through which one can
prepare for the future by learning from past experience. From this per-
spective, the past becomes a ‘storehouse of lessons’ through which to
‘avoid repeating the injustices of the past’ in the future (Booth, 1999,
148 Reforming States of Affairs

p. 256). This is partly what Todorov (2000) describes as an ‘exemplary’

use of memory, which implies a notion of forward movement. This con-
trasts with the literal use, which is unable to move forward and remains
fixed on the past event. While the exemplary use of memory employs
the past to improve the present and future, the literal use preserves and
perpetuates the past at the expense of a renewed present and future.
Todorov’s view of memory places the forward-facing quality of memory
in the spotlight of memory studies. Accordingly, not only is memory
not solely concerned with the past, but its most positive uses are in fact
those which are actively directed at accomplishing something in the
future. In relation to the memory debates discussed earlier, those who
defend the importance of confronting the past do so because, by engag-
ing in that confrontation, their objective is to be able to look forward to
the future from a renewed perspective.

Revolutions in Spain in the 1930s

Even though media representations and oral testimonies tend to focus

broadly on the Civil War, there has also been research on the workers’
revolutionary efforts that developed in Spain in the 1930s against state
repression and unequal distribution of resources. Most notable are the
revolts in Casas Viejas in 1933 (Mintz, 1982) and in Asturias and other
Spanish regions and cities in 1934 (Taibo II, 2010), all of which were
violently repressed by the authorities of the Second Republic. The latter
is usually referred to as the Asturian revolution, due to the central role
played by the Asturian miners in their struggle to secure better working
and socio-economic conditions. The mining industry has traditionally
constituted a focal point for workers’ struggles due to their working con-
ditions and the insecurity of employment faced by the miners. The local
community in Asturias, as in other mining regions in Spain (and indeed
across the world), identifies strongly with its long-standing mining tradi-
tion, a feeling which has been passed on from generation to generation.
Not only does mining provide a source of income for many families,
but its harsh working conditions and the strength and determination
with which these communities have conducted their historic struggles
have also become a central part of their identity, for which they are both
remembered and still known.
Given the long tradition of social struggle that characterizes Asturias,
the example of the Asturian miners seems a suitable case study to
explore this point further through the lens of the media, and to exam-
ine some of the ways in which the past is remembered and re-used in
 Ruth M. Sanz Sabido 149

its contemporary, ‘forward-facing’ version. In 2012, the Spanish gov-

ernment announced, as part of a wider programme of spending cuts,
that investments in the mining industry would be reduced considerably
(Cuartas, 2012). The miners took to the streets to protest against this
measure, which in practical terms would mean the closure of mines and,
with it, the loss of an important source of income in Asturias and other
Spanish towns. Hence the 2012 protests attempted not only to achieve
better working conditions, but to fight for the survival of the sector as a
whole (Cuartas, 2012).
While this chapter is specifically concerned with the miners’ strug-
gle, the protests of 2012 can be contextualized within the wider wave of
demonstrations that had developed across Spain beginning in 2011 in
reaction to the worsening socio-economic conditions in the country.
Indeed, the miners became part of what, in 2012, was coined as mar-
eas ciudadanas (citizen tides), an extension of the 15M movement that
had emerged the previous year. Demonstrations across the country were
attended by various colour tides that represented different public sec-
tors, such as the health and education systems (white and green tides
respectively), social struggles such as the women’s movement, and cam-
paigns against home evictions and the privatization of public spaces.
The marea negra (black tide), which described the miners’ movement,
embodied the contemporary expression of their struggle, which should
be understood both within its own specific historical context and in
relation to the more recent threats that it has faced.

Contemporary Asturian protests

In this section, I explore some of the ways in which the Asturian past
re-emerges through those discussions about contemporary issues, which
bear directly upon models of the future. To this end, I draw upon online
articles published by two different sources: on the one hand, activists
(miners and non-miners) who write articles and post material in dedi-
cated social media accounts and websites in order to raise awareness and
inform other activists and followers; and, on the other hand, feature arti-
cles published by national newspapers which seek to inform wider (and
therefore more fragmented) audiences.
One of the online messages distributed by activists was published by
the 15M or indignados group in Vigo, a city in Galicia, a neighbouring
region to the west of Asturias. This activist group is a locally organized
assembly which is part of the broader indignados movement in the coun-
try. They wrote this message in support of the miners, illustrating the
150 Reforming States of Affairs

opportunities that new media have created for alternative groups to

create media content. The message stated:

They, the miners, have struggled for many years in order to secure
a future which is denied to them. Their grandparents did it, their
parents did it, and now also the children of those who, in 1934, were
already asking for a better future for their families.
(Comunicación Vigo, 2012, my translation)

This statement provides an example of how activists make strategic ref-

erences to past struggles in order to reinforce their current message. The
reference to past generations and the explicit allusion to 1934 are not
mere historical descriptions, and are not uttered from a nostalgic per-
spective. These references constitute an active use of memory which
advances a specific purpose in the contemporary realm of protest: to
emphasize the need to resolve the issues at hand to secure the future of
the miners and their communities or, in their own words, ‘to show our
support to those fighters who have spent days struggling for the future
and their children’s bread’ (Comunicación Vigo, 2012, my translation).
This activist motivation is further reinforced, alongside its underpinning
ideological perspective, by echoing the terms of the historical struggle:
‘the road to freedom, dignity and solidarity involves understanding that
this struggle is not localized, it is a struggle for dignity, it is a struggle for
survival’ (Comunicación Vigo, 2012, my translation).
The historical connection and the use of these terms do not appear
exclusively in the discourses promoted by activists, as they are also ani-
mated in left-leaning news outlets. This is the case, for example, of the
centre-left newspaper El País, which is one of the leading titles in the
Spanish print media. The following excerpt, which was part of a feature
article that was available on the newspaper’s website, also establishes
the historical connection while highlighting the similarities that exist
between past and present relations with politicians:

José Luis, who is 40 years old [and] has two children, argues that the
situation has not changed in eighty years. ‘The methods are different,
but the objective is the same: to repress the workers, and we are the
ones that maintain the politicians’.
(Rosillo, 2012, my translation)

Even though the 2012 protests constitute a distinct story, in this arti-
cle we see how it is shaped by the miners’ ‘formative stories, myths,
values, traditions, and collective traumas’ (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013,
 Ruth M. Sanz Sabido 151

p. 102), and that their attitudes are interpreted in the light of their strug-
gles in historical events. This is also illustrated in the following passage,
in which the memory of previous stages in the process of the miners’
struggles also play a key part:

‘We are fed up with being treated like criminals. We are workers who
fight against a great injustice: they are trying to eliminate our way
of life.’ This is how determined José Luis is. With a grave voice and
a strong Asturian accent, he says that barricades are the only fight-
ing method he knows. ‘My grandfather fought in 1934, my father in
1963, and now it is my turn.’
(Rosillo, 2012, my translation)

When audiences are reminded of the history of struggles that the

Asturian miners have gone through, they are also being reminded that
actions are yet to be taken to resolve these social problems. These
actions – which are yet to be implemented – appear contextualized, not
only in the geographical space (Asturias) and in the economic sector
(the mining industry), but also, most importantly, in the ongoing socio-
historical process within which these issues (past, present and future) are
embedded. The re-activation of these memories in the media coverage
of the protests and related discourses is useful in that they highlight
the increasingly urgent need to find a solution, emphasized by the
knowledge that a resolution to their struggles has been long overdue.
Of course, the fact that the media or other agents make these connec-
tions between the past, present and future does not guarantee in any
way that the problem will be resolved positively. However, without this
memory-driven context, the sense of ongoing unsettled business would
not be present in the coverage. This constitutes one of the potential
positive uses of memory in journalism.
The message of support from the 15M activists in Vigo, mentioned
above, also makes reference to the cultural identity of the Asturian min-
ers, which is grounded in their history of struggle. In this respect, the
miners are described as ‘brave people’ throughout the statement, and
their plight is depicted in terms of tireless effort, sacrifice and resistance.
A similar characteristic emerges in the feature article, which serves to
contextualize the stance taken by the miner José Luis regarding his plans
to deal with the situation:

When asked how long they think their struggle will continue, he
states: ‘look, as long as there is no coherent proposal, we will
continue. The miners will remain locked up in the mines and we
will go on further peaceful marches, with the barricades and cutting
152 Reforming States of Affairs

the traffic.’ ‘I hope the situation changes because, if not, somebody

can really get hurt’, he concludes.
(Rosillo, 2012, my translation)

Here, the emphasis given to the cultural memory of the Asturian miners
provides, once again, a framework through which to understand their
position, their ongoing actions and views of their future. The examples
discussed above illustrate how memories can be re-activated in the con-
text of contemporary protests, not only through supportive statements
written by activists who speak the same language and share similar
socio-political objectives, but also in like-minded mainstream media,
helping to shape the ways in which the public may understand current
issues. We can argue, therefore, that the re-activation of these memo-
ries constitutes a useful tool to animate relevant references that help to
construct concurring messages, as indicated also by the multiple online
reproductions and references to the feature article published by El País.
Some of these websites are generic blogs, such as meneame.net (2012),
where users can post material to raise awareness and generate debates.
These provide useful data regarding the stance of the users who post
comments in response to the articles. These stances range from being
supportive of the miners’ cause and expressing admiration, to question-
ing their justifications for protesting and even the very need to keep the
mines open.
However, most websites citing or reproducing the article are under-
pinned by more specific ideological stances, including left-wing orga-
nizations and workers’ associations. For example, the Catalan website
Bombolla Immobiliaria, which defines its role as aiming to generate
debates about economy, politics and society, quoted El País in a list of
reasons why the miners should be supported. One of those reasons is
that ‘the miners’ struggle (current and historical) is an example for every
worker’ (Bombolla Immobiliaria, 2012, my translation). We find another
reference to El País in an article published by the site Clase Contra Clase,
which is run by Trotskyist factions in Spain and several South American
countries. It builds on the historical reference discussed by El País to
point out that the tradition of struggle and organization of the miners is
imprinted in the memory of the working class. This reference to the past
appears alongside a historical overview of those struggles in Spain since
the 1930s (Lub, 2012). In turn, Lub’s article has also been reproduced by
others, such as El Blog de ‘Acebedo’, a blog site interested in the history
of Asturias and the ways in which knowing that history can help users
‘know themselves better’ (El Blog de ‘Acebedo’, 2013, my translation).
 Ruth M. Sanz Sabido 153

These and other allusions to the historical struggles of the miners and
the role of memory in these discussions clearly demonstrate the ideolog-
ical perspective of these sources. Whether the authors are journalists in
mainstream newspapers or activists working for different organizations,
what these references have in common is the fact that the memory of
the miners’ past struggles contributes to the argument that the miners
deserve support. Even though a significant number of users argue that
mining fossil fuels is not sustainable, many of them point out that they
respect the miners for fighting for their rights, and that their ongoing
resistance provides a model for all workers to follow in the present and
future.
Nevertheless, this opinion is not shared by all users. As discussed
earlier in relation to the victory of Podemos and the analogies with the
victory of the Popular Front in 1936, these memories, which are strongly
politicized, can be re-shaped in different ways to support divergent
stances. Overall, references to the Asturian miners’ background are
less frequent in right-wing environments, since the historical contex-
tualization tends to justify rather than delegitimize the activists’ case.
However, we also find some instances in which the memory of the
1934 revolution is subject to right-wing revisions. For instance, El Bierzo
Digital, an online news provider which focuses on local issues, also
published an article that referred to the widely quoted piece by El
País. On this occasion, however, the author discredits the person who
stated that his grandfather fought in 1934, his father in 1962, and now
it was his turn. The article states that this person believes that he is
fighting

an open war against the police – which represents the oppression of

the state – due to the spending cuts, must be one of those Historical
Memory guys who, on the other hand, know very little history; but
the point is, perhaps the relic of a sectarian collective memory, to link
that supposedly mythical struggle against Franco in 1934 and 1962
with Franco’s heirs.
(El Bierzo Digital, 2012, my translation)

In denouncing the politicized use of memory by the miners and their

supporters, the standpoint of this article is also strongly driven by a clear
ideological agenda that seeks to delegitimize the basis for their strug-
gles. Similarly, Trapiello (2012), in an article published by centre-right
newspaper La Vanguardia, also refers to the 1934 revolution as a time
when
154 Reforming States of Affairs

Asturian miners took up arms against the Republic, and equipped

with dynamite sticks destroyed half of Oviedo and small villages,
which they left full of dead bodies, before they were defeated by the
army [. . .] Luckily, today’s miners do not have dynamite, and they
have had to settle for small firework rockets, although this does not
stop them from shooting at law enforcement agents.
(Trapiello, 2012, my translation)

Here, the reference to the Asturian revolution of 1934 is reframed to

highlight a history of violence and sectarian interests, rather than to
describe the miners’ resistance against the oppressor. In doing so, it
delegitimizes the miners’ protests, both past and present. As with previ-
ous examples of online content produced by left-leaning sources, these
perspectives also attract a variety of comments from readers. Trapiello
reposted his article in his own blog, eliciting some fragmented reactions
by its users. In order to elaborate on their perspectives, some readers also
incorporate references to the memory of previous struggles, particularly
when they support the miners’ cause. In this case, for example, one of
the readers commented that

The young man who [. . .] feels himself to be the heir to the tradition
of resistance by his elders has always been surrounded by the cer-
tainty that without struggle there is no progress whatsoever. I know
because I am a miner’s daughter and I do not remember one single
pay rise, one single social or work improvement which has not been
achieved through strikes and lock-ins, through our own suffering.
(Hemeroflexia, 2012, my translation)

This comment draws not only upon collective memory, but also upon
individual memories, in order to suggest the way forward: progress will
only come through struggle, an argument which is supported by the
memory of past experiences. This instance and other similar contribu-
tions count with the added value of personal narratives, which serve
to strengthen not only the justification for the miners’ struggle, but
also the need to learn from the past and develop forms of resistance
to defend social rights.

Conclusions

This chapter has explored how some of the aspects of Spain’s past are
used to provide a framework through which to understand and assess
 Ruth M. Sanz Sabido 155

present conditions and to contextualize and shape actions and stances

when facing the future. When analysing the case of a community such
as the Asturian miners, which has a long history of disruption and social
struggle, it is evident that their understanding of current issues is still
strongly marked by their history. The memory of their old struggles
has become part of their identity, and this inevitably influences their
attitudes towards their present problems and their ongoing strategies
to improve their prospects for the future. For the miners, these are the
product not only of collective memories which work at symbolic levels,
but of memories which are very close and personal, since they consist of
very real experiences which have determined every aspect of their way
of life for generations.
Furthermore, this memory is also re-activated and appropriated by
others in order to develop concurring discourses based on ideologi-
cal support for the miners’ actions and motivations. The selection and
reconfiguration of memories by activists and their supporters is a central
aspect of contemporary demonstrations (Sanz Sabido, 2015) and plays
an important part in their endeavours to achieve social change and to
provide a secure future for a certain community. In this case, the use
of collective (rather than strictly individual) memories serves to situate
the miners’ resistance within broader struggles for social and working
rights, which they symbolize and encourage. However, this chapter has
also dwelt upon the ways in which memory is also used by opposing
viewpoints which are expressed through particular reconfigurations of
the past, even though the agents who tend to engage and promote these
perspectives often disagree about the need to preserve the memories of
this period. In these cases, however, memories are presented in ways
which serve to question the activists’ efforts and motivations.
This chapter has illustrated how the use of memory provides a use-
ful context through which to frame contemporary socio-political issues.
Indeed, emphasizing the miners’ long struggle not only ensures that
those memories are not forgotten, but also explains why their fight
needs to continue, and how their past experiences inform their current
attitudes. We could argue, then, that the reverse is also true: those mem-
ories are more likely to be re-activated if they fit the right purpose, being
reconfigured in ways which seem appropriate to the message that needs
to be conveyed. This is indicative of the political nature that memory
acquires, as illustrated by the ways in which memories of the 1930s
form the basis of the coverage of Podemos and the Asturian miners by
the right-wing press. The politicization of memory is an inevitable part of
the vital role that memory plays in any ongoing socio-historical process.
156 Reforming States of Affairs

Memories are selected and re-shaped one way or another in order to

fulfil future aims, depending on their intentions or their political sig-
nificance. Accordingly, the fact that certain memories are discarded or
emphasized in specific contexts is also an indication of the relation-
ship between the political uses of memory and the place they occupy in
that socio-historical process, since memory, political purpose and social
context cannot be separated.

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9
Asbestos Memories: Journalistic
‘Mediation’ in Mediated
Prospective Memory
Mia Lindgren and Gail Phillips

Introduction

Margaret Page and Ted Grant grew up in the blue asbestos mining
town of Wittenoom in Western Australia in the 1950s. Both died from
mesothelioma decades later. They remembered playing in the asbestos
tailings that were everywhere and spoke about the betrayal they felt later
when they realized the impact of that exposure:

. . . we used to climb up on the piles of tailings and slide down . . . and

find the little bits of asbestos fibres in the tailings and . . . peeling the
fibres to see how many fibres we could get out of this. If we had
known the danger or our parents were told of the dangers, no way
would they have let us children do those things.
(Page, 2008)
There was nothing ever said, nobody knew. And then I find out in
later years that in 1898 they knew about it, in 1926 they had a sym-
posium, in 1936 they also had another one. So they knew in 1956
the dangers of asbestos and they were still mining it.
(Grant, 2008)

‘There was nothing ever said, nobody knew’ is a recurring theme in

the stories of people currently suffering the effects of asbestos exposure.
Despite evidence of the risks to health from the so-called ‘magic mineral’
dating from the early 1900s (Selikoff & Lee, 1978), the enormous profits
to be made from its use in building products, especially in the post-
Second World War housing boom years, meant that people were not

158
 Mia Lindgren and Gail Phillips 159

alerted to its dangers until the growing death toll from asbestos-related
diseases (ARDs) forced industry and government to acknowledge the
problem in the 1970s and 80s. In Australia asbestos is everywhere in the
built environment, yet many perceive it as ‘yesterday’s story’, assuming
that the problem ended with the final banning of asbestos in Australia in
2003. Instead the number of deaths from mesothelioma, the asbestos-
induced cancer, continues to rise (Olsen et al., 2011). When a group
of medical epidemiologists in Western Australia sought funding from
the main Australian medical research funding body, the National Health
and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), for further research into dust-
related disease in Western Australia, they included an allocation for the
creation of a website based on stories of people’s personal experiences
with asbestos. The aim was to use storytelling as a technique for drawing
public attention to the risks and what to do to mitigate them, to make it
more difficult for future generations to maintain that ‘there was nothing
ever said, nobody knew’. Storytelling has been used across many disci-
plines as a way to share culture (Little & Froggett, 2009) and for people
to make sense of their experiences. It can also be a vehicle for challeng-
ing normative social and moral assumptions, as shown in storytelling
projects about people living with HIV (see, for example, Nichamin,
2012; Positive Women, n.d.; Sonke Gender Justice, n.d.). However, this
was the first time storytelling had been used to present the personal,
social, political, medical and legal history of asbestos in Australia.
The academic research team for the website project came from three
different discipline backgrounds: journalism, history and public rela-
tions. Their combined skills would be used to build an accessible online
resource which would use journalism methods to create compelling con-
tent and web communication techniques to disseminate it. The site
would provide a one-stop shop where people could learn about the his-
tory of asbestos and ARDs, and access public health information about
the ongoing risks to the public from exposure to asbestos fibre. The per-
sonal asbestos stories were at the centre of the website. Unlike many
digital storytelling projects where people share their own stories through
audio-visual formats, here the journalists played a central role as medi-
ators in producing the content. This provided an opportunity for the
authors, as journalism practitioner-scholars, to interrogate their own
journalistic practice in the construction of memory.
Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt (2013) uses the concept of ‘mediated
prospective memory’ to illustrate the role of journalism in collective
memory. While her focus is on the agency of the media industries more
broadly in facilitating public memorializing, in this chapter we apply
160 Reforming States of Affairs

her concept to the journalistic process itself – to the intimate media-

tions practised by journalists as they select, gather together and edit
the material they will reversion into a repository of collective mem-
ories to be injected into the public domain. We ask what ‘mediated’
means in this journalistic sense. What form does journalistic media-
tion take in the construction of memory? What, if anything, makes
the journalistic creative outcome distinctive from other forms of his-
torical storytelling? We then deconstruct the story creation process used
for the Australian Asbestos Network (AAN) website to demonstrate the
nature and variety of journalistic mediations, starting with the germi-
nation of the original idea, and progressing through to the creation and
subsequent dissemination of the final artefact.

Journalism and mediated prospective memory

Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt (2013) uses the term ‘mediated prospective

memory’ to describe the process whereby past memories are harnessed
in order to raise awareness and encourage future remedial action.
In developing this concept, Tenenboim-Weinblatt identifies ‘collective
retrospective memory’ and ‘collective prospective memory’ as ‘two
complementary components of collective memory’:

Whereas collective retrospective memory refers to collective recol-

lections of past events from the standpoint of present, collective
prospective memory refers to collective remembrance of what still
needs to be done, based on past commitments and promises. The
media . . . serve as agents of both types of memory.
(Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013, pp. 92–93)

Tenenboim-Weinblatt’s focus is on the agenda-setting role of the main-

stream news media, but the concept she describes is equally useful when
applied to journalism methodology more broadly, in contexts where
journalists are not having to operate within the industrial, organiza-
tional and commercial norms that determine what stories are pursued
and how in the media. It isn’t just the news media that can act as
‘agents of collective prospective memory’, but anyone using a journalis-
tic method to engage in ‘creative interactions between past and future’
(2013, p. 107) for the purpose of engagement with an audience.
When the AAN website was launched in 2010, there was no con-
solidated resource providing comprehensive, authoritative information
about asbestos in Australia. Searches would take people to international
 Mia Lindgren and Gail Phillips 161

resources, while localized information was buried in official government

websites, or diffused among sites sponsored by interest groups (asbestos
removal services, legal firms involved in compensation claims, advocacy
groups) which offered no guarantee as to the integrity and impar-
tiality of the information provided. The aim of the multidisciplinary
academic team, which in addition to the project members comprised
medical, epidemiological and public health researchers, was not only
to give a personal dimension to asbestos history, but importantly also
to provide an independent and trustworthy information resource about
asbestos. The journalists were not themselves advocates – their activism
began and ended with the initiative of making authoritative informa-
tion publicly available. To do anything more would be a breach of
journalism ethics (discussed below). However, they were agents in build-
ing what Booth (1999) refers to as a ‘storehouse of lessons’ intended
to ‘[yield] imperatives of the “Never again!” type’ where ‘the impor-
tance of memory here lies not in atonement but in its ability to help
us avoid repeating the injustices of the past’ (p. 256). Many of the
current asbestos victims were exposed during the 1960s and 1970s in
Australia (Olsen et al., 2011). Forty years later, new generations of home
renovators risk a similar future fate unless lessons can be learned from
the past. The journalistic ‘mediation’ was evident in the initial iden-
tification of an issue that warranted attention, in the collection and
treatment of narratives, and in the dissemination of these stories to
a wider audience. The story-gathering process would create the initial
stock of ‘collective retrospective memories’ which, when compiled into
an accessible web archive and put into the public arena, would become
a resource for ‘collective prospective memory’ where people could con-
front and make sense of traumatic and challenging topics like terminal
illness and death from asbestos exposure. They could use the stories not
just to understand the past, but also to learn the lessons from the past
that might impact on future attitudes and behaviour in their encounters
with asbestos. In the following sections we begin with a description of
the journalism method itself, before showing how it was applied in the
context of mediated prospective memory.

Journalism as method

While journalism has traditionally been described as ‘the first draft of

history’, it is perhaps no less true to state, as Kitch (2008) does, that
‘journalism is also the first draft of memory, a statement about what
should be considered, in the future, as having mattered today’ (p. 312).
162 Reforming States of Affairs

Yet as Zelizer (2008) points out, journalism is an area that has been
relatively neglected in discussions about collective memory (see also
Zelizer & Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2014). In what discussion there has
been about the role of journalism in the crafting of history, the focus
has been mostly on the work of news in preserving, recording and uti-
lizing history in the form of daily reportage, usually in the institutional
setting of the mainstream media (see, for example, Garde-Hansen, 2011;
Meyers et al., 2011; Olick, 2014; Tait, 2011; Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013;
Zandberg, 2010). The issue with viewing journalism solely in terms
of mainstream production practices is that it ignores the fact that the
journalistic methodology involved in the collection and retelling of sto-
ries has an application and validity beyond conventional professional
journalism.

Journalistic storytelling
While social scientists have long acknowledged the value of storytelling
as a method of collecting personal experiences and assisting sense-
making, especially in areas of illness narrative (Baumeister & Newman,
1994; Charon, 2006; Hurwitz et al., 2004; Kleinman, 1988), the story-
gathering and storytelling function of journalism has not been given
equal credibility as a methodology. Olick (2014), for example, says the
reliance on interviews and recollection explicitly separates journalism
from ‘academic history’, while ‘other factors distinguish it [journal-
ism] . . . from interview-based sociology’, suggesting that journalism lies
outside accepted sociological research methods (p. 26). Lindgren and
Phillips (2011) take a different view and argue that, rather than exclud-
ing journalism from the ranks of credible research methodologies, it
should be acknowledged as a research method itself aligned with con-
ventional social science practice. Lindgren (2011) compares the research
steps involved in creating a radio documentary with commonly used
qualitative approaches (see also Phillips & Lindgren, 2010). The chal-
lenge for practice-related researchers in journalism has been to identify
and describe the characteristics that distinguish journalism from other
sorts of storytelling. How is a journalistic approach to storytelling dif-
ferent from, for example, oral history? Oral historians also go out to
capture individual stories and make them more broadly available, usu-
ally via library archives. The main distinguishing feature is mediation:
in oral history the subjects tell their stories with the historian operat-
ing as facilitator; in journalism the journalists tell the subjects’ stories
operating as mediators between the subject and the audience. In fact, if
oral historians do act as mediators in telling people’s stories, as they do
 Mia Lindgren and Gail Phillips 163

when incorporating interview extracts in books and articles, it would be

more accurate to argue that in this case they too are engaged in jour-
nalism practice. The difficulty of capturing and defining the journalistic
method is compounded by the fact that one of the identifying traits of
quality journalism is the concealment of artifice – stories should flow
without the reader/viewer/listener being aware of any mediation at all.

Journalistic values and integrity

As is evident from the ongoing debates on the nature of modern jour-
nalism (see, for example, Allan, 2006; Deuze, 2003; Kawamoto, 2003;
Richards, 2005; Riordan, 2014a), just being able to gather material and
publish it on the web does not make it journalism. It is accuracy, inde-
pendence and impartiality that ‘are the hallmarks of good journalism’
(Riordan, 2014b), more than ever in the digital age when content is so
prolific. The credibility of journalistic storytelling resides in the author-
ity of the journalists themselves, which is a product of the ethical
standards journalists abide by, and the integrity of their sources and the
material they purvey.
The AAN journalists conformed to three codes of practice, each of
which imposed certain standards on them. First, the Australian Journal-
ism Code of Ethics required that they ‘report and interpret honestly,
striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts’ (Media
Entertainment and Arts Alliance, n.d.). Second, the NHMRC Human
Research Ethics standards committed them to ensure the welfare of
the participants (NHMRC, 2007). The fact that the AAN was a public
health website imposed a third level of responsibility. The authority
and credibility of health information on the web has been the subject
of much academic debate on the need for specific standards (see, for
example, Commission of the European Communities, 2002; Eysenbach
et al., 2002; Kim et al., 1999; Schwitzer, 2010). To meet this addi-
tional responsibility, the journalists complied with the Health on the
Net HONcode principles (Health on the Net, n.d.) which reinforced the
journalistic values of authoritativeness, transparency and impartiality.
The website was distinguished from other asbestos-related websites in
being free from commercial links. The authority of the site depended
not just on this independence but also on the credibility and accu-
racy of its information through ‘integration of biographical and official
sources’ (Zandberg, 2010, p. 12). In line with the HONcode principles,
the research team’s medical and public health researchers authenticated
and checked the information content to ensure the integrity of these
sections of the site. The information was journalistically reversioned to
164 Reforming States of Affairs

Figure 9.1 The Australian Asbestos Network: website landing page featuring
Sylvia Lovenfosse, along with Robert Vojakovic, AM, JP and Rose Marie Vojakovic,
AM from the Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia, www.asbestosdiseases.org.au.

make it as accessible as possible to the general public. This included the

translation of complex government and scientific language into simple
English, the use of clear headings and a logical narrative progression,
the collection and integration of useful links taking users straight to rel-
evant information that was often buried deep within other information
sites, the use of pictures to add visual interest and so on. These ‘cer-
tified’ resources complemented the stories in which individual people
remembered their engagement with asbestos, often at tragic personal
cost. We will now examine the form journalistic mediation took in
creating the AAN website.

Mediating memories

The journalistic mediation in the AAN project can be divided into

three stages: the identification of the story, the process of gathering
the material and creatively adapting it into appropriate website content
(Figure 9.1), and the method of dissemination.

Identification of the ‘asbestos story’

Asbestos is a difficult topic for many Australians to come to terms
with, both at a societal and a personal level, in confronting not only
 Mia Lindgren and Gail Phillips 165

the past actions of corporations and governments (Holland & Pyman,

2011; Howell & Miller, 2006; LaMontagne & Walker, 2005; Leigh, 2007),
but also the overwhelming challenge of dealing with the asbestos that
remains in Australian communities (Phillips & Lindgren, 2010). In many
cases personal experiences were not shared publicly because of confiden-
tiality clauses in compensation settlements between asbestos companies
and the victims of ARDs. In addition, asbestos is often seen as an occu-
pational issue and an issue of the past. Unfortunately, because of the
long latency period (it can take decades for asbestos diseases to develop)
and the pervasiveness of asbestos in the built environment, the material
continues to pose a danger to Australian society, exposing a new cohort
of home renovators and others who come into contact with the asbestos
residue in old buildings and public infrastructure. This is what is com-
monly referred to as the ‘third wave’ of ARDs following the first wave
of mineworkers and the second wave of workers in manufacturing and
construction industries (Olsen et al., 2011).
For many years, in Australia as elsewhere, the truth about asbestos
was deliberately kept hidden by those in the know (Castleman, 1990;
Selikoff & Lee, 1978). According to Leigh,

[i]ndustry, sections of the medical and occupational hygiene pro-

fessions, and governments stand accused to varying degrees of a
conscious attempt to delay, obfuscate and minimise recognition of
the importance of the asbestos hazard.
(Leigh, 2007, p. 524)

Whilst there is now a considerable body of scholarly knowledge about

asbestos in Australia, this has not translated into high levels of aware-
ness amongst the general community about the dangers of asbestos
(LaMontagne & Walker, 2005; Nicholls, 2006) and many Australians
still struggle to find information about asbestos (Hunter & LaMontagne,
2008; Lee et al., 2009). There is also a surprising gap in research about
the personal experiences of people affected by ARDs and their families
(Hunter & LaMontagne, 2008; LaMontagne & Walker, 2005; McCulloch,
2006). The story of asbestos is not pretty, the dire consequences of expo-
sure are frightening, the suffering experienced by the victims of ARDs is
hard to confront, the fact that asbestos dust is everywhere and therefore
difficult to avoid is unnerving. This is not a story people want to hear;
on the contrary, distressing news can trigger what Seu (2003) refers to
as ‘an active “looking away” ’ (p. 190). As a result, in Australia there has
developed a culture of denial exacerbated by both ‘lack of knowledge
and lack of opportunity to act on knowledge’ (Bauman, 2003, p. 139).
166 Reforming States of Affairs

This is where the AAN website became a site for Tenenboim-Weinblatt’s

(2013) mediated prospective memory.
In this context the agency of journalists began with the acknowl-
edgement that there was an untold history of asbestos beyond the
accounts that had been picked up by the mainstream media. These
were the stories of private suffering and grief, of past wrongs never pub-
licly acknowledged, of past tragedies and present fears. By seeking out
these stories and putting them into the public domain, the journalists
would be making the invisible visible – their intervention initiated the
process of creating a repository of collective retrospective memory for
Australians to share.

The story-gathering process

The selection and gathering of the material for stories is the second area
of journalistic agency in collective retrospective memory.
The capacity of personal narratives to change behaviour has been
noted in the area of public health. According to Ziebland and Wyke
(2012), there is evidence that ‘hearing other patients’ stories can affect
health behaviours’ (p. 239) and as a result they are increasingly being
used in public health websites. However, Bauman (2003) notes, ‘only
relatively few messages about other people’s suffering come to us com-
plete with clear information about what we can do to help’ (p. 146). The
AAN stories would not only personalize the asbestos experience but also
serve as a gateway into a unique Australian-specific compendium of pub-
lic health information on the identification of asbestos, safe handling
practices and asbestos diseases and treatments. This required that the
journalists first find the memories and then determine an appropriate
format in which to present them.

Finding memories

Memory enables us to create a ‘usable past’ (Wertsch, 2002, p. 40)

through ‘access to stories that, hitherto, had been repressed, forgot-
ten, marginalized, erased or traumatized’ (Healy & Tumarkin, 2011,
p. 5). The role of the journalists in the Australian Asbestos Network
was to find sources for the ‘repressed, forgotten, marginalized, erased
or traumatized’ stories about asbestos (Figure 9.2).
The public were invited to ‘tell their asbestos story’ via recruitment
sessions on local talkback radio and through leaflets deposited at the
Asbestos Diseases Society, local libraries and the lung diseases clinic
where many ARD sufferers presented themselves for regular check-ups.
 Mia Lindgren and Gail Phillips 167

Figure 9.2 Example of Australian Asbestos Network story page: Ted Grant

Many of the initial interviewees were patients of the medical experts

in the research team who were keen to tell their stories, and this led to
other contacts using snowball sampling techniques (Noy, 2008). Though
people were invited to ‘tell your asbestos story’ on the website, very
few took up the offer of doing it themselves. Those who contacted the
project wanted the journalists to help them – to bear witness to their sto-
ries and to use their skill to retell them. The interviews were extended
and semi-structured, a practice common to both journalism and oral his-
tory (Feldstein, 2004, pp. 4–5). Edited audio recordings were included in
the Asbestos Stories section of the site, but extracts were also used to
add a personal dimension to the historical and medical sections of the
site: the capacity to listen to people telling their stories in their own
voice became a distinguishing feature of the narrative. Interviews were
also conducted with key players in the legal battles – lawyers, unionists,
asbestos advocacy groups, journalists and historians – as well as with
prominent medical researchers.
The process of collecting retrospective memories gave people licence
to remember and the journalists were the recipients of accounts, many
being told for the first time, of trauma that had been accumulating
often over decades. Prominent themes emerged in the stories: how and
where people were exposed in the workplace or during home renova-
tions; the lack of knowledge about the dangers; the impact of the illness
on their lives; the anger from the sense of having been betrayed by
168 Reforming States of Affairs

asbestos companies and governments. Mesothelioma patient Elizabeth

Nicholson didn’t know she could be exposed during a home renova-
tion in the early 1990s (Nicholson, 2009). Angela Napolitano, whose
husband Liborio died from mesothelioma after working in Wittenoom
in his youth, remembered the fear of illness that dominated their lives.
Watching many of his fellow workers die from ARD had made Liborio
depressed:

his depression was knowing that he was going to die from something
that his friends had died from and he knew it was going to be a ter-
rible death . . . the only cure [for his depression] would have been to
make him believe that it was not going to happen to him, but no one
could do that.
(Napolitano, 2008)

Stories about the impact of asbestos on loved ones, especially the chil-
dren, were particularly poignant. Clarence Taylor, a former Wittenoom
worker who lost both his wife and his adult son to mesothelioma, spoke
eloquently of his anguish and guilt:

What I had was about 3 ½ years of happiness [living in Wittenoom]

and I am paying very dearly for it now. How can you lose one of your
children and your wife and say I’m in front. You’re not. Your life is
destroyed . . . I wish to God I had never gone to that damned place.
I feel as though I murdered my wife and I murdered my son. I was
the one that took them.
(Taylor, 2008)

In telling their stories, the interview subjects were able to express their
grief at what had happened to them, their anger at the authorities who
had neglected them, and their satisfaction in finally being heard and
having their experiences recognized as a warning to others. For the
audience the memories highlighted the risk of exposure during home
renovations, the emotional challenges of living with and dying from
ARDs and of coming to terms with guilt from exposing loved ones
unintentionally.

Recounting the stories

While individual accounts can be moving and powerful on their own, as

Kunelius and Renvall (2010) note they are made even more powerful by
 Mia Lindgren and Gail Phillips 169

‘the attention and form journalism [gives] to them’ (p. 528). The agency
of journalists in storytelling brings with it a serious responsibility: their
selection and treatment of events can impact on how the commu-
nity relates to the past, on what we remember and how we remember
(Zandberg, 2010; Zelizer, 1992). They don’t have an untrammelled lib-
erty to do what they will with the material they collect, and the strength
of the stories derives from their being ‘factual accounts of what “really”
happened’ (Edy, 1999, p. 73). It is this that gives journalists ‘a unique
authority in telling the story of the past’ (ibid.). Like Archibald’s (2004)
‘public historian’, the journalist is ‘a facilitator of useful storymaking
based on fact’ (p. 13).
Journalism involves an act of creation through which the raw material
is turned into a compelling narrative to maximize its audience impact.
This is what Gamson and Modigliani (1989) refer to as ‘interpretive
packages that give meaning to an issue’ (p. 3). While deploying skills
familiar in oral history and sociology methodologies, the power of the
story and specifically its crafting to maximize its appeal to a future
audience is what distinguishes journalism as a discipline. Without the
audience journalists would be recorders, not reporters.
The arsenal of techniques at the journalist’s disposal includes selec-
tion of interviewees, organization of the narrative, selection of formats
and, in this case, web organization. In this sense journalism can be seen
as ‘a process rather than a product’ (Kitch, 2008, p. 317), with journal-
ists in the role of agents or mediators who ‘[t]hrough their authorship
of the event . . . provide it with a timeline, context, circumstance, and
causality. In other words, they construct a narrative from a previously
chaotic event’ (Ashuri & Pinchevski, 2009, p. 145).
Unlike oral history collections where unmediated and unabridged
extended interviews are stored in libraries and archives, the AAN web-
site featured edited audio interviews intended for public dissemination.
The editing process was informed by editorial considerations relating to
impact, clarity and duration to make the packages accessible to a web
audience. The journalists used the interview material to create ‘mini-
documentaries’ made up of multiple interview extracts edited together
around themes, such as life in Wittenoom, the experience of illness,
medical history of ARDs, legal cases and government inquiries. This
journalistic treatment resulted in high-quality audio and written pack-
ages formatted in ways that aimed to encourage reading, listening and
navigating through the site. It also meant that web users were able to
find stories of relevance to them without needing to trawl through hours
of interviews.
170 Reforming States of Affairs

Collective retrospective memories of asbestos

The journalistic activities of collecting and retelling the heretofore
dispersed and unheard asbestos stories and assembling them in a sin-
gle online site allowed them to form part of a compelling body of
evidence about the history of asbestos in Australia. Content analy-
sis of the narrative threads that emerged from people’s recollections
revealed the repeated themes of anger, betrayal and ongoing hurt
deriving from the fact that ‘nothing was ever said’, as well as guilt
arising from the unintentional exposure of loved ones to a future
threat because ‘nobody knew’. The interviewees saw their testimony
as a call to action from the past to the present. Introducing the
archive into the public domain would initiate the process of convert-
ing private memories into collective prospective memories for society to
share.

Collective prospective memory: Disseminating the stories

The transition from collective retrospective memory to collective

prospective memory requires an audience, the final link in the memory
chain. Journalists, in addition to their power as mediators in the telling
of stories, also have access to the public sphere. The aim of the dissem-
ination strategy was to find a web audience. To do this required three
things: first it needed to be publicized; second it needed to be easy to
find on the web; third it needed to be easy to navigate, with formatting
and presentation that it encouraged engagement.

Publicizing the AAN website

The site was launched during Asbestos Awareness Week in Novem-
ber 2010, which led to mainstream media coverage at both the local
and national level. This and subsequent public events each November
increased awareness of the site amongst the public and also mainstream
journalists, with the researchers now regularly contacted for further
information and media comment when asbestos stories are in the news.

Finding the website

The AAN website brought together previously fragmented resources scat-
tered amongst government, advocacy and legal sites. It had above all
to be easy to find. Judicious use of keywords such as ‘asbestos’ and
‘Australia’ has ensured the site features prominently on the Google
landing page, accessible with just one click.
 Mia Lindgren and Gail Phillips 171

Types of engagement
Patterns of access can be tracked using web analytics data which can
reveal quantitative information on how many people accessed the site,
when they accessed it and how they navigated around it.
In the three full years of the funded project, between November 2010
when the website was launched and November 2013, there were 51,226
sessions (visits), 40,046 unique visits (an individual Internet Protocol/IP
address counted once) and over 230,000 page views (total number of
viewed pages including the same page viewed more than once) recorded.
Access tended to peak when an asbestos-related story appeared in the
media. Google Analytics analysis has made it possible to track the user
pathways and these confirm the migration of users from stories to infor-
mation and vice versa, no matter where they started their journey on
the website.1
Though the project had a social media presence, most people con-
tacted the team directly via email, often motivated by panic on becom-
ing aware of past or recent exposure, and seeking information on
what to do and where to go for help. They were directed to the most
appropriate agency to contact for assistance.
While these statistics confirm that the site is being used, it is dif-
ficult to measure the extent to which it has directly influenced the
behaviour of the users. This goes beyond the remit of this chapter, which
focuses on content creation and dissemination. Ziebland and Wyke in
their analysis of patients’ experiences online note that online narratives
constitute ‘a new field with no agreed-on theoretical and methodolog-
ical basis’ (2012, p. 225). While they recognize that accessing others’
personal stories ‘has the potential to affect decision making’ (p. 221),
they say that little is understood about what makes these first-hand
accounts compelling and how they might influence the user’s future
actions. The asbestos stories are not exclusively illness narratives, but
Ziebland and Wyke illustrate the challenges of scientifically measuring
the impact of the AAN website. A PhD study is currently under way
which is evaluating stakeholder engagement using the AAN as a case
study.

Conclusion

The journalists working on the AAN website had a social purpose, not
just to collect stories, but to put them into the public domain to sup-
plement and rectify a deficient historical record. In the example of
172 Reforming States of Affairs

‘mediated prospective memory’ recounted in this chapter, they lent the

credibility of journalism to memories that had up to then been hidden
away. The people interviewed for the project were motivated to tell their
stories online so that their suffering could serve as a warning to others.
Their voices ‘put the past into words’ to create ‘a storehouse of lessons’
(Booth, 1999, p. 256), a repository of collective retrospective memory
that hadn’t existed before. This became a corpus for collective prospec-
tive memory when combined with relevant medical and public health
information to take the public from past trauma to present and future
remedial action. In this way the journalists contributed to the ‘collec-
tive remembrance of what still needs to be done’ (Tenenboim-Weinblatt,
2013, p. 92). By making the material on offer as comprehensive as pos-
sible, as compelling as possible and as accessible as possible on the web,
they provided the public with a new and unique resource by which
to engage with asbestos as a live and relevant issue in modern-day
Australia.

Acknowledgements

This research project was supported by two grants from the National
Health and Medical Research Council (2007–09, Project Number
458519; 2010–12, Project Number 634458). We wish to acknowledge
the contribution of our co-researchers Renae Desai, Lenore Layman and
Chris Smyth from Murdoch University, Western Australia.

Note
1. We also wish to thank Renae Desai for access to the web analytics data
from her current PhD research project, ‘Developing a Model for Effec-
tive Online Communication: Utilising the New Media Environment for
Stakeholder Engagement for Public Health Campaigns in Australia’. Renae
has been completing this research while managing the website as part of the
NHMRC-funded project, Dust-related Health Issues in Western Australia.

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Part III
Recollecting States of Identities
10
Stories of Love and Hate: Cultural
Memory in the Cuban Diaspora
Ivan Darias Alfonso

Introduction

In the half-century that has elapsed since the year when revolutionaries
led by Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, the past has remained a con-
tentious issue. The year 1959 became a kind of temporal boundary that
delimited the Caribbean island’s transit from capitalism to socialism,
and in time, a charged reference with a symbolic power to designate
the old and new societies: the backward neo-colonial republic and the
developing nation. That division of pre- and post-revolution was inte-
grated into the national consciousness in a country that also turned into
a global symbol for social justice, revered for its educational and health
successes, and for engaging in a confrontational relationship with its
powerful neighbour, the USA.
The year 1959 marked also the emergence of the Cuban diaspora,
when the closest allies of Fulgencio Batista and most of the nation’s
upper class abandoned Cuba and settled 90 miles north, in Florida and
other US states. On the island, the revolutionary leadership adopted
socialism and gradually came under the sphere of influence of the Soviet
Union. In socialist Cuba, media stayed under government control and
followed the propaganda model. Over the years, news organizations,
national cinema and television succeeded in shaping a representational
paradigm of Cuban society which relied mostly on an edited version
of the national history (Rojas, 2007). This representation enabled an
essentialist notion that linked the collective idea of the patria (home-
land) with the revolution (Kapcia, 2005) and brushed aside important
contributions from the recent past, prior to 1959, or made by those who
had left the country. Revolutionary values such as egalitarianism, self-
sacrifice, patriotism, internationalism, laboriousness and loyalty to the

179
180 Recollecting States of Identities

revolution played a significant role in influencing an educational system

that prioritized the creation of a communal atmosphere in formal and
informal spaces for schooling (Blum, 2011). More than one generation
of Cubans grew up accustomed to this ideological scenery. When social-
ism collapsed in Eastern Europe in 1989, Cubans were forced to endure a
so-called ‘special period’ of power cuts, downward social mobility, food
scarcity and public health epidemics. Vast numbers of people educated
in revolutionary values emigrated in the following years.
The Cuban diasporic blogosphere peaked around 2007–09, when the
majority of blogs analysed in this chapter emerged online. What we call
the blogosphere is a diverse space where one can find blogs covering
dissimilar issues, therefore it comes as no surprise that not all blogs by
Cuban emigrants dealt with their nation or with their migration experi-
ence. Likewise, not all blogs ended up a collection of personal accounts
of their past and a repository of collective memories, because many were
devoted to sharing news content about Cuba and the world. On the
island, blogs also flourished and some of them, especially Generación Y
by Yoani Sánchez, became well known worldwide.1
This chapter is organized as follows. The second section presents the
selection criteria for the blogs included in the study and a brief discus-
sion of methodology and my position as researcher. In the next section
I explain the diasporic context and its importance for the bloggers’
reflections on self in relation to their collective past. I also comment on
the possibilities of the internet and blogging for the creation and sharing
of these reflections. The next section focuses on intentional and contex-
tual acts of remembering, which influence the bloggers narrations of
their past in the homeland. There, I highlight the connection between
remembering and identity formation. The last section of the chapter
discusses how the bloggers’ narrations of the collective past aim for a
reconstruction of past experiences in the homeland. By adopting a criti-
cal stance against the official discourse of the Cuban government and by
reflecting on the role of ideology in their formative years, the bloggers
provide new accounts of their homeland past, which also influence their
notions of identity.

Cuban emigrants as bloggers

For this chapter I have chosen a selection of blogs created by diasporic

Cubans, many of which appeared in the flourishing period of the Cuban
blogosphere after 2006–07, when the majority of the bloggers launched
their personal sites. Blogging had already become a promising trend
 Ivan Darias Alfonso 181

almost a decade earlier (Siles, 2012). Ignacio Siles (2012) notes that
writing about themselves became a means for early bloggers to gain
a new grasp of concealed aspects of the self that could result in self-
transformation. By that logic, I claim that writing about the past would
also lead to a revision of the bloggers’ relations with past experiences
that, as we shall see, would transform their understanding of their
memories and those memories’ influence in terms of their identity.
For the purpose of my research, I focused on those websites deliber-
ately aimed at reflecting on the importance of the homeland and the
migrants’ previous lives there in order to make sense of themselves. The
selection was based on some fairly exclusive criteria: I decided to exclude
blogs created by information professionals (journalists and media work-
ers), because for them the treatment of topics such as remembering and
identity could be related to their own intention of weblogging.
In her analysis of several blogs created by Cuban official journalists,
Elaine Díaz Rodríguez (2009) notes that their language still pertains
to the persuasive function of the government’s propaganda, in parallel
with a discursive turn exemplified by the ‘truth about Cuba’ approach,
in which the realistic portrayal of the island can only be presented by the
official media. By contrast, media bloggers in diaspora have challenged
this official representation by focusing on topics such as identity and
remembering. I consider this focus critical in these diasporic bloggers’
own reasoning for the creation of their digital logs. However, media
bloggers in diaspora appear to have an advantage over the ones selected
for this chapter, because their previous journalistic experience provides
them with more inside knowledge to challenge the messages put for-
ward by the official Cuban media bloggers. I do not intend to question
the validity of their portrayal of Cuba or how they locate themselves
with respect to it in diaspora, but I aim at a more personal approach
to the topic of collective past. Elsewhere (Darias Alfonso, 2012), I have
shown how Cuban emigrants engage in new strategies of media con-
sumption to reflect on their identity and their previous lives in the
homeland and how this process happens mostly in the everyday context
of diaspora. Therefore, in the case of media professionals, the revi-
sion of their past may also come about as a rather organized process
informed by their professional cultures. It is worth remembering that in
the media environment of revolutionary Cuba, alternative voices were
almost non-existent.
For the same reason, I decided not to include blogs created by artists
and authors, because they also would have a particular interest in recre-
ating their pasts. Instead, I have focused on a list of more conventional
182 Recollecting States of Identities

content producers without previous involvement in media production

or access to producing and sharing information through media tech-
nologies while in the homeland. Here I am seizing the democratic nature
of the internet and its importance for encouraging diverse points of view
and perspectives of a given situation. I could call these bloggers ordi-
nary actors of the diaspora, with the clear distinction that, although
not journalists or literary authors, they possess the cultural capital
required to produce and share narrative accounts of their past and
current experiences.
I selected 11 blogs created by Cubans living in Western Europe. The
majority of them originate in Spain (Memorias de una cubanita que emi-
gró con el siglo, El blog de Betty, Desde Afuera, Diario de la Pelusa, Los
días no volverán, Muñequitos rusos).2−7 Others come from Germany (Libros
que traje de Cuba, Desarraigos Provocados), the UK (A Cuban in London),
Sweden (Barrio Blog) and Switzerland (Ben un cubano en Europa).8−12 The
oldest was created in 2007 and the vast majority of them have remained
relatively active up to the time of writing.
My analysis draws on media studies and discourse analysis through
a sample of several posts from the selected blogs. It covers a period of
approximately seven years (2007–14), which coincides with the most
active time in terms of content production and interactions. It should
be noted that the production of the bloggers’ own content decreased
notably after 2010–11, and bloggers reduced their number of posts from
previous years.13
Blog posts were analysed as texts, that is, concrete written documents.
Texts were examined through a rhetorical analysis to understand how
the arguments were constructed. Rather than proposing a mere interpre-
tation of metaphors and images, I analysed the bloggers’ construction of
texts within a context defined by a common past in the homeland and
influenced by an official discourse based on a pervasive ideological mis-
sion, but I also located the text production in the temporal context of
diaspora.
I created two divisions in order to separate the themes emerging in
the narrations of the past. For the purpose of this chapter, I selected blog
posts that denoted a particular association with the past in the home-
land and those that included detailed authors’ intentions to provide
their personal reconstruction of the past. Texts were later reinterpreted
to identify instances relating to intentional and contextual acts of
remembering, which will be explored below. Another selection was
made to discuss texts dealing with reconstructions of past memories,
which were re-examined to focus on the relation between the authors’
 Ivan Darias Alfonso 183

points of view and the importance of the context in which the posts
were produced.
Before presenting my analysis, I would like to clarify some issues
regarding my position as a researcher. I should disclose the fact that, like
the bloggers studied, I am also a diasporic Cuban and I have also kept
a weblog since 2005. I consider my ethnic origin and migrant expe-
rience to be an advantage in understanding the bloggers’ reflections
on the shared past. Cubans on the island are well known for talking
and writing in a kind of coded language which may pose difficulties
for foreigners, as some researchers have noted (Rosendahl, 1997). I pre-
fer the metaphor of a coded language, since it presupposes interactions
and deciphering amongst informed parts in a communicative process.
This has become not only a discernible feature of the island’s reality,
but something already ingrained in the country’s institutions and edu-
cation system. Doing ethnographic research on Cuban schools, Denise
Blum (2011) identified the prevalence of two contradictory normative
ideologies in the public and private spheres. This contradiction, Blum
argues, has resulted in ‘rampant dissimulation’ as Cubans opt for the
‘double moral’ (2011, p. 209). Having lived in revolutionary and post-
Soviet Cuba, I believe I am in a good position to identify and reflect on
my compatriots’ coded assumptions regarding the various attitudes and
behaviours present in Cuban society.

Cultural memory, blogs and diaspora

Constructed versions of a collective past gain in complexity when situ-

ated in the context of diaspora. On the one hand, versions of the past
will become influential in strategies of identity formation for the emi-
grants, because homeland allegiances always shape the migrants’ sense
of self and their notions of belonging. As the homeland becomes an
idealized construction, so does the collective commitment to its mainte-
nance and restoration (Cohen, 1997). The recollection and reconstruc-
tion of the common past enables a strong ethnic consciousness and a
sense of distinctiveness. On the other hand, that reconstruction of the
past cannot be separated from the everyday present of diasporic citi-
zens, because it continues to influence their identity formation, which
is understood as a process rather than as a concept (Hall, 1990).
If we agree with Avtar Brah (1996) that diasporas are constituted in
the materiality of everyday life, then we can conceive of émigré groups
as fertile ground for the reconstruction of a shared past as they make
sense of themselves in a present of dispersal and resettlement. I would
184 Recollecting States of Identities

add to that diverse context the influence of the internet and its pos-
sibilities for the rapid production and exchange of mediated memories.
Digital technologies also multiply the production and retention of man-
ifold versions of the past because of their almost unlimited capacity
for the storage of mediated memories (van Dijck, 2007). They also pro-
vide multiple outlets for their consumers to make sense of that past,
in a process in which individual and collective memories not only
coexist, but are also created anew, discussed and shared. This com-
plicates individual processes of selectivity: what to remember, what
to forget, for example, because of the internet’s nature and plurality,
and enables the convergence of many more voices and versions of the
shared past.
José van Dijck (2007) argues that blogging is a process that helps to
shape subjective feelings and identity through affective connections,
defining a sense of self in relation to others. The selection of blogs
included in my study support her argument, since the simple act of shar-
ing a memory triggers an affective connection acknowledged by others.
That acknowledgement can be seen in comments left on the blogs, or it
can be quantified by traffic statistics. Blog posts can be considered part
of a diverse repertoire of media that migrants access as a way to con-
nect self with others (van Dijck, 2007). I would add that in the Cuban
context, this connection is recovered or re-assumed. The internet expe-
dites transnational bonding, for example between Mallorca (Spain) and
Gothenburg (Sweden), but also enables a proximity between diasporic
Cubans living in the same country, overcoming the well-documented
reluctance that diasporic Cubans exhibit when it comes to group for-
mation or community building (Berg, 2007, 2011; Sánchez Fuarros,
2008).
With respect to the homeland, the digital space appears to be more
liberal and democratic than Cuba’s public sphere, as the past can
be evoked without essentialist views about nation and national iden-
tity. As I will demonstrate, the blogs’ narratives emerge devoid of the
homeland-loaded terminology relating to patria (homeland) and social-
ism, allowing a personal identification with a collective notion of the
island nation characterized as a cultural lodestar. As a result, notions
of cultural/national identity are orientated towards this construction,
rather than towards the geographical island. As early diaspora theo-
rists acknowledged (Cohen, 1997; Saffran, 1991; Tölölyan, 1991), this
constitutes a common feature of human dispersal, the understanding
that after emigration the return to the ancestral home is no longer
possible.
 Ivan Darias Alfonso 185

Blogging about the past: Intentional and contextual acts of

remembering

In this section, I explain how the bloggers’ narrations of their past in the
homeland stem from intentional and contextual acts of remembering.
By describing acts of intentional or contextual remembering, I am posi-
tioning the Cuban bloggers in a very active segment of the blogosphere,
where Cuba appears as the topic around which many blogs converge.
By active, I mean that most of the bloggers analysed regularly featured
in other blogs compiling online contributions on Cuba, or took part
in the comment sections, which enabled further cross-referencing on a
daily or weekly basis. Their blogs can be characterized as part of a news
media context of other diasporic blogs and websites that promoted the
sharing and diffusion of manifold visions of the Caribbean island.
I argue that remembering becomes contextual when a piece of news
shared in the wider blogosphere motivates a contribution by the anal-
ysed bloggers. For example, many of the posts analysed originated after
the release of a piece of news which prompted a narration of the
shared past, hence my argument about the contextual nature of acts
of remembrance. I would add that in spite of their ‘independence’ as
bloggers – that is, not being affiliated with other, more visited blogs or
news websites, like Penúltimos días,14 for example – many of the authors
included in this study featured in other blogs of the Cuban diaspora
and even in websites and blogs from the homeland. For that reason, it
is possible to identify a more conducive context for the production and
sharing of notions about the common past.
However, I also argue that the bloggers’ inclusion of their memories
on the blogs is a response to an intention, a clear purpose to present
themselves in the blogosphere and assume this blogger-diarist identity.
As blogger Aguaya Berlin (Desarraigos) claims in her early posts, ‘remem-
bering is her right’.15 This claim is sometimes not explicitly stated by
other bloggers, but one can infer it in the majority of the blogs stud-
ied. Most of the initial posts begin with a reference to the island and a
statement of the blogger’s origin, immediately followed by other posts
related to the condition of living in diaspora.
I defend the intentional aim of sharing past memories because, as
I will explain below, the past becomes the focus of many posts through
diverse associations: as a way to connect with the homeland, as a
source of transnational bonding, as an incentive for contextualizing
identity markers and to compare the past with the official represen-
tation of Cuba. In addition, we can look at the very blogs’ names to
186 Recollecting States of Identities

discuss the importance given to retrospective memories. For example,

in Memorias the author uses the very word ‘memories’ to name her blog.
The title is taken from Cuba’s children’s literature classic Memorias de una
cubanita que nació con el siglo by Renée Méndez Capote.16 The paraphrase
announces the act of emigrating as the leitmotif of the blog. It high-
lights issues of both national identity (a little Cuban) and diaspora (who
emigrated).
Some posts also make a distinctive connection between the blogger’s
cultural traits and their past to tell stories about the diasporic present.
Aguaya Berlin’s account of a minor mishap exemplifies, in this case, a
peculiar use of language as a cultural marker. Posted on 20 July 2008,
the entire recollection of the event is peppered with phrases of Cuban
Spanish pertaining to both the vernacular and the slang. She uses the
words aterricé (landed), destartalé (disassembled), trastazo (bang), matá
(knackered), me regué (all over the place) and desguabinao (broken).
This becomes her way to contextualize the event, which happened in
Germany, as though it were to be ‘translated’ for a Cuban audience. Her
translation exercise entails memory work since she is using words dating
from her childhood and adolescence, or even from an earlier time.
I regard remembering as a powerful incentive to define national iden-
tity and notions of belonging, and above all as a signifier of diaspora.
A common characteristic of many posts is that they reveal how acts
of memory occur in the most mundane circumstances of everyday life.
Occasionally, a particular event – a trip to another city in the host coun-
try or a trip abroad, a peculiar encounter with locals’ attitudes and
customs – prompt a reflection on the blogger’s formative years. The
present in these posts introduces the memory work and the narration
about the past dominates the rest of the entry. Such a way of telling
the story becomes a notable stylistic feature in blogs like Desarraigos and
Memorias. They start from a specific event in diaspora, which correlates
with a similar past experience on the island, and then the memory is
evoked.
Remembering also relates to the bloggers’ spatial-temporal awareness
of being here (in diaspora) and not there (in the homeland), which char-
acterizes their condition as diasporic individuals. Memory work informs
their double consciousness by linking their present to the homeland,
when comparison between life in the host country and in the homeland
becomes a leitmotif that guides their recollection of past experiences.
Cuba, then, emerges as a continuous reference. It corresponds to the
original centre of things past, but at the same time, it becomes an incen-
tive for cultural memory. Bloggers incorporate the past into strategies of
 Ivan Darias Alfonso 187

identity formation as part of their understanding of their place in the

social structure of both homeland and host country and their notions
of belonging.

Evoking the past, reconstructing past memories

The issue of reconstructing the past does not pertain only to the
realm of memory and recollections. As diasporic individuals, Cuban
bloggers recognize the importance of self-awareness and of consider-
ing the homeland as a contested space, a feeling influenced by the
bloggers’ everyday life in the host countries. Therefore, remembrance of
the past can be one of the personal strategies migrant-bloggers employ
to construct their ideas about the country left behind.
In diaspora, Cuban migrants have broader access to media reports
about the homeland and the world, which cannot be compared to
their previous patterns of media consumption on the island. Researchers
working on emigrants and their uses of media also acknowledge that
in diaspora, questions of access to and consumption of diverse media
sources shape subject construction and notions of belonging (Aksoy &
Robins, 2003; Karim, 2003; Thompson, 2002). However, while those
resulting constructions of self and nation influence personal strategies
of identity formation, they rarely extend beyond the private sphere, or
a public sphere limited by the ‘borders’ of an ethnic group or enclave.
The advent of blogs has enabled, first, a reflection on those strategies in
the form of texts, and later the possibility of sharing them globally.
In a context where we can identify ‘zones of silence’ in homeland
media – that is, stories not told – the past has a predictable appeal
for diasporic Cubans. The bloggers studied have not only confirmed
this interest in untold past stories, but also in the narration of some
of them. Retelling entails a reconstruction of the past, which results in
a revision of lived experiences even at a semantic level, by highlight-
ing the nuances by the choice of words. Blogger A Cuban, who writes
in English from London, explains in a post dated 19 February 2008
about the MTT (Territorial Troops Militia), that he did not ‘enrol’, but
was ‘coerced into joining’. A single change of wording gives the text
new meaning. Remembrance operates in this case as a sort of filter that
analyses the event and reconsiders the means of retrieving it and its fur-
ther narration. The post continues with a story about him listening to
a speech given by Fidel Castro, a rather solemn occasion in the official
repertoire of social practices of revolutionary Cuba. However, the nar-
ration acquires a humorous twist when he shifts the attention to his
188 Recollecting States of Identities

feelings of frustration when trying to contain his urges to urinate while

waiting for the Comandante to finish.
Cuban ex-president Fidel Castro is frequently mentioned on the blogs.
Authors share their remembrances of Castro’s ubiquitous presence in
many aspects of their previous lives. Bloggers criticize his ways of ruling,
his authority on issues beyond governance like a baseball game (Betty) or
the verticality of Cuba’s power structures (Desde), but I would also point
to a more general criticism, because they expose, in their own words,
how ideology influences every aspect of the social fabric of the island.
Los días displays many significant posts that illustrate the role of
ideology, for example. The author’s recollections cover her childhood
and adolescence, and the texts examine her passing through Cuba’s
school system.17 Posts recount the diverse past instances when she,
a true believer in the revolution and its legacy, became disappointed
after several homeland experiences, which would make her question the
authenticity of revolutionary values. I arrived at this conclusion after
reading a series of texts in which she revisits her past from a critical per-
spective. Myra Georgiou (2007) regards this critical appraisal as the norm
in the way the homeland will be imagined in diaspora. However, Los días
provides a very detailed reflection, a quasi-ethnographic retrospective of
homeland experiences that I value as both original and revealing.
In the posts illustrating reconstructions of the shared past, the most
common resource in memory work suggests a kind of archaeological
approach to the recent history of the homeland. Bloggers delved into
previously unknown passages of Cuban history silenced by the official
media on the island, but available to them in diaspora through vari-
ous news sources and media. For example, events such as the UMAP,18
the sinking of the tugboat ‘13 de Marzo’,19 the Maleconazo20 and the
Black Spring21 are all commemorated in several posts throughout the
years covered. At the beginning, they are mentioned and used as recur-
rent topics that guide the whole recollection. In subsequent posts over
the years, these events are incorporated into the bloggers’ own lists
of commemorations or references to their pasts. On the island, at
that time, these cited events did not make it into the national press,
or were reported according to the government’s version, exonerating
Cuban authorities from any tragic outcomes. However, in diaspora,
the bloggers deemed them fundamental to understanding their links
with the homeland and even as justification for their own reasons to
emigrate.
Bloggers end up promoting a version of the national history that con-
trasts with the official position, and this version is incorporated into
 Ivan Darias Alfonso 189

their sense of national identity. Following the trajectory of blog posts

during the years studied, it is possible to notice the bloggers’ leaning
towards a more critical stance, even a political break-up with the Cuban
government’s position, disregarding the potential consequences of such
disagreement.22 I cannot indicate a precise point in time when this con-
frontational approach towards the homeland becomes more evident.
One can argue that initial posts in some blogs explored issues of belong-
ing, nostalgia and the reality of diaspora, and that the later posts fit
into the narrative that the Cuban government labels a hostile position
against the revolution. However, I can relate the emergence of these
posts to a series of recent events in the homeland and its diaspora, which
enabled the emergence of an active presence of Cuban bloggers and of
Cuba as a topic on the internet and social media. We must consider
that after 2006, when Fidel Castro abandoned all his responsibilities as
head of state, the island gained the attention of international news orga-
nizations wanting to explore or identify a possible transitional process
towards democracy.
Cubans can now access the internet from paid points, at very pro-
hibitive prices, from which they can browse a limited number of
websites and services because of a government firewall that blocks many
pages critical of the Cuban authorities. In spite of all these difficulties,
Cubans on the island have taken advantage of an increasing, albeit lim-
ited, exchange of information and media products from the diaspora.
The so-called paquete (a selection of programmes from American and
diasporic TV in digital format distributed informally on USB sticks),
for example, shows how the official media’s influence has recently
waned.
I would argue that this context, of a more permissive attitude towards
foreign information entering the homeland, facilitates the bloggers’
desire to reconnect with an audience based on the homeland. That
reconnection is obviously informed by their experiences in diaspora,
and by stories narrated with the aim of reconstructing a shared past.
I argue that in reconstructing versions of their past, bloggers identify not
only – as explained previously – the impact of ideology on their previous
learned versions of homeland, but also the whole idea of the society as
a formative force to influence their notions of belonging. In this regard,
the past is susceptible to being dissected, and migrant bloggers point
out several flaws in the dominant discourse about Cuba as a classless,
post-racial and egalitarian society.
In terms of ‘race’, bloggers of Afro-Cuban ancestry included in my
selection regularly published posts acknowledging the impact racial
190 Recollecting States of Identities

stereotypes and institutional racism had on their upbringing. Blogger

A Cuban, in a post from 13 June 2010, describes a visit to the theatre
for a performance by Cuba’s National Ballet, when he was left feeling
out of place because of how regular ballet-goers stared at him (a black
boy from an Afro-Cuban working-class neighbourhood) and because of
the clothes he was wearing. The narration, in this case, goes beyond the
anecdotal and makes a case for an insightful recollection of the entire
incident from a racial perspective. If we follow A Cuban’s posts, it is easy
to identify several texts in which racism is highlighted. Undoubtedly,
‘race’ has become more important in diaspora, because his Afro-Cuban
origin and the impact of this culture are acknowledged and embraced as
part of his Cubanness.
Various posts written by Ben also reconstruct the past from a racial per-
spective. In his case, he delves into the official version of the national
history to look for those instances when the contribution of black
Cubans has been overlooked. For example, in a text dated 1 May 2010,
he relates how Afro-Cubans tried to halt the execution of eight medi-
cal students by the Spanish colonial authorities. This is a well-known
event in the collective memory of Cubans, for it belongs to the long list
of commemorations associated with national history. Every 27 Novem-
ber, the event is officially remembered in the ritualized fashion of
the Cuban revolutionary occasions, but in the official recollection of
the event, embedded with signifiers of independence, anti-colonialism,
martyrdom, virtue and sacrifice, the contribution of Afro-Cubans is very
seldom mentioned. Interestingly, Ben’s evocations are generally based
on Cuban sources by researchers and authors working against the official
grain.
Personal reflections on assumed versions of national history are found
not only in texts, but also in comments and discussions that con-
tribute to a collective summary of forgotten events. Comments on the
blog Libros, for example, are fundamental to an understanding of pre-
viously unknown historic events and figures (literary authors, in this
case). Living in diaspora has led bloggers to uncover an important list
of forbidden writers in Cuba, deemed cultural icons, indispensable for
a more encompassing idea of national culture. Nevertheless, as bloggers
admit, they had never heard of them while in the homeland. Readers
and bloggers engage in a collective appraisal of these literary figures and
their contributions to national culture before and after their emigration
from revolutionary Cuba. These exchanges enable a useful production
of knowledge, which later influences the bloggers’ own ideas of nation
and cultural identity.
 Ivan Darias Alfonso 191

I would add that remembering reveals a particular positioning of the

bloggers with respect to self and the group. Reconstructions of the past
are aimed at dismissing the homeland as an essentially collective unit
that negates individual agency. In Los días, for example, we notice the
author’s insistence on past experiences as a common (collective) set
of actions and activities that everyone from the same generation was
bound to perform. Diaspora, for her, has resulted in recognition of her-
self as an individual, a compensation for the lack of self-awareness she
(and by extent the other bloggers) experienced in the homeland, where
collective notions of identity were dominant.
Remembering, then, operates as a process that focuses on collec-
tive experiences, which will be retold in texts with an emphasis on
individuality. Prevalent notions of the group and the nation will be
reconstructed as a more individual memory. National identity notions
are not rooted in a previously learned concept of common traits and uni-
fying ideological aims, but in a constructed notion, which reinterprets
the past through the gained knowledge and experiences of a diasporic
present. The homeland, as is stated in Memorias, becomes ‘an island
made up of memories’.

Conclusion

This chapter has discussed the diverse strategies Cuban migrants in

Western Europe employ to reconstruct their perspective on their per-
sonal and collective past on the island and the conditions of remem-
bering (and expressing/sharing) it in diaspora, with the aid of blogging.
I have explained how the diasporic context enables the bloggers’ acts of
remembering with the incentive of transnational bonding and challeng-
ing previously learned versions of their collective past in the homeland.
Sharing their memories online becomes a useful strategy for the bloggers
to compare their previous lives in the homeland with the peculiarities
of their current everyday lives in their host countries.
In diaspora, the past is portrayed through a recollection of events that
highlights the role of ideology in shaping the collective representation
of the homeland. Cuban bloggers detach themselves from official ver-
sions of national history and reflect on new allegiances to their country
of origin, this time defined as a cultural space rather than as a limited
geographical entity.
The bloggers’ memory work delves into forgotten passages of the col-
lective past, silenced by Cuban official media, and helps them retell past
experiences while stressing the importance of social constructions, such
192 Recollecting States of Identities

as race, in their formative years. Reconstructed versions of the past are

incorporated into the bloggers’ sense of identity and shared online with
the further aim of transnational bonding and establishing stronger links
with the homeland. In their revision and discussion of their group mem-
ory, bloggers value the internet and the blogosphere as a space to share
reconstructed versions of the past, which challenges characterizations of
diasporas as spaces for the emergence and reproduction of an essentialist
idea of the homeland.

Notes
1. Philologist Yoani Sánchez gained immense popularity after opening her blog.
She received the Ortega y Gasset Prize for Journalism, awarded by Spanish
newspaper El País, in 2008 and was named as one of the 100 most influential
people in the world by Time magazine. In 2009, she was awarded the Maria
Moors Cabot Prize by Columbia University.
2. Memorias de una cubanita que emigró con el siglo (Memories of a little Cuban
who emigrated with the century) hereafter, Memorias.
3. El blog de Betty (Betty’s blog) hereafter Betty.
4. Desde afuera (From Abroad) hereafter Desde.
5. Diario de la Pelusa (Pelusa’s diary) hereafter Pelusa.
6. Los días no volverán (The days won’t come back) hereafter Los días.
7. Muñequitos Rusos (Russian cartoons) hereafter Muñequitos.
8. Libros que traje de Cuba (Books I brought from Cuba) hereafter Libros.
9. Desarraigos provocados (Provoked Uprootings) hereafter Desarraigos.
10. Hereafter A Cuban.
11. Barrio Blog (Neighbourhood Blog) hereafter Barrio.
12. Ben un cubano en Europa (Ben, a Cuban in Europe) hereafter Ben.
13. For example, A Cuban in London published 39 posts in 2007, 224 in 2008,
142 in 2009, 125 in 2010, but 83 in 2012 and 79 in 2013. Blogger Ivis from
Memorias posted 291 texts in 2007, 354 in 2008, 254 in 2009, but only 18 in
2010. Aguaya Berlin’s posts also confirm the decreasing trend, with 433 posts
in 2008, 305 in 2009, 154 in 2010 and 31 in 2012.
14. http://www.penultimosdias.com. Conceived initially as a blog, this site
evolved to become an aggregate of many news items, comments, and own-
and guest-produced content about Cuba on the web.
15. http://desarraigos.blogspot.com/2007/10/si-te-fuiste-perdiste.html (accessed
22 September 2014).
16. Writing for children, in Memorias de una cubanita que nació con el siglo (Mem-
ories of a little Cuban who was born with the century) author Méndez
Capote provides a detailed narration of life in Havana’s emerging outskirts
neighbourhoods in an upper-middle-class family at the dawn of the 20th
Century.
17. http://losdiasnovolveran.blogspot.com/2010/08/de-camino-casa-voy-conver
sando-sin.html and http://losdiasnovolveran.blogspot.com/2010/09/cuna-
de-nueva-raza-ii.html (accessed 22 September 2014).
 Ivan Darias Alfonso 193

18. UMAP stands for Unidades Militares de Apoyo a la Producción (Military Units to
support production), labour camps created for the re-education of homosex-
uals, religious activists and dissidents. Up to 25,000 youngsters were interned
in the camps, which existed from 1965 until approximately 1968 (Zayas,
2006).
19. The tugboat ‘13 de Marzo’ was occupied by a large group of Cubans wanting
to escape to the USA by sea on the night of 13 July 1994. After the port
authorities noticed the hijacking, the boat was intercepted by patrol boats in
an obscure episode in which 41 people, including ten children, perished.
20. El Maleconazo is the name given to the spontaneous protests registered on
5 August 1994 in some areas of the Centro Habana neighbourhood in the
vicinity of the Cuban capital’s famous promenade along the city’s coast: El
Malecón.
21. The Black Spring relates to the period in which 75 activists, independent
journalists and dissidents were sent to prison after a series of rushed trials.
The process prompted strong condemnation from the USA and the European
Union, amongst other nations.
22. In posts from the summer of 2009, Aguaya Berlin narrates her experience of
being detained at Havana’s International Airport before returning from her
first trip to Cuba since the opening of her blog. She describes being ques-
tioned by the airport branch of the state security service, which resulted, as
further posts confirmed, in her being informed by the Cuban consulate in
Germany that her authorization to travel to Cuba had been revoked.

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11
Media Memory Practices and
Community of Remembrance:
Youth Radio DT64
Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt

Introduction

A recent essay in the German weekly Spiegel proclaimed the end of a

distinct East German identity (Berg, 2013), the end of Ossi. However,
online and offline sites for commemorating cultural artefacts from the
former GDR are flourishing. One example is the still-growing Facebook
page DT64 – Das Jugendradio der DDR dedicated to a former youth
radio station that disappeared from the re-unified German media land-
scape already in the early 1990s. We consider the Facebook page not so
much an example of persistent Ostalgia – that is, nostalgia for the East
(Gallinat, 2006; Godeanu-Kenworthy, 2011), but an illustration of how
media memories are performed in our digital age, entangling individual
and collective memories. In that sense, we are interested in the kind of
community of remembrance that is afforded by the Facebook page and
the media practices it fosters.
The youth radio station DT64 was a state-controlled station that oper-
ated for a period of about 30 years (1964–93) in the territory of the
German Democratic Republic (GDR). Recently, the social networking
site Facebook gave new life to DT64 as a number of groups and pages
dedicated to the radio station were founded. They became a forum
for a community devoted to the remembering of DT64, thus enabling
media memories. The page DT64 – Das Jugendradio der DDR is the biggest
and most active page, with more than 7,000 users. The page recollects
both the official history (represented through markers on the timeline

195
196 Recollecting States of Identities

such as foundation and extension of the programme) as well as per-

sonal histories (represented by user and administrator posts) of DT64.
The administrators of the page are active and share approximately three
posts per week, while the users react with an average of 100 likes, shares
or comments on each of these posts. The users’ engagement, considering
they post approximately once per week, is comparably low and receives
little attention from other users.
In the context of digital media, a growing body of research suggests
that platforms such as Facebook fundamentally change the way mem-
ories are constructed. This chapter reviews the literature critically and
presents an empirical case study of online media memories. Linking
the notion of media memories to that of practices, the chapter inves-
tigates the question of how media memory practices are being played
out with the help of digital media technologies, and what affordances
for memory practices are set by the platforms used. The chapter draws
on in-depth interviews and a survey among users of the Facebook page
DT64 – Das Jugendradio der DDR. Furthermore, we have conducted a
textual and platform analysis of the Facebook page to investigate the
specific affordances for media memories. Based on this empirical inves-
tigation, the chapter suggests that social networking sites facilitate the
production of media memories that are collaborative and take place in
public. Ultimately, the chapter discusses the changing nature of media
memories in the context of a changing media landscape from a media
and communications perspective by looking at questions of how users
experience performing media memories online in relation to a given
infrastructure that allows for, but also constrains, specific media-related
practices (Couldry, 2012).

Media memory practices

Media including print, television, film, photography, radio and the

internet have become increasingly important sites for engaging with the
past (Garde-Hansen, 2011), but the focus on investigating the relation-
ship between media and history is fairly recent. Joanne Garde-Hansen
refers to works by Baudrillard, Sturken, Zelizer, Shandler and Canndine
as examples of this rather new engagement and suggests a distinc-
tion between the History as an official grand narrative and history
as a ‘repository of shared memories’ (quoting Schama, 2004, p. 23).
Consequently, she attempts to investigate media compelling ‘an end
to history and the beginning of memory’, where memory is consid-
ered as always being reconstructed and renegotiated. Hence memory
 Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt 197

engenders an alternative to the totalizing approach to history (Garde-

Hansen, 2011). In her understanding, memory is a more inclusive
domain than history as it links the self actively to the past through con-
tinued memory work and identity work. Mediated memories in turn,
José van Dijck proposes, refer to ‘activities and objects we produce and
appropriate by means of media technologies, for creating and re-creating
a sense of past, present and future of ourselves in relation to others’
(van Dijck 2007, p. 21). Andrea Hajek, finally, has pointed out that
‘media allow for public memories to be felt privately’ (Hajek, 2012,
p. 376). In this sense we are considering the memories shared about
DT64 on Facebook as a way of appropriating a shared past through
individual memories without attempting to write a grand or official
narrative.
In this regard, the development of digital media and the attention
paid to the relation between media and memory practices have led
scholars to consider that ‘we may have to rethink how we conceive of
memory; that we are changing what we consider to be the past; that the
act of recall, of recollection and of remembering is changing in itself’
(Garde-Hansen, Hoskins & Reading, 2009, p. 1). This links to the cur-
rent discussion of digital media having contributed to what Andrew
Hoskins (Garde-Hansen, 2009; Hoskins, 2009b, 2010, 2011) describes
as the connective turn, referring to changing visibilities and agencies in
our negotiation of the past. The possibility to shape, store and organize
as well as delete remainders of the past allows for different individual
and social memory practices, Hoskins (2010) argues. He further posits
that ‘new’ memories are evolving as they are continually emerging in
connection with media and technologies. Although DT64 – the object
of our case study – was shut down in 1993, shortly after the reunification
of the two Germanies, the radio station continues to exist in the mem-
ories and memorabilia of large parts of the audience, expressed through
media memory practices as, for example, exercised on Facebook or the
DT64 Festival organized in 2014 to commemorate the channel’s 50th
anniversary.1
Recent studies have contributed to the investigation of the increased
connectivity of media memories empirically focusing on different digi-
tal media and platforms. For example, Lucas Hilderbrand (2007) inves-
tigated YouTube as a repository for cultural memory and analysed the
video-sharing platform as a forum where experiences, popular culture
and historical, shared narratives intersect in an idiosyncratic man-
ner. Christian Pentzold (2009) focused on Wikipedia as a memory
place within cyberspace where narratives about the past are negotiated,
198 Recollecting States of Identities

and Joanne Garde-Hansen (2009) examined the archival function of

Facebook.
The discussed studies of connective memories enabled by digital
media share a focus on media (plat-)forms and the affordances con-
nected to them. The notion of affordances is often used to refer to
‘action possibilities’ (Gibson, 1979) provided by an object or technolog-
ical infrastructure. This starting point assumes that there are intended
ways of usage. However, media technologies and platforms are not
neutral in character and cannot be adopted in all kinds of ways.
Instead, as Bloomfield and co-authors argue, affordances of technolo-
gies ‘are not reducible to their material constitution but are inextricably
bound up with specific, historically variable, ways of life’ (Bloomfield,
Latham, & Vurdubakis, 2010, p. 428). Hence, media technologies and
infrastructures are constructed following a certain set of ideas, par-
ticularly commercial platforms such as Facebook, as we have argued
elsewhere (Kaun & Stiernstedt, 2014). Facebook, for example, is follow-
ing a business model that is largely based on dispossession of creative
expressions in the form of data that become the resource of the plat-
form (Andrejevic, 2013; Elmer, 2003). Users navigate within this set
framework of institutional and technological affordances and in some
cases invent unintended appropriations of the technological infrastruc-
ture. In our understanding, media memory practices become one fruitful
entry point in order to investigate this negotiation process.
Besides the emphasis on media as mnemotechnological platform,
Garde-Hansen (2009) suggests that media institutions and media prac-
tices are two other possible areas of investigation within media memory
research. Rather than analysing memory as discourse (Pentzold, 2009),
we aim to draw on media practices to understand current forms of
media memories. We suggest, hence, media memory practices and the
doing of memory work as an analytical lens. Consequently, this chap-
ter connects an analysis of platform affordances with media memories
as practices, which we consider as a somewhat underrepresented per-
spective in current media memory studies. We therefore ask how users
actually perform media memories online and how they reason about
their practices. Consequently, we are interested in whether and how a
community of remembrance is constructed based on these practices.
Analysing media as practice is enjoying increasing popularity within
media and communication studies. Nick Couldry’s (2004, 2012) attempt
to rethink the research agenda of the field of media and communica-
tions in 2004 and his more recent reflections on media as practice have
been repeatedly suggested as a starting point (for example, Barassi &
 Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt 199

Treré, 2012; Mattoni, 2012). Although the relationship between struc-

ture and agency implicit in the notion has been contested (Hobart,
2010), several scholars suggest media practices are a fruitful entry point
to analyse negotiations of structure and agency that are irrevocably
intertwined, as for example put forward by Giddens’ (1984) notion of
structuration (Bird, 2010; Postill, 2010). In that sense, we aim to carve
out the middle ground of media memory practices operating at the
intersection of structural conditioning and creative appropriation of
remembering media with the help of media.
The conceptual history of practice theory is certainly much older than
Couldry’s propositions. Couldry suggests Wittgenstein and Merleau-
Ponty as philosophical roots and defines media practices, while relying
strongly on Schatzki (1996), as an ‘open set of practices relating to, or
oriented around, media’ (Couldry, 2004, p. 117). He argues that media
practices are concerned with specific regularities in actions that relate
to media, and regularities of context and resources that enable media-
related actions. Ultimately media practices stand in for ‘what people are
doing in relation to media in the contexts in which they act’ (Couldry,
2012, p. 35). Following Couldry’s understanding, this encompasses prac-
tices that are firstly directed to media (for example letters to the editor),
secondly actions that involve media but do not necessarily have them
as object or major aim (for example everyday talk that takes media con-
tent as a starting point) and thirdly actions that depend on the prior
existence, presence or functioning of media (for example hacktivism).
Couldry also problematizes the place of media practices in relation
to other practices and whether they gain more importance over time,
which is in line with the arguments of current mediatization research
(Couldry & Hepp, 2013; Hepp & Hartmann, 2010; Hepp & Krotz, 2014).
Consequently, he too considers whether media practices might function
as anchoring practices for other social practices.
With reference to Couldry’s systematization and based on the mate-
rial analysed, we distinguish between media memory practices as storing
practices, representational practices and connective practices. The first
type of practice refers to the usage of media as a storage platform and
their archival function. The second category involves representational
aspects of the media triggering memory, while the third encompasses
performing media memories in an interactive and collective manner
(Hoskins, 2009a, 2009b, 2010; Pentzold, 2009). These categories will
serve as analytical entry points to investigate the media memory prac-
tices exercised through the Facebook page DT64 – Das Jugendradio der
DDR.
200 Recollecting States of Identities

Considering DT64 memories on Facebook

The name DT64 represents the inauguration of the radio chan-

nel at the German meeting of the Young and Thälmann Pioneers
(Deutschlandtreffen) in 1964. The channel was installed to broadcast non-
stop and live from the event. The Berliner Rundfunk took over DT64
after the event and transformed it into a permanent programme and
consequently continuously extended the airing hours from ten hours
a week in 1964 to 20 hours daily in 1987, and to 24-hour full service
in 1990 (Ulrich & Wagner, 1993). DT64 was famous for its music pro-
grammes and ‘recording-friendly’ shows, playing whole albums without
interruptions. Therefore, it became a resource for rare Western music
that was taped and shared in the schoolyards.2 The possibility to lis-
ten to and record Western music made the channel especially popular
among the 15–18 and 19–24-year-olds, with market shares of 50 and
45 per cent according to a survey from 1973 (Schildt & Siegfried, 2006).
For young people, listening to DT64 represented one of the few leisure
time activities available, and it became a popular hobby (Lietz et al.,
2006; Stahl, 2010). In that context, DT64 had an ambivalent character
of being embedded in the official media landscape of the GDR and at
the same time providing an alternative forum for youth culture.
The study of the DT64 Facebook page is a case study of media memo-
ries beyond memories that are related to media representations. Instead
we aim to capture a transmedia form of remembering in its own right.
The Facebook page integrates, in that context, different temporal lay-
ers of media memories and provides diverse entry points to study
affordances for and experiences of media memory work.
The empirical analysis builds on three major sources. Based on a pilot
study drawing on in-depth interviews with users of the Facebook page
and DT64 listeners (Kaun & Stiernstedt, 2012), we developed a sur-
vey and extended the analysis of the page. The survey was introduced
and posted by the page administrators and received moderate atten-
tion. Although we and the page administrators repeatedly posted the
questionnaire and the call for participation, the number of responses
remained low, with 27 respondents.3 We decided, therefore, to focus on
the page analysis while relying on the survey as contextualizing mate-
rial. The page analysis concentrated on the affordances of the site to
perform media memories while considering the practices of the users.
For a basic quantitative page analysis, we used a free software program
to calculate response rates to posts on the page and the intensity of
exchanges among the users.4
 Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt 201

In the survey only regular users of the page participated. They mainly
found the page through actively searching for DT64 on Facebook (54 per
cent), others came across it because friends have liked the page (15 per
cent). A majority of the survey participants engage with the page several
times a week or even on a daily basis (taken together, 18 respondents).
Most of the respondents report a high usage of Facebook and check their
accounts several times a day (20 respondents) – mainly in order to read
their newsfeed – and have a moderate number of friends (max. 500)
compared to the average adult Facebook user with 338 friends.5 In terms
of security and privacy settings, the respondents consider themselves
rather savvy. They keep themselves updated about changes in Facebook
terms of usage and have adjusted their privacy settings to their individ-
ual needs, that is, granting only friends access to their pictures and posts.
Some have separate friends’ lists that distinguish between contacts in
terms of access to pictures and content that they post. In demographic
terms, the participants in the survey reflect the target audience of DT64
born in the 1960s and 1970s. Two of the participants were actually too
young to be former listeners. In terms of gender, more men have been
participating (17 respondents) compared to women (6 respondents) in
the survey. As indicated earlier, we are using the responses to illustrate
general tendencies and are very cautious in extrapolating them for the
whole group of page users. In terms of the population, that is, the users
of the site, we only had access to data concerning the total number of
current followers (7,135 as of February 2014). For the first data collec-
tion, conducted in December 2011, Facebook’s statistics of the site were
still openly available, giving more detailed information in terms of gen-
der and location of the users. The administrators describe themselves as
individual enthusiasts and former listeners aiming to keep the spirit of
DT64 alive.
The analysis of the Facebook page considers on the one hand the
content posted, and on the other hand the possibilities for exchanges
provided by the page. More concretely, we consider what people are
actually doing on the page and how the infrastructure governs these
activities.

Storing practices of media memories

One of the main practices on the page is storing information and mem-
orabilia as well as sharing memories about a specific medium and media
landscape that have long disappeared (Hoskins, 2011). As an exten-
sion of the material posted directly to the group, there are links to
202 Recollecting States of Identities

two Soundcloud archives providing recordings of shows, mixes and songs

related to DT64 (for example the DT64 theme, jingles, Top 2000 D from
1990 – a chart show co-produced with the radio station SDR3 from
the former West Germany). The group also includes a rather extensive
description of the history of DT64 in the info section and numer-
ous pictures encompassing print outlets from DT64, stickers, postcards,
newspaper articles, record and tape covers by GDR and Western artists.
Regularly the administrators and other users share calls for material
from specific shows. These calls become incentives to digitalize ana-
logue materials for the common archive on the Facebook page. The
main activity of the administrators is to repost and promote these user
posts. Furthermore, they also collect and catalogue materials that have
been sent to them directly. Based on these materials, from time to time
they suggest topical weeks as, for example, a special dedicated to the
Bruce Springsteen concert in Berlin in 1988.
The administrators, hence, choose, assemble and partly edit which
objects become part of the archive and which are visible as timeline
posts. In that sense they are gatekeepers for the objects of remembrance
(Price, 2009) that are visible on the page. This is enabled by the infras-
tructure that the Facebook page provides, namely the presence and
visibility of so-called brand posts on the page and the relative invisibil-
ity of user posts that are collected in one field, but that are not exposed
in chronological order on the timeline. In general, Facebook encourages
businesses, brands and organizations to ‘brand their page’, ‘highlight
what matters’ and ‘manage everything in one place’.6 In a blog post,
Facebook officials explain further that

while Pages were designed to be the official profiles for entities, such
as celebrities, brands or businesses, Facebook Groups are the place
for small group communication and for people to share their com-
mon interests and express their opinion. Groups allow people to
come together around a common cause, issue or activity to orga-
nize, express objectives, discuss issues, post photos and share related
content.7

Pages, hence, are built to make content and access management for the
owners easy, while groups are supposed to constitute ‘private spaces’
to ‘share different things with different people’.8 Understandably the
initiators of the DT64 page chose the pages feature for their project,
providing them with the highest possible visibility, although they are
not commercially oriented actors.
 Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt 203

The focus on content and access management of the pages feature

is reflected by the interactions taking place on the page. Posts by the
administrators outweigh the number of user posts considerably during
the two weeks analysed quantitatively, and only 1.8 per cent of overall
engagement is constituted by user posts to the page. This dominance
is also reflected in the user survey. The 27 survey participants regularly
read content, but post content to the site very rarely. They are, however,
using the possibility to engage with administrator posts through links,
shares and comments.
The low visibility of contributions in the form of user postings of
course has implications for the possibilities of connective memory being
strongly guided by the administrators, who are unknown to the audi-
ence as they only describe themselves as enthusiasts for DT64. Some
of the users have the perception that they have been involved with
DT64 officially, while others see them as peers rather than official DT64
affiliates.

Representational practices of media memories

Representational media memory practices, namely the sharing and

the production of longer memory narratives about how DT64 evolved
(memories by the media), are less prevalent on the Facebook page. The
‘about’ section gives a somewhat official history of the channel, point-
ing out milestones in the development. Furthermore, the administrators
share original videos and newspaper articles about crucial moments in
the evolution of DT64, for example that the radio station was back on
air after losing frequencies in several cities, causing considerable protests
in the early 1990s. The administrators have marked historical events
for the channel in chronological order on the timeline. Rather than
longer representations, the story of the channel is assembled through
the administrator posts and the photo archives provided on the page.
In that sense the page is only partly used to reproduce one official
history, but evolves as a memory network where posts are the nodes.
As indicated earlier the choices of the administrators play a crucial
role here. Although users can participate in the negotiation of DT64’s
history, conflicts and corrections among the users happen very rarely,
indicated both by the content analysis of the Facebook page and the
survey among users. In that sense, the page does not foster reflexive nos-
talgia in terms of critically negotiating an official narrative of the past.
In general, the way in which DT64 is remembered in a predominant
number of posts and comments is nostalgic, not Ostalgic in character.
204 Recollecting States of Identities

The following comments on one of the profile pictures well illustrate

the personal character of the memories typically shared on the page:

C1: The good old DT64 time, how cool was that, for example the
Hard’n’Heavy shows.
C2: These ones I have also always been listening to and have been
recording to then get on the nerves of my family.

C3: Maxi hour on Sundays and the rerun on Thursdays – sometimes

that meant that you had to skip some lessons if you have missed
something during the weekend.

Users are nostalgic about a radio style and format that was characterized
by spending airtime on music broadcasts without interruptions, mak-
ing the recording of whole albums by popular groups such as Depeche
Mode – a scarcity in the GDR – possible for the listeners. The users and
administrators, however, do not express nostalgia for the state system of
the GDR or the cultural environment in more general terms. It is rather
the specific experience of formerly belonging to the DT64 audience that
creates the community. These shared experiences emerge from personal
memories of youth and adolescence that were placed in the specific con-
text of the GDR. The GDR as a political system itself, however, remains
secondary for the users.

Connective practices of media memories

As indicated in the literature review, previous studies have stressed a

connective turn when it comes to media memories, namely that the pur-
suit of memory work is increasingly fostered by media platforms such as
Facebook (memories through the use of media).
The Facebook page DT64 as a whole can be considered a connective
ecology offering possibilities to comment, share and like content. How-
ever, the way of connecting in the memory work of different users is
neither free of presuppositions nor non-hierarchical. Among the pos-
sibilities for connectedness (van Dijck, 2013), administrator posts and
more specifically picture posts are the most successful, triggering on an
average 457 reactions (likes, shares, comments) while videos receive on
average 98 reactions. The dominant form of user engagement is ‘likes’.
Furthermore, the main motivation to join the site, according to our
survey participants, is to remember events in the past, to gain new
information about DT64 and to get access to interesting pictures and
 Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt 205

materials. The exchange with other users and former listeners is of less
importance. Hence, while learning new things about DT64 is a common
experience that users share, the survey participants report that they do
not find new contacts through the site. It happens only rarely that users
are engaging with the page over a longer period of time, that is, posting
content regularly. At the same time, the low level of direct engagement
with other users is not a target of critique, but rather accepted and
appreciated.
Hence, the form of connectedness in terms of memory work is a spe-
cific one. The practices are individualized practices that are performed in
a shared context, while the emerging connectedness and a community
of remembrance through the site – if experienced at all – is a side effect
rather than the main purpose of engagement.

Conclusion

The chapter has discussed different forms of media memory practices

and their implications for the emergence of a community of remem-
brance. The page analysis and the user survey have shown that the
character of the community is conditioned by the infrastructure that
Facebook provides. The page format privileges a filter process guided by
the administrators that determines which memories are visible. Rather
than a bottom-up connectedness of users, visibility is steered by the
owners of the page. In that sense, the chapter contributes to a critical
discussion of the participatory mode of social networking sites that still
continues to emerge in the academic discourse and pushes beyond early
celebratory accounts.
The media memory work that has been analysed here should be
considered as transmedia practices combining and traversing the bound-
aries between digital and analogue technology as analogue media are
mediated with the help of digital media. The notion of transmedia prac-
tices is derived from the discussion of transmediality of global news
suggested by Anna Reading (2011), namely the wandering between and
transformation of news items between genres, formats and channels. For
the memory work in the case of DT64 the digital materiality dominates,
adding an ephemeral character to the shared media practices.
The memory work identified here as storing practices, representa-
tional practices and connective practices is characterized by a double
articulation of pastness and presentness. While the practices indicate a
turning towards the past, their purposes are very much related to the
present, namely an immediate engagement with and experience within
206 Recollecting States of Identities

the platform. Rather than a mere reconstruction of the past from a

standpoint situated in the present, the memory work practiced in the
platform is part of a constant and ephemeral flow of updates and reposts.
In that sense, the Facebook page provides a ‘registry of modern longings’
(Peters, 1999, p. 2) – a utopian return to the past – while the platform
itself focuses continuously on the present. A projected future surfaced
only rarely in the interviews or practices and seems not to be a major
vantage point of this particular page.
The regular activities of the administrators are a way to establish vis-
ibility and stability in the flow of memory work that is shared on the
page. The analysis showed, however, the limits of connected memory
practices in the context of Facebook, its interface and distributed vis-
ibility. The analysis showed that instead of a fundamental change of
connective (memory) practices giving visibility of many to many, or
few to few, the engagement remains very much within the logics of
mediated visibility that Thompson (2005) described for electronic mass
media. The radio and television have enabled ‘a few people to be vis-
ible to many’ (Thompson, 2005, p. 40). What has changed, however,
is the disguised authorship of the few, as the administrators remain
largely anonymous. In that sense, the activities performed on the exam-
ined page correspond to the intended use of Facebook pages which,
in comparison with Facebook groups, favour practices of commercial
actors aiming to increase visibility for their products and services in
an orchestrated manner rather than enhancing user exchange and
engagement.

Notes
1. http://www.dt64-festival.de/ (accessed 19 November 2014).
2. Two of the most popular acts during the 1980s were Depeche Mode and The
Cure.
3. The response rate is 0.4 per cent considering all users that liked the page (6,780
as of September 2013). Calculating the response rate in that way is difficult,
however, as it is not certain how many of the users actually saw the call, as
the algorithm Facebook uses to determine the content that appears in the
newsfeeds of the individual user is not known.
4. For this purpose, we used Simply Measured’s content analysis and page anal-
ysis tool calculating the user statistics for a two-week period from 22 August
through 5 September 2013; http://simplymeasured.com/ (accessed 11 Septem-
ber 2013).
5. According to a current PEW report, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/
2014/02/03/6- new-facts-about-facebook/ (accessed 19 November 2014).
6. https://www.facebook.com/about/pages (accessed 11 November 2013).
 Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt 207

7. https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/facebook-tips-whats-the-difference-
between-a-facebook-page-and-group/324706977130 (accessed 11 November
2013).
8. https://www.facebook.com/about/groups (accessed 11 November 2013).

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12
August 1991 and the Memory
of Communism in Russia
Rolf Fredheim

Introduction

In this chapter I use quantitative methods to uncover how the memory

of Soviet collapse has been invoked in recent Russian political discourse,
in particular during the 2011–12 Russian electoral cycle. I draw on two
data sources: on the one hand, I analyse patterns in half a million
Russian newspaper articles, published in the period January 2003–May
2013, while on the other I explore email correspondence between mem-
bers of the Russian political elite, leaked in early 2012. I analyse the data
from three perspectives that allow for different levels of generalization:
close readings, keyword search and through a topic model. Together
these approaches show that images of Soviet collapse were downplayed
in pro-Kremlin political rhetoric.
The Russian opposition found in the end of communism an especially
instructive lens through which to analyse the Medvedev–Putin han-
dover. The use of images of Soviet collapse was not new, but it seemed
especially pertinent as thousands of Muscovites demonstrated against
falsified election results and, in some cases, prophesied the collapse also
of Vladimir Putin’s Russia (for one example, see Gessen, 2012). This anal-
ogy will come as little surprise to Western readers. Communism – in
particular of the Stalinist variety – is an overused yardstick with which to
measure Putin’s Russia. For instance, in March 2000, The Guardian wrote
that Putin wants ‘to return to the Soviet era’, a sentiment echoed in
March 2014 when the BBC claimed Putin was ‘rebuilding Soviet Russia’
(Bullough, 2014; Traynor, 2000). Comparable statements are virtually
absent, however, in pro-Kremlin rhetoric.

210
 Rolf Fredheim 211

This chapter is situated within a new trend in memory scholarship

that attempts to track changes in collective memory through the proxy
of large databases of news material (for example Etkind, 2013). Van Dijck
famously argued that memory and media are inseparably intertwined
(van Dijck, 2007), while Halbwachs, in his seminal study On Collective
Memory (1950/1980), wrote, ‘often we deem ourselves the originators
of thoughts and ideas . . . how often do we present, as deeply held con-
victions, thoughts borrowed from a newspaper, book or conversation’
(Halbwachs, 1950, p. 44). Halbwachs’ quote illustrates the media’s role
in shaping ‘collective memories’, that is, ideas shared by an informa-
tion community. He contends that we remember ideas longer than
their provenance, and that consequently we assimilate, by proxy of the
media, ideas as our own.
Here I analyse media texts as a tool for shaping collective memory. It is
a commonplace that politicians seek to harness the persuasive power
of the press. Stalin famously called the press ‘our party’s sharpest and
strongest weapon’ (Stalin, 1923). In a country where the media are state-
controlled, this may be a unilateral process, leaving the political elites
free to shape ‘a memory culture that defines how a country deals with
its own past’ (Jarausch & Geyer, 2003, pp. 322–23). The media ‘select,
amplify and transform constructions of the past produced elsewhere [. . .]
they give a privileged space to conceptions of the past which accom-
pany the party-political battles’ (Popular Memory Group, 2011, p. 256).
Thus, memory selection and creation is politicized. This politicization
is especially clear in Russia, a country where polls show that Russian
journalists of all ages accept the ‘political function of journalism as a
propaganda machine’ (Pasti, 2005, p. 89). This, taken in conjunction
with Kansteiner’s reminder that ‘representations speak primarily to the
collective memories of their producers, not their audiences’ (Kansteiner,
2002, p. 192), justifies taking media expression as a proxy for political
interests. For this reason, I measure the ways in which Russian elites
have attempted to shape collective memory, not the collective memory
itself.

Background

Before considering the Kremlin’s relative lack of interest in historical

allegories, let’s consider the historical context: the disputed Duma elec-
tions on 4 December 2011 came but months after the 20th anniversary
of Soviet collapse, as marked by the defeating of the Communist hard-
liner Putsch of 19 August 1991. Pictures of Boris Yeltsin astride a tank
212 Recollecting States of Identities

were beamed around the world. By the end of the year, the USSR had
crumbled. The defeat of the coup – known as the August Putsch – is, at
least seen through Western eyes, emblematic of Russia’s transition.
In Russia, though, the August Putsch is disputed and controversial
in part because the Soviet collapse was a drawn out and painful pro-
cess, associated with Yegor Gaidar’s market reforms, known as ‘Shock
Therapy’, and the resultant economic hardship. According to Reddaway
and Glinski (2000), in 1992 alone average real incomes of Russians fell
by 46 per cent. Putin has often positioned his rule in contrast to the
chaos and instability of the 1990s, but the stark contrast he draws is mis-
leading. As Sakwa points out, ‘Putin continued along the broad policy
direction established by Yeltsin’ (Sakwa, 2011, p. viii). At least in terms of
political institutions, Putin inherited the state Yeltsin created, and it was
Yeltsin’s constitution (adopted in December 1993) that enabled Putin’s
presidential rule. In August 1991, Yeltsin’s victory was marked by the re-
introduction of the Russian Tricolour, and National Flag Day, instituted
by Yeltsin in 1994, is the only semi-official event associated in any way
with the Putsch. The day is not a holiday, and it never gained popular-
ity. On the contrary, in recent years, especially in the period 2008–10,
Russian authorities prevented commemorative marches being held on
this day (‘Putche prezhnego’, 2011).
As Russians took to the streets in the winter of 2011–12 to protest
against electoral fraud, some commentators writing for independent
Russian media outlets referred to 1991 when speculating about the posi-
tion the army would take in the event of revolution (the army had
refrained from taking sides in August 1991). The main point of refer-
ence, though, was not the Putsch itself but rather the popular protests
that had preceded it. A text by the independent weekly New Times, pub-
lished between the parliamentary and presidential elections, illustrates
this argument: the text, bearing the title ‘4 February 1990 – how power
crumbled’, was the first in years to print pictures of Muscovites demon-
strating against the Soviet authorities as well as a detailed chronol-
ogy of other demonstrations, right up to the August Putsch of 1991
(Mostovshchikov, 2012). They emphasized the contemporary signifi-
cance of this historical episode, with some commentators positing that
Putin’s regime might crumble just as communism had. From Decem-
ber 2011 onwards, dozens of videos depicting the February to March
1990 mass protests were posted on YouTube (for example ‘Shestvie 4
fevraliia . . . ’, 2011). The Russian opposition specifically invoked this
legacy when timing the protest at Bolotnaia Square in February 2012 in
the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections.
 Rolf Fredheim 213

The Kremlin online

While the Russian opposition found the Putsch to be an instructive lens

through which to analyse the events of 2011–12, sources close to the
Kremlin virtually ignored the subject. We know this in part due to a
remarkable trove of leaked emails revealing the internal workings of
the pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi, involved with running the
Kremlin’s online election campaign.
Analyses exploring the leaks have focused on the way Nashi
attempted to dominate the online news agenda by paying bloggers and
commenters to promote pro-Putin messages (Elder, 2012; Seddon, 2014).
More recently the leaks have been analysed within the context of an
internal power struggle, apparently between First Deputy Chief of Staff
Viacheslav Volodin and former Kremlin spin doctor Vladislav Surkov
(Klishin, 2014). While much has been made of what the leaks reveal
about the Kremlin’s internet tactics, no attention has been devoted to
the language and ideas in the messages. Questions of history and mem-
ory, for instance, are virtually absent in the correspondence. In itself
this need not be surprising, as Nashi were jockeying for position in
a nasty internet campaign, in which their primary aim was promul-
gating anti-oppositional content. What is more surprising, though, is
that references to historical events were so rare in attacks targeting the
opposition.
In the leaked correspondence, mention of the Putsch, or even 1991, is
restricted to surveys of the press, occasional posts on social media, unan-
swered requests from journalists for comment, and occasionally to taunt
opposition figures such as Aleksei Naval’ny. The handful of Nashi emails
referring to 1991 are all drafts of speeches, fliers or agitational mate-
rial. There are only two substantively relevant texts, both of which were
disseminated in the immediate build-up to federal elections. In 2007
one text, apparently drafted by then Nashi leader Vasilii Yakemenko
(Marina-nashi@yandex.ru, 2007), was distributed on fliers in Moscow
(‘Iz materialov . . . ’, 2007). The fliers were an attack on former Prime
Minister turned opposition Presidential candidate Mikhail Kas’ianov.
Alleging Kas’ianov had promised to sell Russian gas to America at a
third of the market price, the flier stated the Americans were incit-
ing revolution, hoping to turn Russia into a colony. ‘You don’t believe
it’? Yakemenko asked rhetorically: ‘In 1991 the majority didn’t believe
either. That lack of belief came with a gigantic cost: millions of lives,
devastation [razrukha], collapse of the country, thousands of kilometres
of territory, national humiliation’ (‘Iz materialov . . . .’, 2007).
214 Recollecting States of Identities

In 2011, shortly before the Duma elections, Yakemenko edited a sim-

ilar document, this time for dissemination amongst grassroots Nashi
activists. The text, called ‘One in 50 million’, was sent to 127 Nashi
Commissars along with the message: ‘Dear Commissars! You received
correspondence about the actions planned for 4–6 December [the time
of the elections – RF]. To me this was too negative . . . I see the situa-
tion differently and am sending my own text.’ The original version of
the document was awash with references to Mikhail Gorbachev, Lenin,
Stalin and even Stanislav Shushkevich, the Belorussian signatory of the
Belavezha Accords which formally dissolved the USSR. These historical
figures were portrayed equally as harbingers of chaos, as elites whose
wanton ambition had cost the ordinary Russians dearly. Contemporary
Russian opposition politicians such as Naval’ny and Boris Nemtsov, the
text argued, were cut from the same cloth. Yakemenko’s rewritten ver-
sion omitted all the historical allusions, focusing instead on how Putin’s
Russia was a happier place, where corruption had been eliminated and
even young people in the provinces could afford smartphones. There
could be no return to the past, and to move forward young Russians had
to support Dmitrii Medvedev and United Russia’s modernization plan.
During the rest of the period covered by the email leaks, 1991 figures
twice and almost identically, in blueprints for a speech to be deliv-
ered by ex-Nashi Commissar Duma deputy Robert Shlegel’ to a Nashi
spin-off group sometimes referred to as Open Internet (Otkrytiy Inter-
net) and other times as the Digital Party (Tsifrovaia Partiia). According
to the blueprint, Shlegel’ would argue that ‘sadly, those organising the
protests offer people nothing but re-elections, seizing the Kremlin, over-
throwing Putin and Medvedev. Nobody says what happens next. We’ve
been through this already, in 1917 and 1991.’1 The end of communism
was portrayed as an exclusively negative parallel, not as the end of an
oppressive regime, let alone as ushering in a period of greater freedom
and democratic potential.
The emails show that Nashi rarely invoked the memory of Soviet
collapse, except as a contrast to the stability and prosperity of Putin’s
Russia. Low-level Nashi operatives knew to draw on the 1990s as an
allegory for revolutionary excess, but even this stereotype was side-
lined in 2011, as can be seen in Yakemenko refashioning the appeal
to Nashi Commissars on the eve of the Duma elections. Yakemenko’s
rewrite points to the limits of the 1990s’ mobilizing potential: when
attempting to persuade regional Nashi members to come to Moscow
(all expenses paid, please bring your friends) to create a pro-Putin, pro-
United Russia fervour, he dismissed the ‘negative’ historical template in
 Rolf Fredheim 215

favour of a narrative about progress and transparency. Here Yakemenko

decided not to employ the twin slur of Nazism and Liberalism to taint
the opposition. Although this may have changed as the popular protests
mounted (see, for example, former Minister of Emergency Situations
Sergei Shoigu’s article in Komsomol’skaia Pravda (‘Ne dai nam bog. . .’,
2012), it demonstrates that at least right up until the elections, Putin’s
most ardent supporters found very limited mobilizing potential in the
memory of Soviet collapse.

Source selection and the Russian media landscape

The shift in Nashi’s rhetoric in many ways echoes how the August
Putsch has gradually disappeared from Russian state-controlled media.
Russian newspapers are a more diverse and less controversial data source
than the leaked emails. Do publications closely allied to the Kremlin
also skirt around the issue of Communist collapse? To answer this ques-
tion I contrasted the output of state-controlled outlets to that of Russia’s
beleaguered independent media.
Recent studies of Russian media have compared Russian print media
to that of the Western press (Dyck et al., 2008); to publications from
neighbouring states (Szostek, 2014); or to Russian internet publica-
tions and social media (Oates, 2013). Here I analyse media coverage by
contrasting state-controlled newspapers to independent publications,
which, by implication, are more likely to print dissenting or outright
oppositional content, and less constrained in expression of political
ideas. Like Toepfl (2011), I refer to groups of publications as defined
by ownership. The labels ‘independent’ and ‘state-controlled’ reflect
Becker’s argument (2004) that ‘relative autonomy from the state’ is both
defining of independent media and a precondition for press freedom.
To facilitate a comparison, I used two groups of publications: state-
controlled media (SCM) consisting of Rossiiskaia Gazeta (RG) and
Izvestiia, and independent media consisting of Novaia Gazeta (NG)
and Gazeta.ru (Gazeta). Much could be said about the validity of this
division, though there is no room for that discussion here. Other
researchers have preferred to label NG and Gazeta ‘oppositional’ or
‘liberal’ (Arutunyan, 2009, p. 84; Kratasjuk, 2006, p. 48; Toepfl, 2011,
p. 1304). At present, though, Russians more often use ‘liberal’ as a slur
than as a self-identification, while ‘oppositional’ fails to capture the
diversity of media output. For various technical reasons I ignored some
relatively independent sources, such as Lenta.ru and the popular busi-
ness dailies Vedomosti and Kommersant. I used the media monitoring
216 Recollecting States of Identities

company Medialogia’s citation counts to measure significance. Accord-

ing to Medialogia’s ranking of Russian mass media sources for July 2014,
Izvestiia was the most cited , followed by Kommersant and Vedomosti.
Rossiiskaia Gazeta came fourth, while Novaia Gazeta was in ninth
position.
Rossiiskaia Gazeta (RG) is an official government publication; Izvestiia,
bought in 2005 by the state-controlled gas company Gazprom, is widely
considered to be close to the official line (Arutunyan, 2009). Novaia
Gazeta (NG) is known for its investigative journalism and is the only
independent (print) newspaper to have published consistently through-
out the period. Gazeta is, according to Medialogia, the third-most signif-
icant online publication after the popular business daily Rbc.ru and the
news site Lenta.ru. Gazeta’s citation count is 85 per cent of Rbc’s; smaller
independent online sources, such as Slon.ru or Echo of Moscow’s web-
page, are between 2 per cent and 5 per cent as cited as Lenta (Medialogia,
2013).
Studies of reception have consistently stressed how marginal the inde-
pendent media are in the Russian media landscape. Access to media is as
important as unbiased coverage and Putin has, to use Lipman’s phrase,
ensured independent media remain ‘constrained or irrelevant’ (Lipman,
2005, p. 309). This has meant exerting strict control over all television
and most media broadcasting, yet allowing some independent print
outlets. Independent Media are ‘irrelevant’ because most people can-
not access them: print editions are rarely distributed beyond the major
cities, while the reach of state-television extends event to remote, rural
areas. Moreover, price remains an off-putting, even prohibitive, barrier
(Gehlbach & Sonin, 2014, p. 8; Pasti et al., 2012, p. 280)
In many cases, ‘independent’ media are financially dependent on
individual stakeholders and organizations, many of whom have ties to
the Kremlin. Mikhail Gorbachev and oligarch Alexander Lebedev hold
a majority stake in Novaia Gazeta; the critical radio channel Echo of
Moscow is owned by Gazprom. Online content is not yet as strictly con-
trolled as print media, but wealthy individuals allied to the Kremlin own
the most popular portals. In March 2013, the main Russian internet por-
tals were placed under single ownership through the merger of Vladimir
Potanin’s Afisha-Rambler and Aleksandr Mamut’s SUP Media. The merger
affected the hitherto oppositional Gazeta, along with Lenta and the pop-
ular blogging community LiveJournal. By late 2013, Gazeta’s political
coverage had become less incisive. In March 2014, at the height of ten-
sions between Russia and Ukraine, Lenta’s editor was dismissed. Most of
Lenta’s journalistic staff resigned in protest (‘Dorogim chitateliam . . . ’,
 Rolf Fredheim 217

Table 12.1 Number of articles by publication

Publication N articles

Izvestiia 212,679
Rossiiskaia Gazeta 145,337
Gazeta 159,918
Novaia Gazeta 18,400

2014). At this time, the Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor blocked

access to oppositional internet portals, including grani.ru, as well as
internet resources associated with the blogger and opposition activist
Aleksei Naval’ny (‘Rossiiskie provaidery blokiruiut dostup . . . ’, 2014).
I identified texts from Izvestiia and Gazeta from their respective
websites, and accessed copies of NG and RG through the Integrum Cen-
tral Press Database. I removed sport and motor sections, along with sites’
‘news ticker’ features, duplicate articles, very short or very long texts,
and a number of lists. I then used a series of scripts to extract the body of
text, and to remove all HTML marking. The table below shows how arti-
cle numbers vary across publications. Izvestiia contributes in excess of
200,000 articles, NG less than twenty 20,000. The sample size of Izvestiia
and Gazeta is near 100 per cent, while roughly half of all RG and NG
articles are included (Table 12.1).

Media accounts about the Putsch and the communist past

In 2006, the author Dmitrii Bykov claimed the August Putsch of 1991,
and with it Russia’s transition from communism, had yet to be ade-
quately processed. Bykov predicted, however, that in ‘three or four years’
the Putsch would be more accepted as worthy of commemoration, due
to the passage of time (Bykov, 2006). In the event, the subsequent trend
was precisely the opposite of what Bykov predicted. Five years later, on
the 20th anniversary of the Soviet collapse, SCM circulated less than
half the 2006 number of texts about the Putsch. Bykov’s prediction
did, however, hold true for IM: over same period, 2006–11, the fre-
quency with which the Putsch featured as a historical analogy in IM
steadily increased, culminating in a sharp spike in 2011 during the
Duma elections.
Over a period of more than a decade (January 2003 to March 2013)
references to the August Putsch, the foundational event of the Russian
Federation, in the four newspapers are limited to 270 – on average six
218 Recollecting States of Identities

times per paper per year. One might compare this with the number of
references to Poland’s foundational moment, the Round Table discus-
sions of 1989, out of which came the historic elections of June that year:
during the 2000s, the two largest Polish newspapers, Gazeta Wyborcza
and Rzeczpospolita, respectively mention the Round Table discussions
in more than 1,500 and 2,000 separate texts. Admittedly, the compar-
ison may be somewhat unjust, partly because the Polish transition is
still vigorously contested and therefore in the public eye, but the com-
parison does illustrate how Russian journalists are less keen to focus
readers’ attention on the details of Soviet collapse than are their Central
European counterparts.2
The increase in coverage during the 20th anniversary of the Putsch,
predicted by some commentators, materialized in IM but not in SCM,
where the frequency of reference dropped dramatically in 2011. The
trend shown in Figure 12.1 is stark: coverage in SCM is low and declin-
ing while IM coverage is stable or increasing. Most striking is the absence
of a spike in SCM coverage in 2011, the 20th anniversary of both the
Putsch and the end of the USSR. Given the momentous nature of Soviet
collapse, we might expect it would be hard to avoid mentioning the
Putsch, yet for SCM there is no discernible spike in references to the
Putsch in 2011.
Like Nashi, SCM have tended to pay ever less attention to the events
of August 1991. The numbers shown in Figure 12.2 are telling, but very
small: the analysis is restricted to texts that mention individual words.
To say something more meaningful about the memory of communism,
I used a topic model to identify a broader group of texts including
reference to Russia’s communist past.

40

30

20

10

0
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

Independent State-controlled

Figure 12.1 Number of texts that mention ‘GKChP’ or the ‘August Putsch’
 Rolf Fredheim 219

Tsarist Communist Great patriotic war

history rule (GPW)

0 200 400 0 200 400 0 200 400

Number of articles
RG Izvestiia Gazeta.ru NG

Figure 12.2 Distribution of texts by topic and publication

A topic model can be used to estimate the distribution of a particu-

lar semantic field within a document and to group words that typically
occur in similar contexts. This allows researchers to overcome the chal-
lenge posed by multiple meanings and provides an overview of themes
across a collection of texts. This method, though new to Russian and
Memory Studies, has been used to analyse media sources. The most
accessible example is Robert Nelson’s interactive model of the Richmond
Daily Dispatch (Nelson, 2011), in which he shows that certain topics in
newspaper coverage correlated with the ebb and flow of the American
Civil War.
A topic model is an algorithm that aims to uncover what David Blei
(2012) refers to as ‘a hidden topic structure’ by clustering terms that
tend to co-occur. To infer the topic structure I used David Mimno’s
program MALLET, which implements Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)
(Yao et al., 2009).3 The algorithm has no prior knowledge about pos-
sible systematic characteristics of texts, for example information about
authorship, date or place of publication, or indeed which newspaper
it came from. MALLET yields a list of topics, each of which is a list
of words (for example fish, boat, line, hook and fisherman), ordered
according to probabilistic centrality within the topic (we might label it
fishing). The mathematical proofs that the algorithm works may be, to
quote Ted Underwood, ‘brain-squashingly hard’, but readers wishing to
understand how it works could do worse than to start with his account
(Underwood, 2012). Topic modelling is controversial because it is easy
to execute, while its results are hard to interpret and replicate. To avoid
a series of pitfalls outlined by Schmidt (2013), I used a data cleaning
process and input settings as outlined by Matthew Jockers in an analy-
sis of themes in 19th-Century literature (Jockers, 2013). I removed 132
newspaper-specific terms and all words except nouns to minimize the
effects of style on topic allocation and to prioritize words that carry
thematic weight.4
220 Recollecting States of Identities

Table 12.2 Ten most central terms in topics about history

Tsarist Russia Communist Rule Great Patriotic War

History Power [vlast’] War

Century [vek] TsK (central committee) Veteran
Historian First Victory
Emperor KPSS (Soviet Communist party) Soldier
War Vozhd’ (leader, usually Stalin) Army
Prince [kniaz’] Litso (person or face) Front
Tsar History History
Empire Narod (roughly: the people) Anniversary
First Comrade Memory

I used the topic model to infer the distribution of topics across the
entire collection. Amongst the 500 topics, three featured the term ‘his-
tory’ prominently. Based on a number of tests, examples and the terms
associated strongly with the topics, I labelled these Tsarist Russia, Com-
munist Rule and the Great Patriotic War (GPW). The terms most strongly
associated with each topic are listed in Table 12.2.
I identified ‘historical’ texts as those at least 20 per cent about the
three topics GPW, Communist Rule and Tsarist Russia. In total, there were
1,643 such texts, 1,197 in SCM and 446 in IM. Adjusting for sample size,
state-controlled media have a marginally higher density of historical ref-
erences than do the Independent outlets. However, the vast majority
of SCM texts featuring historical topics are centred on GPW, whereas
IM are more evenly distributed amongst the topics. Gazeta in particular
printed a large number of texts about Communist Rule. While Izvestiia
and RG have devoted more than 700 texts to GPW, the same publica-
tions published less than 100 texts about Communist Rule. Gazeta and
NG issued a higher number of texts about Communist Rule than GPW.
These numbers confirm that outlets known for oppositional coverage
are much more likely to feature vocabulary associated with Communist
Rule, while historical references in SCM tend to be about Victory in the
Great Patriotic War.
The distribution of texts about the Communist Rule topic reveals how
this legacy is invoked differently by the two groups. Not only were SCM
less likely to write about Communist Rule than IM, the discrepancy has
also steadily widened. We can visualize this by plotting the proportion
of texts about the topic. Figure 12.3 shows that while IM have written
consistently about Communist Rule, SCM levels in 2012 dropped to one-
tenth of peak output in 2003.
 Rolf Fredheim 221

0.3%

0.2%

0.1%

0.0%
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

Figure 12.3 Proportion of texts about the topic Communist Rule

N texts about outgoing communist elites, by dates mentioned

20
Independent
10
0
State-controlled
10
0
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Figure 12.4 Number of texts about Communist Rule, by dates mentioned (1900–
2013)

Apart from the quantitative discrepancy, the greatest difference

between historical references in IM and SCM is that IM texts are more
frequently forward-looking, whereas SCM tend to situate the past firmly
in the past. This can be seen on an aggregate level by looking at the dates
in these texts.5 Retrospective texts about the Russian transition are likely
to mention dates in the 1980s and 1990s, texts linking the Putsch to the
present will more often refer to dates in the 2000s, whereas texts men-
tioning the Putsch as part of a biography or a grander Soviet narrative
will incorporate dates prior to 1980.
Figure 12.4 shows that IM texts about Communist Rule refer primar-
ily to contemporary events. 1991 emerges as a pivotal year, positioned
between two epochs. In SCM, no such divide is in evidence, and the
period 1950–70 is more frequently referenced, even in absolute terms,
than is 1980–2000. The distributions are striking, even inverse: IM texts
about Communist Rule rarely mention dates during communism, while
SCM texts rarely refer to the period since. The average for SCM texts
is pushed back through two types of texts: firstly, obituaries for various
public figures active during the Soviet Union, and secondly, anniversary
222 Recollecting States of Identities

texts on the birthdays of leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev and even

Stalin. Thus, the small number of SCM articles discussing Communist
Rule were rarely about contemporary events, let alone contemporary
politics. Upon close reading I found that in these texts, the past itself
was invariably the story; none of the texts drew attention to the break in
the early 1990s between modern Russia and the Soviet past. In this way,
the actual content of the Soviet era is remembered more prominently in
SCM than are the details of the transition.
IM draw parallels and contrasts in particular between the transitional
moment and the present. The greater presence of historical analogy in
IM has resulted in their references to the past being more politicized.
Firstly, we can see this by the high density of references to the recent
past rather than the Communist period: historical analogies are com-
mon in explicitly oppositional texts temporally situated in the present.
For instance, Vladimir Milov asked rhetorically in 2009, ‘is it conceivable
that the Sistema,6 to prolong its life, will “ditch” Putin, the discredited
leader at the time of the economic crisis, as the GKChP once tried to
ditch Gorbachev?’ In a long text where all dates but one lay in the
future, he contended that, ‘yes’ – the siloviki might become a GKChP-2
(Milov, 2009). Other texts drawing on the end of the Union as an anal-
ogy for Putin’s possible demise likewise wrote more about the present
and future than about the past. Thus, historical analogies in texts in
independent media about contemporary politics briefly pinpoint past
events, before returning to the discussion about the present or, often,
to desired future outcomes. SCM texts about contemporary Russian
politics, though, hardly ever include references to the Soviet collapse.

Conclusions

The data discussed reveal a divide within the way Russian political elites
invoke images of the past. Certain oppositional voices in independent
media consistently draw on the image of Soviet collapse to foreshadow
the demise of Putin’s Russia. At the same time, in the winter of 2011–12
when the regime was faced with unprecedented opposition, figures
aligned with the Kremlin were increasingly reluctant to use historical
allegories at all, even when attacking the opposition through references
to ‘the 90s’. The inevitable conclusion to be drawn in this regard is that
the past was of peripheral relevance to efforts aimed at guaranteeing
Putin’s return to office, while it was central to attempts to mount a chal-
lenge to his rule. In light of the failure of the protest movement, the
subsequent authoritarian consolidation and the fact that ‘independent’
 Rolf Fredheim 223

media in Russia typically can be traced back to oligarchs exiled early in

Putin’s first term, it appears that in Russia, the memory of communism
is for ‘losers’.
While the image of Soviet collapse was central to an opposition nar-
rative as expressed in both traditional and social media, the opposite
was the case for voices aligned with the Kremlin. As the Nashi emails
illustrate, social media were extensively polluted with fake and auto-
matically generated content, making it almost impossible to separate
messages pushed as part of an election campaign from those expressed
by individuals. Based on references to the past both in traditional and in
social media, the Russian case presents compelling evidence that media
representations of the past reflect the political agenda of media owners,
not the collective memory of their audience.

Notes
1. http://slivmail.com/potupchik/message/14631.
2. Broadly speaking, the Polish Right emphasizes how the Round Table com-
promised the transition to democracy, while those on the Left see it as an
irreplaceable precondition for the peaceful transition to democratic rule.
3. Latent Dirichlet Allocation is the simplest topic model. For more on LDA and
other types of topic modelling, see Blei (2012).
4. The topic structure and a complete list of stopwords may consulted here: http:
//fredheir.github.io/ThesisFiles/.
5. I counted all numbers in the range 1300:2013 as dates. The greatest source
of errors introduced come from decades, such as 1990s. While these numbers
distort the measure, they do not invalidate it. Publication dates and newspaper
metadata introduce a bias towards the present. To prevent this I only counted
years prior to date of publication.
6. For more on Putin’s Sistema, see Ledeneva (2013).

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Part IV
Recalling States of Life
13
Mourning in a ‘Sociotechnically’
Acceptable Manner: A Facebook
Case Study
David Myles and Florence Millerand

Introduction: Mourning online

This chapter investigates how mourning practices are transposed on

and performed through social network sites (SNS). We define mourn-
ing practices as the ways in which bereavement status is performed
and grief is expressed in socially acceptable manners. This interest in
the social dimension of mourning was already present in Durkheim’s
work (1912/2008, p. 567) in which he argues that ‘grief is not the
spontaneous expression of individual emotions’.1 Mourning practices
are framed through a series of conventions, customs and rules (Baudry,
2003) that authorize certain rights and privileges, but also stress certain
restrictions and obligations to specific individuals (de Vries, 2001; Sklar,
1991). Mourning ‘causes mass or individual behaviours (attitudes, con-
ducts, rituals) that are more or less strictly codified depending on cases,
places and times’ (Thomas, 1988, p. 44).
Online mourning practices taking place on SNS (boyd & Ellison,
2007), such as Facebook or MySpace, have attracted the attention of
scholars in recent years. Early studies on online mourning mostly anal-
ysed major events such as cataclysms (Arthur, 2009), mass shootings
(Foot et al., 2005; Vicary & Fraley, 2010) and deaths of public figures
(Courbet & Fourquet-Courbet, 2014; Sanderson & Cheong, 2010). Some
studies have focused specifically on the use of SNS in order to ‘commu-
nicate’ with the deceased (Carroll & Landry, 2010; DeGroot, 2009) or
analysed messages published in the profiles of deceased users of MySpace
(Brubaker & Hayes, 2011) and Facebook (Getty et al., 2011). Others have

229
230 Recalling States of Life

investigated the desecration of such online mourning sites by ‘Facebook

trolls’ (Phillips, 2011; Riechers, 2013).
More recent studies have increasingly focused on social and techni-
cal norms that frame online mourning practices. For example, Sherlock
(2013) suggested that the mythical nature of technologies might facil-
itate commemoration in secular societies, while Brubaker et al. (2013)
focused on the temporal, spatial and social expansions of public mourn-
ing potentially brought by the use of SNS. Some scholars have compared
SNS to ‘traditional’ commemorative apparatus (McEwen & Scheaffer,
2013; Roberts, 2012) and documented the role of SNS’s affordances over
mourning practices (Church, 2013). Others have underlined the impacts
of SNS’s public dimension on generated content (Marwick & Ellison,
2012) or questioned whether online memorial pages constitute online
communities (Forman et al., 2012).
This chapter draws from the observation that the ways in which
sociotechnical norms participate in framing mourning practices should
be more carefully studied. As stated by Goodrum (2008, p. 438), ‘rules
and norms surrounding the expression of grief remain unclear’, and
this may be particularly true for web-based platforms such as Facebook
where an ‘etiquette for conversing [. . .] has not yet been established’
(DeGroot, 2009, p. 64). Papacharissi (2009) points to a similar conclu-
sion when she argues that Facebook constitutes an informal setting that
gives place to a perpetual search for normative codes. This search leaves
room for inevitable negotiations regarding what constitute acceptable
ways of using SNS when performing mourning activities online. Hence,
how are mourning practices transposed onto and performed through
the Facebook group application? Using a sociological framework of
uses, this descriptive study relies on the observation and analysis of
a commemorative Facebook group to understand the ways in which
Facebook users negotiate social and technical norms in order to perform
mourning practices online. Four principal forms of use were observed:
the ‘wish card’, the ‘personal diary’, the ‘place of prayer’ and the
mnémothèque.

A sociological framework of uses

This case study grounds its analysis within a French sociological frame-
work of uses (sociologie des usages) (Jauréguiberry & Proulx, 2011; Jouët,
2000) that can be affiliated to the Anglo-Saxon ‘domestication’ theory
(Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992). In order to be named as such, forms of use
must repeatedly manifest themselves and be amplified in order to reach
 David Myles and Florence Millerand 231

a certain level of stabilization. This stability allows capturing the social

conditions that are inherent to the emergence of forms of use which,
consequently, can be recognized as such and be studied (Millerand,
1998). The sociology of uses’ key analytical object is the relationship
between technical objects and their users, which is framed as a media-
tion that is both social and technical. The use of technological objects
implies a technical dimension by providing a restrictive yet flexible
set of possibilities (Jouët, 2000). Technological objects offer frameworks
within which a variety of uses are allowed or excluded. Yet, the medi-
ation that occurs between technological objects and their users is also
social since it relies on ulterior traditions and habits. Indeed, ‘the emer-
gence of new practices draws upon the past, routines and cultural relics
that remain and continue to be spread far beyond their first appearance’
(Mallein & Toussaint, 1994, p. 317). Hence, norms that frame mourn-
ing practices should draw upon conventions whose existence precedes
that of SNS. Yet, the SNS’s affordances also offer a technical framework
in which mourning practices take place. This chapter aims to study the
emergence of certain forms of use of the Facebook group application
in mourning contexts, and the sociotechnical norms that frame these
forms of use. In turn, we believe that the study of online mourning
practices might provide a better understanding of prospective memory
processes (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013), that is, how individuals make
sense of human loss in the present by the use and contribution of
memories from the past in order to cope with an uncertain future.

Method: A ‘virtual ethnography’ approach

This study relies on the analysis of a Facebook group that was cre-
ated in 2008 after the death of a young Quebecer woman we have
renamed Sophie Tremblay, which offered particularly rich data that
spread over four years and allowed observing annual recurrences. Data
extraction,2 their qualitative analysis and their subsequent quantifica-
tion were performed between February and August 2012. We opted for
a ‘virtual ethnography’ approach (Hine, 2000), which relies on observa-
tion techniques and textual analysis. Observation techniques originate
from ethnographic inductive approaches, which aim to understand phe-
nomena through their observation (Denzin, 1997). We followed an
‘unobtrusive’ logic in order not to disturb or alter activities that took
place (Sanders, 2005). We later confronted our findings by using a
constant comparative method with scientific literature as suggested by
a grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 1994).
232 Recalling States of Life

Textual analysis was performed by breaking down publications into

three analytical levels: textual data, meso-data and meta-data (Duchastel,
2012). Textual data refers to contributed content and to its semantic
interpretation. Meso-data refers to the structural dimension of contri-
butions. When analysing Facebook content, meso-data might take into
account that the contribution is an original publication, a comment,
a ‘like’3 and so on, or in the case of textual contributions the number
of sentences or lines produced, forms of address, salutation sequences
and so on. Finally, meta-data refers to the surrounding information
linked to contributions that are made available by the Facebook group
application. It might include contributors’ and recipients’ identity,
socio-demographic characteristics, dates and times at which contribu-
tions were made, the number of ‘likes’ and comments associated with
contributions, details about the relationship between contributors and
recipients and so on. We later generated a database containing the tex-
tual, meso and meta levels of our data. Results shown below are drawn
from our three-dimensional textual analysis and from general online
observations.

Portrait of Sophie’s group

The Facebook group under study was composed of 178 members, within
which half explicitly contributed. During data collection, 749 contri-
butions were divided into seven types: messages on the group’s public
‘wall’ (47 per cent), ‘likes’ of existing contributions (26 per cent), pho-
tos (10 per cent), photo comments (7 per cent) and message comments
(7 per cent), videos (1 per cent) and external URL links (less than 1 per
cent).
Contributions from nuclear and other family members of the
deceased represented more than half of the contributions (respectively
36 and 22 per cent). Contributions from friends, classmates and col-
leagues represented close to a fifth of contributions, while those made
by acquaintances or unknown persons were of lesser importance (respec-
tively 18 and 5 per cent). Nineteen per cent of contributions were made
by members whose relationship to the deceased could not be identified.
Textual contributions (messages, photo comments and message com-
ments) had as recipients the deceased herself (68 per cent), another
member (16 per cent), various recipients (5 per cent) and all family
members (1 per cent). In 5 per cent of cases, recipients could not be
identified.
In regards to textual contributions’ content, to which we have
included eight introductive video and URL texts (n = 474), most
 David Myles and Florence Millerand 233

entailed emotion or sentiment expression (71 per cent)4 such as (in fre-
quency order) love, longing, sadness, pain, humour, anger, gratitude,
denial, disbelief, guilt, fatigue and acceptance. Contents observed also
included updates (37 per cent) regarding recent life events or emotional
well-being; phatic locutions (35 per cent) stating that group members
thought of the deceased or felt her presence; requests (31 per cent)
for protection, help, courage or pardon; and commemorative content
(29 per cent) such as the deceased’s (positive) personality traits, her main
life achievements or experiences shared with her. More infrequent types
of content included general thoughts (13 per cent) on life, death or grief;
forms of support (12 per cent) such as encouragements, advice, acquies-
cence or instrumental support; wishes (4 per cent) such as birthday and
anniversary wishes, holiday wishes or wishes for rest; and condolences
texts (4 per cent).

Mourning online: Four main forms of use

The following section builds upon the descriptive data mentioned above
and suggests four main forms of use of the Facebook group applica-
tion: the ‘wish card’, the ‘personal diary’, the ‘place of prayer’ and the
mnémothèque.

The ‘wish card’: A phatic use of the Facebook group application

The use of the Facebook group application as a ‘wish card’ is charac-
terized by a set of textual contributions issued in a specific timeline
that relies on content such as thoughts, support, wishes, condolences,
commemoration or emotion expression, and that are directed towards
the deceased’s family members. In our case study, two distinct timelines
were noted: the days following Sophie’s death, and holidays, birthdays
and anniversaries. The first timeline refers to the way mourners use the
Facebook group application to express condolences. Members among
whom this form of use was observed were not close relatives or friends
of the deceased. Publications were notably short and contained one to
five lines of text, such as: ‘My condolences to the Tremblay family!!!
Simone xxx’.
Most users who expressed their condolences contributed only once
in a ‘normalized’ (and highly similar) fashion, not unlike the tradi-
tional use of sympathy cards, hinting at the performance of an expected
‘line of conduct’ (Goffman, 1959) in which an individual must respect
certain rules according to a specific social setting. Lippy (1983) argues
that sympathy cards are used to demonstrate one’s symbolic presence
234 Recalling States of Life

to others and to express deference towards mourners’ suffering. Indi-

viduals know that the use of sympathy cards has minimal impact
and reach, but can nonetheless reduce the tension between the desire
(and duty) to pay tribute and the fear of saying the wrong things
(Lippy, 1983), which in turn can explain the high level of normalization
observed.
The second timeline refers to the use of the Facebook group applica-
tion as a ‘wish card’ during calendar events, such as Christmas, New
Year, birthdays, death anniversary and so on. For example, one user
wrote: ‘Happy New Year to all the people who loved Sophie xxxxxxxxx’.
Users who sent their wishes during calendar events were not the same
as those who offered their condolences. If users addressed their condo-
lences directly to family members and friends closer to the deceased, it
was the latter who gave out their greetings. The length of these pub-
lications was still quite short, yet their frequency was notably greater.
Indeed, these users published several times a year. As our observations
tend to indicate, family members, friends and colleagues did not neces-
sarily frequent each other before Sophie’s death, but now share the loss
of the same loved one. Arguably, this shared experience allows them,
via the use of the Facebook group application, to keep their relation-
ships active, however limited they may be, pointing to a phatic use of
the SNS.

‘Dear Sophie’: The use of the Facebook group application as a

‘personal diary’
Our case study revealed that the Facebook group application was also
used similarly as a ‘personal diary’. This form of use relies on textual con-
tributions that contain emotion expression, update sharing or requests,
and are directed towards the deceased. Here’s a telling example of that
form of use:

Hello my baby thanks for giving me courage, because I am better

this morning.we finalised everything that had to be done with your
things and I still feel like in a nightmare and ask myself when every-
thing is going to end. if you knew how I want this to be a bad
dream.but everytime reality strikes me hard. I need to accept real-
ity but it’s like it’s beyond my strengths,but don’t worry I will make
it, it rains in my heart and I still don’t see when the sun will rise
again. I love you my baby and with your departure the sun has left
for good.I kiss you my love, and will talk to you later
 David Myles and Florence Millerand 235

Several of the personal diary’s features can be observed in this mes-

sage written by Sophie’s father. The frequency with which the latter
contributes to the group’s public wall is much greater than that of all
other members (in fact, it represents one-third of all textual contribu-
tions). The notion of frequency is significant because it refers to diary
entries that, over time, need to maintain some consistency (Deseilligny,
2008). Another important feature of the personal diary is the need of
address (Deseilligny, 2008). Entries are expected to possess clear open-
ing sequences, which constitute strategies to materialize the message’s
recipient (Deseilligny, 2008). If the diary’s recipient ‘exists’, it is primar-
ily due to a symbolization effort made by the author. This type of address
is combined with strong closing sequences (Deseilligny, 2008). Not all
textual contributions attained this level of structural formality. Personal
diaries also give place to a ‘unique and reflective subjective enuncia-
tion’ (Deseilligny, 2008, p. 52), which is particularly apparent in the
sentence ‘I need to accept reality but it’s like it’s beyond my strengths,
but don’t worry I will make it’. Even if the message’s formal recipient is
identified as the deceased, it seems like the author is rather speaking to
himself.
Additional diarist writing features can be observed within Sophie’s
father’s use of the Facebook group application, such as the use of
the first-person singular and the importance placed on current event
description following a ‘here and now’ logic (Deseilligny, 2008). These
features are assisted by Facebook’s structure which, by encouraging
day-to-day communication (Papacharissi, 2009), constitutes a good tri-
bune to express one’s thoughts in a ‘diary-like’ form. As Deseilligny
(2008, p. 529) states, we observe in online personal diarist writing
‘the permanence of gesture beyond the specifics of media support’.
Furthermore, the transposition of diary writing onto the Facebook
group application is characterized by significantly longer publications
(ten lines on average) and by a more personal and detailed writ-
ing style. This greater average length might partially be explained
by the practice of ‘event sharing’ with the deceased through which
mourners describe what’s new in their own lives. This kind of
content requires more words than conventionalized corpuses (such
as condolence texts) to communicate without preformatted social
templates.

The Facebook group as a ‘place of prayer’

Using the Facebook group application as a ‘place of player’ is character-
ized by textual contributions that contain phatic locutions or requests
236 Recalling States of Life

that are directed towards the deceased. We define the notion of ‘prayer’
as a ritualized process whose goal is to adapt to situations by punctuat-
ing daily life (Janssen et al., 2000). Here, prayer is considered to be the
result of a tripartite spatiotemporal sequence: (1) isolation in a sacred
place (the Facebook group); (2) performance of an activity that observes
certain methodological requirements (the contribution process); and
(3) exit (to other Facebook or offline activities). Janssen et al. (2000)
identified four forms of contemporary prayer: ‘petitionary’, ‘psycholog-
ical’, ‘religious’ and ‘meditative’. We argue that three5 of those forms of
prayer were observed within Sophie’s group:

Example A (petitionary prayer): Hi beautiful Sophie! I beg you, help us

bring back my beloved Elisabeth. Just like you she likes people, she
is generous. She’s a real little angel!!! I implore you, convince her to
come back to us so that we can hold her in our arms. I know that
you are close to her right now and I thank you!!!!!!! Thank you my
beautiful cousin for watching over my beloved little angel!! See you
soon Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Example B (psychological prayer): Hi Sophie! I came by just to say a

quick hello, I miss you my darling!! I have so many little things to
tell you:) But I know that you are with me. And help me a bit, it’s the
end of the semester, I’m lacking energy. I kiss you plenty, I miss you
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Example C (religious prayer): Happy Birthday Sophie!!! I thought about

you all day long!! I miss you, watch over your family!! Kisses and
hugs! Thanks for everything!! Xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Each of these forms of prayer meets a specific objective. The petitionary

prayer’s (Example A) main function is to communicate a desired effect
over a seemingly helpless situation (Janssen et al., 2000). The enunciator
wishes for the concrete resolution of a personal or social problem. In this
form of prayer, God (or God’s representative) is assigned an active role
(to improve the situation) by the enunciator who, in turn, assigns him
or herself a more passive role (that of waiting for the improvement to
occur). In Example A, a member of Sophie’s memorial group (her cousin)
asks the deceased for some help. Her own daughter is sick and remains
in a critical condition. This form of prayer denotes an external locus
of control. To better deal with the situation, she begs her cousin for
help. It’s that wanted effect (the girl’s recovery) on which the petitionary
prayer relies.
 David Myles and Florence Millerand 237

Similarly, the objective of the psychological prayer is to meet a per-

sonal need. Unlike the petitionary prayer, it assigns an active role to the
enunciator and a passive role to God (or God’s representative) (Janssen
et al., 2000). Here, the locus of control is internal. Rather than wait
for God to change life events for the better, the enunciator wants to
find the strength within him or herself in order to adapt. In Example B,
another of Sophie’s cousins writes: ‘And help me a bit, it’s the end of the
semester, I’m lacking energy’. As argued by Janssen et al. (2000), psy-
chological prayer is used in order to foster self-confidence, strength and
perseverance. Arguably, the enunciator knows that the energy required
in order to pass exams (the personal need) is actually within her. Hence,
psychological prayer is used as a coping mechanism in order to adapt to
a stressful or unpleasant situation, a mechanism which serves to mobi-
lize much-needed resources to personally overcome challenges, but not
to eliminate them, like in Example A.
Finally, religious prayers constitute coping mechanisms that also rely
on an internal locus of control (Janssen et al., 2000). The enunciator is
compliant with God’s will and is prepared to confront difficult events.
However, the main particularity of religious prayers is their direction
and address (Janssen et al., 2000). Here, the praying practice is predom-
inantly phatic because its main objective is to reiterate one’s faith in
God (or God’s representative) and to point out the ongoing existence of
this trusting relationship. By focusing on maintaining this relationship
active through a highly ritualized performance, both God and the enun-
ciators play active parts. Example C illustrates this ritualization process
when the user writes ‘watch over your family’. If the user’s personal need
(of protection) is indeed present, it is not as central as in Examples A and
B. The majority of praying practices observed throughout our case study
were of the ‘religious’ kind. Locutions such as ‘watch over me’ or ‘pro-
tect us’ were quite common. Moreover, these locutions were shorter,
repetitive and identical from one publication to the next, pointing to
a normalized writing process. Arguably, religious prayers could suggest
the existence of an ongoing, yet implicit pact between mourners and
the deceased in order to better face an uncertain future.

The ‘mnémothèque’: Using the Facebook group application as a

mnemonic device
So far, in part because of limitations inherent to our methodological
approach, the forms of use we have introduced all required from users
a visible and written mode of participation. However, our case study
showed that nearly half of Sophie’s group’s members did not explicitly
238 Recalling States of Life

generate content. Evidently, the fact that we cannot see any user activ-
ity does not mean that there is no activity. We argue that some of these
members do, in fact, use the Facebook group application, but in a remote
way, as lurkers. Thus, we introduce a fourth form of use: the ‘mné-
mothèque’ (Thomas, 1988),6 whose primary concern is the post-mortem
aggregation of personal information referring to a deceased individual in
order to keep him or her in memory. This form of use is characterized by
textual, video and photo contributions that mostly contain commemo-
rative content and that are directed towards other group members. Two
types of contributions were distinguished: ‘voluntarily mnemonic’ and
‘involuntarily mnemonic’.
‘Voluntarily mnemonic’ contributions refer to any contributions
issued with the specific purpose of preserving ‘traces’ left by the
deceased, such as photos that were added to Sophie’s group by close fam-
ily members and friends. Just over half of the photos depicted Sophie in
significant life contexts, such as during travels, birthday parties or school
events. Other photos pictured Sophie’s relatives during the same events
(26 per cent) and some of Sophie’s main life achievements (5 per cent).
Arguably, those photos’ main function could be to activate the (collec-
tive) process of ‘memory work’, which can be defined as ‘a conscious
and purposeful staging of memory, an active reconstruction of the past
with the help of “memory texts”’ (Kuhn, 2007, p. 284). In a mourn-
ing context, significant photos of the deceased help (re)construct and
crystallize the deceased’s identity. This process articulates itself within
four distinct, yet inseparable phases: the reminiscing of memories, their
careful selection (or disqualification), their public sharing and the ulte-
rior consultation of their published forms. Selection is a crucial phase,
since one cannot share any kind of memory. Photos should not only
show the deceased in a good light (in fact, almost half of the photos
depicting the deceased were complimented in the commentary section),
but also be consistent with the mourners’ shared representations of the
deceased. On the one hand, this memory work is assured when users
publish photos featuring the deceased. On the other, it is also carried out
when other users browse through the photo album, come into contact
with mnemonic contributions and start reminiscing.
‘Involuntarily mnemonic’ contributions’ first objective does not seem
to be specifically linked to information aggregation and can include
photo or video comments that add extra details to ulterior experiences.
These extra details, which are performed through storytelling, refer to
the ‘interpretative performances that accompany displaying and look-
ing at photograph albums’ (Kuhn, 2007, p. 285). The following example
 David Myles and Florence Millerand 239

depicts an interaction between friends that occurred in the comment

section of a photo depicting the deceased’s prom night. The photo
shows four female friends getting out of a limousine, two of whom
comment years later:

Friend 1: Hey, I am between you two, in black lol! Damn, we were

pretty!
Friend 1: We got drunk in the limo lol
Friend 2: got drunk? what are you talking about . . . I don’t remem-
ber..ahahah..ah yes before, and after prom . . . it was quite a
celebration!! And you’re right . . . we were damn pretty!! real
sexy ladies . . .
Friend 1: Sophie’s dress was amazing!
Friend 2: Yes, it was really beautiful . . . and I remember that it was
complicated to make. If I recall correctly, it was 2 mod-
els of different dresses that were put together to create just
one . . . Sophie absolutely wanted the ‘belly shirt’ effect in the
back!! lol:)

This interaction clearly shows the two friends remembering not only the
event, but also the way it was experienced with the deceased. In turn,
this interaction can bring forth memories in other contributing or lurk-
ing members. It’s precisely because those two friends did not seem to
have the specific intention to provoke a collective process of memory
work that we consider this contribution to be ‘involuntarily mnemonic’.
Indeed, the collective memory work is not only performed through
the consultation of photos but also through the consultation of these
storytelling performances which, traditionally, are not public, nor writ-
ten, but rather oral (Langford, 2001) and private. Hence, the Facebook
group application transforms these storytelling performances into mem-
ory texts that can later be consulted by other users throughout this
collective mnemonic endeavour. This illustrates how online mourning
practices, although drawing from existing rules and conventions, are
also very much framed by the affordances of the technological device
in use.

Conclusion: Creating a new rapport with the departed

In the previous section we defined the mnémothèque as a mainly aggrega-

tive endeavour. In this sense, the notion of mnémothèque was treated
as a ‘space’. This definition is limiting as it can lead to conceptualize
240 Recalling States of Life

the latter into a somewhat static container. Rather than solely being a
‘thing’, we would argue that this form of use is also very much an inter-
active process. In the early 1990s, Barrau (1992, p. 187) argued that,
with the future use of technology, the mnémothèque was to become the
‘necropolis of tomorrow that will no longer be made of corpses, but
of images, of talking images’. The author maintained that the bereaved
would no longer be the ones talking to the deceased. Rather, it is the
deceased who would speak to the bereaved. The results of our study
lead us to believe the opposite. Despite various technological possibili-
ties, the need to address the deceased is, if not ubiquitous, very strong.
It appears stronger, even, than the need in mourners to interact with
one another.
If, indeed, the mnémothèque aims the conservation of memories
related to the deceased (Barrau, 1992), this conservation endeavour
appears residual. Instead, taking into account that the two-thirds of tex-
tual contributions were aimed at the deceased, we would argue that this
conservation endeavour might serve a second purpose, that of sculpting
the body of a symbolic interlocutor through bits and pieces of textual,
video and photo data. This resonates with Georges’ (2009) notion of
‘skeleton diagram’ that is defined as a way to reduce a being to a limited
series of highly significant symbols in order to create an online persona.
One might ask if the mnémothèque’s main goal is, indeed, to conserve,
but in order to better converse.
This need for conversation might be related to the fact that a loved
one’s departure does not constitute information that is automatically
‘processed’. Like Baudry (2001, p. 37) suggests: ‘it takes time to realise
the other person is dead, and also time to know exactly who just
died’. Time allows one to forget. It also allows one to manipulate and
to space out the deceased’s ‘traces’ (Baudry, 2001). This interactive
dimension of the mnémothèque must be taken into account beside its
more conventional accumulative dimension. Each visit to the mnémoth-
èque potentially contributes to the transformation of the relationship
between mourners and the deceased. This iterative process should allow
the former, in time, to move forward by looking back. Researchers
(Brubaker, 2011; Getty et al., 2011) have underlined the existence
of a certain paradox between the mourner’s need to ‘let go’ of the
deceased and the urge to keep their relationship active. Rather than
being paradoxical, both reflexes seem to constitute two sides of the
same strategy whose objective could very well be to create, through
time, a new rapport with the departed. In turn, this new rapport could
allow mourners to cope in the present and project their selves into
 David Myles and Florence Millerand 241

the future by using retrospective memories. The four forms of use we

have presented in this chapter represent only a fraction of the vari-
ous ways mourners perform their bereavement status and express their
grief in ‘sociotechnically’ acceptable manners through the use of the
Facebook group application. In this regard, future research should take
into account the sociotechnical norms inherent to social media use that
will undoubtedly transform the ways we mourn, while keeping in mind
that these ‘new mourning practices’ also tap into existing rituals and
cultural conventions.

Notes
1. All translations from French to English are provided by the authors.
2. All nominative data were anonymized.
3. Facebook allows for publications to be ‘liked’ by users. Each time a publication
is ‘liked’ counts as one ‘like’.
4. Percentages shown indicate the number of textual contributions that include
content of each type. Each contribution can include more than one type of
content.
5. Unsurprisingly, no ‘meditative’ prayers were observed throughout our case
study, since they centre on personal reflection and self-knowledge in order
to reach emancipation. This type of prayer seems hardly transposable to
Facebook, since the use of the SNS requires certain conscious publishing activ-
ities that would prevent attaining the needed concentration level in order to
perform meditative prayers.
6. Etymologically, the word mnémothèque literally refers to a box or a case (thèque,
from Ancient Greek) containing memories or souvenirs (mnémo, also from
Ancient Greek).

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14
Remembering, Witnessing,
Bringing Closure: Srebrenica Burial
Ceremonies on YouTube
Laura Huttunen

Introduction

Katherine Verdery (1999) suggests that funerals always create an audi-

ence of mourners who recognize the dead and their significance.
By the same token, they create and recreate communities around
mourning. When funerals are circulated online, putative audiences
multiply.
Deaths that are embedded in politically tense contexts often give rise
to forms of commemoration that reach beyond the remembrance of the
individuals who have passed away. In such contexts, individuals often
become symbols for political aspirations. In this chapter, I look at one
such case – the remembrance of the victims of the July 1995 Srebrenica
massacre, which took place during the 1992–95 Bosnian war. I examine
a body of YouTube videos depicting the annual reburial cum memorial
ceremony in Potočari, Bosnia-Herzegovina, which commemorates the
victims of the Srebrenica massacre. I consider why these videos are on
the internet, and offer some keys to reading their social, political and
cultural dimensions.
I suggest that the material may be understood through the con-
cepts of witnessing (for example Frosh, 2007; Malkki, 1997; Peters,
2001) and cultural memory (for example Assmann, 1995; Hilderbrand,
2007). I read the YouTube clips as instances of memory-in-the-making
(Nikunen, 2012) which implies a future-oriented assessment of memo-
ries. However, I suggest that the liminality (Turner, 1977) of some of the
victims – that is, those still missing – adds an important dimension to

244
 Laura Huttunen 245

the practices of remembering the Srebrenica victims. Moreover, I suggest

that the geographic dispersal or the diasporic structure of the Bosnian
community is significant for understanding the case.
My particular interest in remembrance practices on YouTube has
grown from my larger anthropological research project on the ques-
tion of missing persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina and beyond. In this larger
project, I am interested in the political and cultural dimensions of a sit-
uation when a large number of people go missing; moreover, I am inter-
ested in the ritual appropriations of the missing in Bosnia (Huttunen,
forthcoming). The reading of YouTube material that I present in this
chapter is embedded in a decade-long ethnographic engagement with
the Bosnian diaspora, and a two-year ethnographic project of working
with the families of the missing as well as the organizations working
with the issue of the missing in Bosnia. My take on the empirical mate-
rial in this chapter is both descriptive and analytical: I will both show
the various types of material online, and tease out the cultural and
political ramifications of this material. In anthropological vein, I claim
that only the careful contextualization of the online material in real-
world social and political relations will allow us to understand its deeper
implications.
I understand internet-based remembrance as embedded within a
larger framework of political projects that aim at coming to terms with
the violence of the 1990s in Bosnia-Herzegovina; simultaneously, they
are projects searching for accountability and justice. In this sense, this
memory work has prospective dimensions, as the circulation of past
events in video format produces a site of making moral claims on the
future of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Moreover, I suggest that for individual
family members, the YouTube material is part of the actual rituals of
remembering, extending the ritual in time and space.
This chapter is structured as follows: First I will make a short intro-
duction to the Bosnian context, including the Bosnian war and the
emergence of the post-war Bosnian state, the fall of Srebrenica and the
question of the missing persons in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina (here-
after Bosnia). I will frame the Srebrenica case within a discussion of rites
of passage and liminality. In the following section, I will discuss the
concepts of witnessing and cultural memory and link them with the
future-oriented idea of memory-in-the-making. After that, I will intro-
duce the video material on Srebrenical burial ceremonies on YouTube,
and I will suggest an analytical reading of three categories of visual mate-
rial circulating on YouTube. I will end by reading the visual material
through the concepts of liminality, witnessing, cultural memory and
246 Recalling States of Life

memory-in-the-making, and I will tie these to the idea of the prospective

employment of memory.

The context: The Bosnian war, the fall of Srebrenica, the

dead and the missing

The dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s gave rise to violent conflicts

in the area, most notably in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. The armed con-
flict in Bosnia, entailing violent assaults on civilian populations, took
place between 1992 and 1995. When the war ended, there were approx-
imately 100,000 dead, and around 30,000 missing persons. The 8,000
victims that went missing after the assault on Srebrenica are among the
totality of 30,000 victims whose destiny was unclear at the end of the
war. As it has turned out, most of those missing were dead, many of
them buried in mass graves in northern and eastern Bosnia (Stover &
Peress, 1998; Wagner, 2008). Moreover, some two million people were
forced to leave their homes because of the hostilities in Bosnia, and
approximately one million of these left the country, creating a world-
wide diaspora. I suggest that the context of the diaspora is significant in
understanding the YouTube material at hand.
Bosnia was particular among the federal states of the former
Yugoslavia in one respect: there were three main ethno-national groups
of approximately similar size, the Serbs, the Croats and the Bosnian
Muslims or Bosniaks,1 while the other five republics were dominated
by one ethno-national majority. The long history of the relationships
between the ethno-national groups in Bosnia is complex, marked with
both periods of tensions and conflict, and periods of cooperation, friend-
ship and even mixture and mingling.2 The rising nationalism in the
area in the 1990s pitted the main ethno-national groups in Bosnia
against one another, and gave rise to competition over the position of
hegemony in the emerging independent state of Bosnia. This very com-
petition was at the root of the outbreak of the war in 1992, with the
neighbouring countries Serbia and Croatia backing their own nation-
alist projects in Bosnian territory (see, for example, Silber & Little,
1996). Consequently, during the war people were targeted as members of
their ethno-national communities. The project of ethnic cleansing was
especially severe in northern and eastern Bosnia, targeting the Bosniak
population, though the other groups were also victimized during the
conflict. The Dayton peace agreement that stopped the fighting in 1995
was brokered by Western diplomats; one of the difficult political legacies
of this agreement was the division of the Bosnian state into two entities,
 Laura Huttunen 247

the Republika Srpska (the Serb Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina) and the

Federacija Bosne I Hercegovine (the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina).
The latter was further divided by a complicated canton structure along
ethno-national lines, dividing the area into Bosniak and Croat territo-
ries. It is significant to note in this context that the division did not
follow the pre-war residence patterns, and the legitimacy of the Western-
brokered state is constantly contested in post-war Bosnian political
discourses (cf. Jansen 2013). Especially for the Bosniaks, who were
expelled violently from the present-day Republika Srpska area, the very
existence of Republika Srpska is profoundly problematic. I suggest below
that to a significant extent, the YouTube material at hand is questioning
the legitimacy of this state structure, though there are other dimensions
to the material as well.
Srebrenica, a small town located in eastern Bosnia in the Podrinje
region neighbouring Serbia, has become a symbol of the brutality of the
Bosnian war. The town, declared a safe area by the UN, was an enclave
to which thousands of civilians poured from the surrounding country-
side. It was attacked by Serb forces on 11 July 1995; over the following
two weeks, over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were brutally executed,
while women and children were deported from the area (Wagner, 2008,
pp. 21–57). The assault on Srebrenica was the most violent single attack
on civilians in Europe since the Second World War, and the leaders
of the campaign, Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, are on trial for
genocide at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The
Hague.
The search for the 8,000 missing persons from Srebrenica and the
30,000 missing persons in the whole of Bosnia – and the identification
of the located mortal remains – has been an enormous project requiring
huge investments in both material and human terms. The details of the
identification work that has been ongoing for over a decade is beyond
the scope of this chapter, but as the missing started to be found in mass
graves and later identified through new DNA methodologies, the fami-
lies of the deceased could start burying their loved ones and begin the
mourning process (Jennings, 2013; Wagner, 2008).
A large memorial centre with a cemetery for the victims of the assault
on Srebrenica was built in Potočari, some five kilometres south of
Srebrenica proper. Newly identified victims from the mass graves are
buried at the cemetery during the annual commemoration ceremony on
11 July. Annually between 200 and 700 bodies have been buried in the
ceremonies, which are attended not only by mourning family members
but also by other Bosniaks from the Federation and beyond who wish
248 Recalling States of Life

to participate in the commemoration. The ritual takes a similar form

every year, combining music, the burial of the victims identified during
the previous year and a Muslim prayer ceremony, as well as speeches by
local and international politicians. The event is strongly supported by
the Federation government and by Bosniak politicians.
The complicated process of locating and identifying the missing has
taken years, creating a situation where remembering and commemo-
rating the dead merges with remembering and commemorating the
missing (see Huttunen, forthcoming; Wagner, 2008). The deeply trou-
bling condition of living with the uncertainty of the fate of a missing
family member colours the commemoration practices even when the
missing person is finally located and identified.
In the post-war cartography, Srebrenica is located in the Republika
Srpska area, and the memorial ceremony commemorating the mainly
Bosniak victims takes place in what is understood as Serb territory.
While the Federation government strongly backs the event through
both material support and visible participation in the actual ceremony,
the local Serb population very rarely participates in the commemora-
tion, and consequently there is no consensus about the meaning of the
ceremony. The difficult political legacy of the war frames the remem-
brance of the dead and the missing within heavily politicized discourses
which tend to read the commemorated victims through nationalistic
frames.
In my larger project, I conceptualize the specificity of the Srebrenica
case through the concept of liminality (Huttunen, forthcoming).
In anthropological approaches, death is understood as the final tran-
sition in the course of human life, regulated by those left behind
through ritual practices (for example Hallam & Hockey, 2001; Metcalf &
Huntington, 1991; Robben 2004). As is well known, Arnold van Gennep
(2004 [1909]) introduced the understanding that all rites of passage
are organized in a temporal continuum, with a tripartite structure con-
sisting of the separation stage, the transition or liminal stage, and the
incorporation stage. In death rituals, the deceased is separated from the
community of the living, then goes through the liminal stage and is
re-incorporated, after a proper burial, back into the social structure as
a dead person or dead ancestor. In this process of transition, the living
family members also renegotiate their relationship with the deceased as
well as with one another.
Those who are missing for extended periods remain at the liminal
stage: they are not properly buried, and the ritual cycle is not complete.
Even when it is most likely that the missing person is dead, without a
 Laura Huttunen 249

body there is no certainty. This is a harrowing situation for those left

behind because they are tied to the unfinished, liminal stage for an
indeterminate amount of time.
Victor Turner (1977) further developed the concept of the liminal,
suggesting that liminality is both a threatening and productive con-
dition. Below, I will consider the ways in which the liminality of the
missing resonates with practices of online remembrance; I will sug-
gest that the troubling aspects of liminality are turned into productive
energy that feeds these memory practices. I suggest that some forms
of remembrance are essentially about closing the period of harrowing
liminality.

Witnessing and making memories: Understanding YouTube

as a cultural site

In this chapter, I approach the empirical data both as an instance of

producing diasporic memory, and as an ongoing project of memory-in-
the-making that exceeds the borders of the diasporic community and
invites non-members to hear, see, remember and understand.
Several scholars working with diasporic communities and geograph-
ically dispersed transnational groups suggest that the internet has
emerged as an important site for recreating social groups and offering
spaces for anchoring the identities of those on the move (for example
Hanafi, 2005; Mandaville, 2003; Nikunen, 2012). I agree with Nikunen
(2012) that net-based sites should be understood as spaces enabling cer-
tain forms of identification, rather than causing them. Virtual sites do
not represent ready-made identities based on clearly spelled out mem-
ories, but rather they enable the continuous process of memory being
recreated and renegotiated in interactive form (Nikunen, 2012). While
reading my empirical data I will ask to what extent the material at hand
works to create and recreate the diasporic Bosnian (Bosniak) commu-
nity, and when it is more fruitful to see the material as invoking and
inviting larger audiences to recognize the significance of the tragedy of
Srebrenica.
Lucas Hilderbrand (2007) suggests that YouTube is an important site
for creating and reproducing cultural memory. The volume of uploaded
material about the Srebrenica-Potočari memorials suggests that this is
exactly what is taking place: a cultural memory of both the tragic events
of Srebrenica and the annually repeated memorial ceremony is being
created and circulated in the virtual space, with new items introduced
each year.
250 Recalling States of Life

Within the field of memory studies, some scholars wish to make a dis-
tinction between official memory and memory as a mundane everyday
practice; the former refers to institutional forms of remembering,
while the latter pays attention to grassroots, unofficial and some-
times counter-hegemonic forms of remembering (for example Assmann,
1995;3 Kansteiner, 2006). The case discussed here falls interestingly
between these categories: the practices of uploading video material by
individuals to YouTube is clearly a grassroots activity, often counter-
hegemonic in spirit. However, the commemoration practices depicted
by the data discussed in this article work within a highly institution-
alized frame, and the political events referred to are far from everyday
or mundane. However, it is worth noticing that the institutionalization
of the event is still highly contested in post-war Bosnia; while some see
it as pitting Serbs and Bosniaks against one another, others read it as
a moment of feeding the overall nationalism of the post-war Bosnian
political landscape.
Several scholars have suggested that witnessing is one of the central
communicative modes of modern media, and that electronic media has
broadened the scope of witnessing (for example Frosh, 2007). A witness
is present at a particular significant event or place, and tells others what
she sees. The internet has become an effective site to circulate and put
forward witness accounts as testimonies. Witnessing, however, implies a
moral or even judgemental frame in communication (cf. Malkki, 1997),
pointing to the prospective deployment of memories. Below I will tease
out dimensions of witnessing and the future-oriented remembering in
the data.
Finally, I will suggest that Liisa Malkki’s conception of accidental
communities of memory (1997) is fruitful in relation to the data at
hand. According to Malkki, unexpected dramatic events, such as natu-
ral catastrophes and violent assaults, create communities that are united
through sharing the specific, life-changing experience. Such communi-
ties do not necessarily live together as communities or share a common,
socially recognized identity. However, members of such communities do
recognize each other, and the significance of such recognition may be
much deeper than what is visible to outsiders.

YouTube material on Potočari

One can find a surprisingly large amount of online material about the
ceremonies at Potočari. On YouTube alone, there are hundreds of video
clips showing various stages of the ceremony. Searching with the words
 Laura Huttunen 251

‘Srebrenica burial’ produces around 1,210 hits, ‘Srebrenica commemora-

tion’ 490 hits, and ‘Potočari burial’ around 190 hits (accessed 29 April
2014). There is footage from the burials at Potočari dating from at least
2003, and repetitive footage shot on consecutive years shows the conti-
nuity of memorial practices as well as the growing number of people at
the event.
By paying attention to the extent of editing as well as to the ori-
gin or source of the material, one can start to categorize the video
material. There seems to be material shot by both amateurs and by pro-
fessionals; the latter comprises mainly material originally produced for
various TV channels. Likewise, the extent of editing varies from the
professional TV-report style of editing to no editing at all. On these
grounds, the video material falls roughly into three categories. Firstly,
there is raw, unedited footage showing the unfolding of the ritual
and events around it in real time. Secondly, there are heavily edited
clips, combining still photographs and moving images, with added texts
and music. Thirdly, there are news reports from various TV channels,
including the BBC and Bosnian television.4 There are significant differ-
ences in the ways in which each of these categories addresses death,
mourning, commemoration and the political frame around them in
Potočari.

Unedited footage: Being there, ending the liminality

Some clips of the unedited footage are just a couple of minutes long,5
while others last for up to two hours and attempt to cover the whole
burial and commemorative event.6 While the shorter clips often show
a short moment of coffins being carried to graves, the longer footage
shows the unfolding of the whole ritual, including elements such as
the music performance that opens the ceremony annually; the rows
of green-shrouded coffins awaiting burial; family members and other
close ones kneeling next to the coffins, often praying, sometimes cry-
ing and wailing; empty graves awaiting the coffins; coffins being carried
to graves while the names of the deceased are read aloud; the lowering
of coffins into graves, the shovelling of soil into the graves; the imam
leading a Muslim prayer ritual; and ambassadors and foreign and local
politicians giving speeches in the nearby hall. This footage brings home
the disquietingly large number of bodies being buried and the repetitive
form of the ritual. The music, images of grief and ritual repetitiveness,
together with the recital of the names of the dead, invite the viewer
to imagine herself as a participant in the ritual, and also invite her to
remember, commemorate and mourn.
252 Recalling States of Life

I suggest that such unedited footage may be seen as an integral part

of the ritual itself. Such material has a performative function: by re-
enacting the moment of burial in virtual space, it repetitively announces
the death and burial of the Srebrenica victims, either of a certain named
victim in the case of the short clips, or a whole group of victims being
buried during a ceremony presented in longer footage.
In this respect, the footage works to end the liminal stage.
By announcing the proper burial taking place, such material brings a
documented closure to the harrowing extended liminality of those pre-
viously missing but now identified victims. Some of the shortest clips
show only a glimpse of a couple of coffins being carried towards graves
and document a couple of names being read out loud to announce the
burial of these persons; these clips are strong statements of these particu-
lar persons being transferred from the anonymity of mass graves and the
forgetfulness of liminality to an individual grave site, marked by an indi-
vidual gravestone that fixes an identity to the mortal remains. The actual
ritual is being extended, both temporally and spatially, through circula-
tion on the internet, allowing those who were not present at the actual
funeral to participate in the ritual itself. Thus, the circulation enables
the future-oriented process of mourning the deaths by those who were
not present at the actual ceremony.
Coming back to Verdery’s claim that funerals are important moments
for recruiting audiences to mourn certain deaths allows us to see that
placing these video clips on YouTube extends the putative audience
significantly. According to Verdery, funeral audiences are crucial sites
for creating and recreating communities. This video material works to
bring virtually together geographically dispersed people and to con-
struct communities that recognize these deaths as grievable (cf. Butler,
2009).
However, there are also elements that break the ritual-like spell of
the footage. In juxtaposition to the formal ceremonial aspects, some
footage also shows groups of relaxed people sitting in the shade, talking
to each other, and young boys waving to the camera. Here the signif-
icance exceeds the rituality and points to the other dimension of this
commemorative practice: this is an event repeated annually, and for
some participants it is not about burying their own loved ones but is
rather a social event, an opportunity to meet others and possibly to
make a political statement through their participation. I will develop
this political aspect below.
Much of this footage has a documentary feel to it, an aura of authen-
ticity, as some of the recordings are technically of rather poor quality.
 Laura Huttunen 253

For the spectator of the material, these videos work as moments of

witnessing the event, even though the moral framing of the witness
account is left implicit, rather than made explicit by the recorders of
these events. Some of the political speeches recorded in the long ver-
sions of unedited footage, however, make strong political judgements,
condemning the violence against civilians and demanding the perpe-
trators take responsibility. Some speeches call for global responsibility,
as the events of Srebrenica in July 1995 are named as crimes against
humanity. The authors of the longer footage have chosen to include
such speeches in the material; nevertheless, they remain in the role of
documenter rather than taking a role as an active commentator. In the
edited genre, however, the authors of the clips take more active roles as
moral witnesses and political commentators.

Edited clips: Political framing

Like the unedited footage, the edited clips also vary in their duration;
but while the unedited clips convey a rather uniform view of the cere-
mony, the subtext or connotative tone of the edited clips varies. Many
of them include a combination of still photographs of the ritual in
Potočari, moving images from the same events and sorrowful, evoca-
tive background music. Rather often, these pictures are interlaced with
images of the assault on Srebrenica, the mass graves and/or refugees
fleeing from Srebrenica in 1995. Sometimes a written commentary is
added, announcing the deaths of 8,000 men and boys and describing
the assault on Srebrenica, the project of ethnic cleansing and the estab-
lished tradition of the memorial ceremony in Potočari. In most cases,
the textual commentary is limited to a couple of simple assertive sen-
tences. Consequently, these clips produce a much clearer political and
moral frame for the ritual than the raw footage; they move further away
from commemoration and ritualization towards political commentary.7
These clips emphasize the fact that in order to understand the signifi-
cance of these funerals one needs to understand the history of the deaths
that are being mourned here – they are not just any deaths, but the
pre-planned murders of thousands of unarmed civilians.
Sometimes, however, these edited clips are so skilfully made that they
produce a strong sense of online ritual commemoration: they have a
strongly aesthetic approach to mourning and remembering, turning the
horror of the genocide and the mass graves into a peaceful, beautiful
farewell.8 The moral commentaries, such as references to the Holocaust
through borrowing the musical theme from the movie Schindler’s List,
are implicit rather than clearly explicated in this genre. By making the
254 Recalling States of Life

Holocaust the reference point for evaluating the moral implications of

the assault on Srebrenica, such clips skilfully reproduce the understand-
ing that Srebrenica represents a crime against humanity. The politics
that these clips invoke is the politics of human rights, human dig-
nity and anti-violence, connecting all human beings regardless of their
ethnic or national backgrounds.
Even though such videos invite the viewers to mourn the vic-
tims, they simultaneously construct a deeply political understanding
of the events behind the funerals. They underline the graveness of the
crimes through comparing them with the Holocaust. The survivors of
Srebrenica and the family members of the victims do not need such
an emphasis, they already know. Thus, I suggest that these clips are
designed to enlarge the audience of the funerals and to convey their
significance further to audiences not personally connected with the vio-
lent history of Bosnia. The beautifully sorrowful act of remembrance is
permeated with implicit political meanings.
Some other edited clips, however, are far more disturbing, and fore-
ground much more explicitly the political message connected with the
burial and commemoration practices. For example, in one such clip, a
voice of a child screaming in horror is mixed with music while pho-
tographs of the 1995 onslaught are shown.9 Such a framing shatters the
atmosphere of peaceful mourning and disturbs the viewer, forcing her
to confront the horrific events behind the pictures of burial and remem-
brance. This genre forces the viewer to evaluate the events in 1995 in
terms of clearly named victims and perpetrators. Simultaneously, this
genre lends itself easily to political contestations in post-war Bosnia
itself, where numbers of victims on each side of the ethno-national
divisions are counted and accusations of culpability are part of political
discourses.
While the raw, unedited footage may be seen as an extension of the
ritual itself, inviting viewers who already know what the event is about
to mourn, the genre of edited clips works in another register. It tries to
invite new audiences, those who do not know yet what the Potočari
ceremony is about, to understand the utter significance of the events.
The aim is, again, to create audiences for the funerals, for remembering
and commemorating the dead and the missing, but this time an audi-
ence who does not have a prior understanding of the events and who
needs to be informed. In these clips, memory work is clearly prospec-
tive: memories of the horrific events and pictures of commemoration
are circulated to prevent such atrocities from happening again. How-
ever, they are prospective in another sense as well: for those familiar
 Laura Huttunen 255

with the Bosnian context, these clips work to evaluate the moral basis
of the post-war Bosnian state, more particularly the establishment of
Republika Srpska on the ruins of a project of ethnic cleansing.

TV reports and news: Institutional voices

There are several cuts from TV news and specific reports for various TV
channels that address the funerals taking place in Potočari uploaded on
YouTube. The TV reports produce a clear, outspoken political frame for
the events. They detail the number of bodies being buried and always
refer to the events of 1995. The news reports also often foreground the
voices of family members of the victims, as many of them feature short
interviews with family members.10 The genre of the news report brings
an aura of objectivity to these clips; however, the putative objectivity
of the news reports differs from that of the raw footage. While in the
latter case, the sense of objectivity arises from their unedited nature,
in the former case it grows from our trust (or lack thereof) in certain
news corporations, such as CNN, BBC and the Bosnian TV channels,
and their reports. These reports fix the commemoration within a frame
of political relations reaching beyond the local Bosnian context, bring-
ing in the neighbouring countries of Serbia and Croatia, as well as the
Western involvement in the fall of Srebrenica. This genre is furthest
removed from being a ritual performed online and closest to political
commentary on the events that produced the need for these massive
commemorations.
By uploading such material on YouTube, the participants in this
project of memory-in-the-making frame the more personal genres
within these institutional voices. The ‘truth’ of the events, or the
cultural memory being formed, emerges as a texture interweaving
individual and institutional voices.

Witnessing, announcing or mourning: Multiple layers of

commemoration

Anna Haverinen, who has conducted research on virtual death and

mourning rituals, has suggested that simply announcing (that is, telling
about) the death of the loved one is one motivation behind virtual
forms of remembering (Haverinen, 2011, p. 60). In the case of the
Srebrenica-Potočari rituals, rather than announcing a death, the mate-
rial circulating online announces that these persons, who have been
missing for up to 19 years, have now been identified and buried, thus
finally closing the period of excruciating uncertainty and threatening
256 Recalling States of Life

liminality (see Huttunen, forthcoming). By the same token, the material

points to the context of the deaths, or at least implies it. This is especially
the case with the edited clips; the added photographs from 1995 and the
written commentary make this apparent, whereas in the raw footage this
dimension is less clearly pronounced. The raw footage works as a form
of ritual remembrance to be shared with those who already know what
the event is about, while the purpose of the edited material is to inform
and invite new audiences to learn about and understand the horrifying
events and their continuing significance.
The memorials studied by Haverinen are individual memorials, while
the YouTube material on Potočari rarely singles out one person, but
rather seeks to commemorate the Srebrenica victims collectively. Even
those clips that single out a named person represent that individual as
one among many similar victims. Commemorating a single person is
thus always embedded within the commemoration of this larger group,
some of whom are still missing.
The existence of the video material on the Potočari rituals becomes
meaningful through the concept of witnessing. The material testifies to
the fact of the burials taking place: mortal remains that have awaited a
proper burial for years are finally being interred. Even more importantly,
they bear witness to the exceptionality of these funerals and, by the
same token, to the tragedy of Srebrenica. The edited clips and the news
material in particular put the rituals into a political frame and point to
the political and moral culpability of those responsible for the violence
in 1995.
I therefore suggest that the witnessing function of this material works
in two registers. For individual family members who upload footage of
their relative’s burial, the material is part of the process of closing the
ritual process, of making public the fact that his or her family mem-
ber is properly buried after an unbearably long liminal phase. In this
sense, they form an integral part of the ritual itself, inviting onlookers
to partake in it. On another level, all this material works to give repeti-
tive witness accounts to the unforgettable tragedy of Srebrenica. In this
sense, the whole project of witnessing is a form of prospective employ-
ment of memory: memories are presented in order to affect the future,
either by enabling the mourning process or demanding the moral and
political responsibility of the perpetrators.
For a geographically dispersed group such as the people who left
Bosnia as refugees during the Bosnian war, the internet is an ideal place
for creating and reproducing a community of memory across spatial
distance. While creating a site for cultural memory for the families of
 Laura Huttunen 257

Srebrenica victims and other Bosnians who identify with the violence,
this material also invites everybody to listen, share and understand the
fundamental significance of the events.

Concluding remarks

In the introduction to this chapter, I posed the question why is there

such a multitude of video material on Srebrenica-Potočari on YouTube.
I claim that the need for this virtual mode of remembering arises from
four sources. Firstly, the unsettled nature of the post-war Bosnian state
and the competing narratives of the Bosnian past invite the prospective
deployment of wartime memories to create a moral basis for the Bosnian
future. Secondly, it serves as an archive for the accidental community
of memory formed by the Srebrenica survivors, now globally dispersed.
Thirdly, the need to bear witness to the horrific events in Srebrenica
in 1995 arises from the conviction held by many that the brutality of
the event is not necessarily understood outside of Bosnia. Fourthly, the
liminality of the victims who were missing for years, and of those still
missing, gives rise to the need to make visible the final burial of the
identified victims.
The last point refers to the fact that some of the victims from the
Srebrenica massacre are still missing, and their absence calls for practices
of remembering. The Srebrenica-Potočari memorial acts as a cenotaph,
that is, a memorial monument without actual physical remains, for
those missing who are not (yet) located or identified. Haverinen sug-
gests that all internet memorials may be understood as cenotaphs
(Haverinen, 2011, p. 57). The YouTube memorializations of the cere-
monies in Potočari spin this dimension further: they are practices of
virtual commemoration for those still missing; in other words, they are
virtual cenotaphs of the actual cenotaph in Potočari.
As I have suggested previously, the video clips speak to both those
personally involved in the tragic events in wartime Bosnia, and to
outsiders who need to recognize the global significance of such mass-
scale atrocities. Together these witness accounts produce a cumulative
site for memory-in-the-making, a quasi-institutional archive of voices
interweaving journalistic and documentary styles and individual voices.
For the accidental community of memory, consisting of those who
have personally experienced the violence of Srebrenica, the archive is
a site for identification. Simultaneously, however, it invites everybody
to recognize the event as significant beyond Bosnia or the diasporic
Bosnian community. Advocating an understanding that Srebrenica
258 Recalling States of Life

represents a crime against humanity, comparable to the Holocaust, this

archive emerges as significant for all humankind. As such, it opens
a future-oriented trajectory and challenges us to engage with ques-
tions of accountability, interference and responsibility in moments of
mass atrocity. Here memory is prospectively employed to prevent such
tragedies from taking place, and to create a new moral beginning for
rebuilding the Bosnian society.

Notes
1. Bosnian Muslims are predominantly called Bosniaks in post-war Bosnia and
among the Bosnian diaspora. For a closer discussion on ethnicity in Bosnia
see, for example, Bringa, 1995; Jansen, 2005. According to the population
census in Bosnia in 1991, 43 per cent of the population were ‘Muslims by
nationality’, 31 per cent were Serbs, 18 per cent Croats, 5 per cent Yugoslavs
and 2 per cent others.
2. For the history of Bosnia see Malcolm, 1996: for a discussion of ethno-
national relations in former Yugoslavia see, for example, Halpern & Kideckel,
2000; for the same in Bosnia see, for example, Bougarel et al., 2007; Jansen,
2005; Kolind, 2008.
3. In Assmann’s vocabulary, cultural memory is equated with official forms
of remembering and distinguished from grassroots memory work; in this
sense his vocabulary is different from that of many other memory scholars
for whom cultural memory is a broader concept, including also counter-
memories.
4. There are over 40 licensed TV broadcasters in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 15
of which are public but many of them working locally. The most important,
and the only nationwide public channel, is the Televizija Bosne i Hercegovine.
Most of the clips on YouTube are either from this channel or from the
Federation-based channel Televizija Federacije BiH, a public channel covering
the entity of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
5. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= bGCwmCMcdTA&
NR= 1&feature= endscreen; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ2FA-s41FQ
(both accessed 29 April 2014).
6. For longer shots see, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
IsyKiQswNPk (accessed 29 April 2014).
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= sAInMXApYVo; https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v= OPE0gMBDPuM; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= sL
Now-Z02Eg; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4vfVNNoF4s; (all accessed
29 April 2014).
8. For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Nr8-QUtQkJE; https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v= e14fSONEs4o (both accessed 29 April 2014).
9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= L3C3Aypjqb8; https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v= DR2f0tS0MbQ (both accessed 29 April 2014).
10. For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= vhoh6fq_upE; https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v= u0hJZqn4a4o (both accessed 29 April 2014).
 Laura Huttunen 259

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15
Remembering Zyzz: Distributed
Memories on Distributed Networks
Bjorn Nansen, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn
and James Meese

Introduction

Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian, better known as ‘Zyzz’, died in 2011 at

the age of 22 from a heart attack in a Bangkok sauna. Zyzz was a well-
known figure among amateur bodybuilders – a subculture which seeks to
achieve the ‘aesthetics’ of a highly muscular physique. Prior to his death,
Zyzz had become a minor internet celebrity, actively self-promoting
through social media to create a personal brand. He had a Facebook fol-
lowing of more than 60,000 ‘fans’ and regularly posted videos of himself
on YouTube. Following his death, however, coverage of Zyzz exploded,
with both social and traditional media discussing his death, his status
as a role model and celebrity, and the growing use of steroids among
amateur bodybuilders.
This chapter compares posthumous representations and memories
of Zyzz across multiple platforms, including niche bodybuilding fan
sites (BodySpace, Shredded), popular social networking sites (Facebook,
YouTube) and other online information-sharing or discussion forums
(Australian Broadcasting Corporation or ABC, Squidoo). Based on a com-
parative analysis of content from these platforms, we examine how
material ecologies and social collaborations of commemoration in dig-
ital networks shape and re-shape the collective memory of Zyzz. This
analysis draws on the multiple disciplines of the authors, including
media studies, digital anthropology, technology studies and human–
computer interaction, to outline the various social and technical tra-
jectories involved in retrospectively remembering and prospectively
memorializing the dead online. In so doing, we offer a new perspec-
tive on interactions between digital media and memory (Garde-Hansen,

261
262 Recalling States of Life

2011; Garde-Hansen et al., 2009; Neiger et al., 2011; van Dijck, 2007).
We argue that the memories of the deceased are entangled with and
across multiple platforms, and are thus subject to a tension between
coherence and dispersal under the conditions of distributed networks.
In these conditions, digital memories are persistent, replicable, scalable
and searchable. Furthermore, instead of remaining stable, digitally net-
worked data are often fragmented, incomplete, restricted or obscure.
Subsequently, memories of the dead are susceptible to competing, par-
tial and disparate accounts which endeavour to secure a particular view
of the deceased and identify a specific legacy that the deceased leaves
behind.

Background: Remembering the dead online

Digital platforms are increasingly important for contemporary practices

associated with commemorating the deceased. Just as the internet is
implicated in the changing customs and rituals of socializing, it is also
increasingly impacting on changing customs and rituals of death and
commemoration. Billions of people socialize in significant ways online,
and each year tens of millions of these people die. Therefore, it is impor-
tant to understand how people make use of social media in the context
of death and the affects and effects of these uses on our collective mem-
ories of the deceased. These issues have generated responses from the
mainstream press (articles such as ‘What happens to your Facebook after
you die?’, Fletcher, 2009), online commerce (see Carroll, 2014), social
networking services (such as Facebook’s memorialization policy, see
Facebook, 2014) and academics, who have become increasingly inter-
ested in how new technologies stimulate new ways of thinking about
death and commemoration.
Digitally networked forms of commemoration emerged as the
internet became readily accessible and an integral part of people’s
communicative practices. They first took the form of online memorials
in the late 1990s, when memorial websites were created and hosted by
families and friends (Roberts, 2004; Roberts & Vidal, 2000). The earlier
web required familiarity or proficiency with coding languages to create
or contribute content. This meant that online memorials were uncom-
mon, authored by a limited number of people, often combined text and
images in a cumbersome way, and remained fairly static. However, fol-
lowing the emergence of Web 2.0 platforms, digital commemoration
has grown in popularity and diversified in form, with a range of user-
friendly tools allowing people to more easily create, author and publish
 Bjorn Nansen et al. 263

content (Anderson, 2007; O’Reilly, 2005). People are now appropriat-

ing the general-purpose resources of social networking sites to connect
with others and engage in digital commemoration of the dead. Digi-
tal commemoration incorporates a range of online practices including:
tribute pages and memorials hosted on specialist memorial websites (for
example Legacy.com); blogs created to commemorate loved ones; videos
posted on video sharing sites such as YouTube; repurposed and memori-
alized pages on social networking sites (for example Facebook); digitally
mediated funerals or cemeteries (for example streamed funeral services;
digitally tagging gravestones); and virtual world commemorations and
ceremonies (Gibbs et al., 2012).
Hutchings (2012) describes the shift accompanying Web 2.0 platforms
as one where memorials are no longer created within virtual cemeter-
ies or as stand-alone websites, which have ‘clear parallels with the role
of the physical cemetery, relocating the deceased to a place which is
accessible but separate from the spaces usually occupied by the living’
(p. 51). In contrast, social media platforms allow users to convert exist-
ing profiles into memorials and existing ‘intimate publics’ (Hjorth &
Arnold, 2013) into mourners. This process integrates mourners’ ‘prac-
tices directly into their ongoing social relationships’ (Hutchings, 2012,
p. 51) and removes any need to create a new dedicated memorial web-
site. Carroll and Landry (2010) as well as Williams and Merten (2009)
have noted this inclusive aspect of online memorials, by examining
the use of online social networks amongst young internet users who
have lost loved ones. Through an analysis of comments on sites such
as Facebook and MySpace, they found that many young people con-
tinued visiting and posting to their dead peers’ sites, and these sites
allowed them to maintain an attachment with the deceased. Indeed,
later research by Brubaker and Hayes (2011) has identified these cultural
practices of interacting as commonplace, and entwined with the plat-
form affordances and conventions of social networking, rather than a
deviant or fringe activity.
These studies show that individuals’ online selves persist to some
degree after their bodies have gone, and that these surviving digital
selves are managed in a distributed and collective fashion. They demon-
strate how these new forms of persistence are dynamic and therefore
contrast in important ways with gravestones, epitaphs or printed obit-
uaries, by providing more opportunities for change and development
over time. Similarly, Veale (2004) identified that the dead do not remain
static but continue to evolve though the participatory construction of
memories, bereavement and remembrance, which Veale describes as a
264 Recalling States of Life

‘collective memorial landscape’. Veale (2004) points out that online

memorials are typically authored by many people and develop over
time, which has led to controversies about appropriate communication
and behaviour, especially in relation to tribute pages subjected to forms
of defacement or so-called ‘RIP trolling’ (Kohn et al., 2012; Phillips,
2011). These relational, decentred posthumous ontologies are not sta-
ble or necessarily coherent, but instead evolve as they are represented,
contested and negotiated through multiple user accounts, across various
services and platforms.
But what does it mean to socially network with the dead? The shift
from an older web architecture to a Web 2.0 environment – where the
technical affordances or capacities of social media platforms enable or
facilitate a shift from archiving to interactivity – means that deceased
profiles continue to be added to, modified and/or maintained through
collaborative actions and interactions. Whilst many memorial sites or
services are set for private use by friends and family, others are not and
can be publicly viewed and contributed to by strangers. As a result, the
affordances of digital networks for creating distributed and collective
memories of the dead are open to different networked publics – and
to conflict as much as collaboration – with some researchers even sug-
gesting a need for posthumous impression management. Marwick and
Ellison (2012), for example, note that Facebook memorial pages persist
and scale through networks in ways that allow for a large audience of
family, friends and strangers, who can potentially come into conflict
over the deceased’s memory, thus suggesting a need for posthumous
profile curation. They also explain that the replicable and searchable
qualities of memorials means that memorials can easily be found,
copied and amended by this varied audience, challenging notions of
authenticity and authorship.
This research points to the emergence of practices associated with
posthumous impression management on Facebook – the ways audiences
within this platform collectively gather and remember and potentially
collapse or conflict through the structural affordances of persistence,
replicability, scalability and searchability (Marwick & Ellison, 2012).
However, it also suggests a need to consider how memory and amnesia
are established, shaped and challenged as they spread across the numer-
ous platforms that are part of our everyday media environment. This
research approach needs to extend beyond the possibilities afforded
by the platforms, to also include their constraints and contradictions.
So while memories inscribed on the Web may be persistent and durable,
they are also fragmented by differentiated platforms and their publics.
 Bjorn Nansen et al. 265

They are replicable and dynamic, yet also messy, incomplete and sub-
ject to repurposing and revision. Digital memories are scalable and
participatory, yet can also be restricted through platform architecture
and moderation. And whilst memories are searchable and visible, they
are often obscured by levels of access or high volumes of data.
A single social media memorial page is a site of collective memory
(through inscription) and amnesia (through omission), in which a pub-
lic gathers and participates in determining what is to be remembered
and what is to be forgotten; yet memories are often inscribed across
many and different kinds of networks, each acting as a meeting ground
for a differently constituted public, remembering some things, forget-
ting others. Through a detailed analysis of the reaction to Zyzz’s passing,
we outline how various authors, publics and platforms constitute a
dynamic (and more unstable) social memory, one underpinned by an
ongoing tension between coherence and dispersal, and by competing
efforts to secure the past or fashion future significance.

Methods: A case study of Zyzz

To investigate how the dead are remembered across digital networks,

we chose to investigate the digital commemoration of a single person.
We use this case study to explore how the affordances and appropria-
tions of different platforms shape collective representations of memories
of the deceased. We selected Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian (‘Zyzz’) for
this case study as the timing and prominence of his death meant that
copious commemorative content was publicly accessible online, and
that a variety of platforms were deployed in engaging with his death
and inscribing his memory.
Zyzz was a Russian-born Australian who gained a degree of social
media celebrity status through self-promotion within the subculture of
amateur bodybuilding. Through hours of daily weightlifting, he trans-
formed himself over the space of a few years from a ‘skinny high school
kid’ into a young man with a muscular and ‘shredded’ body – a partic-
ular physical appearance described within the subculture as ‘aesthetics’.
While transforming his body he also transformed his online presence.
A social media persona called ‘Zyzz’ was created, and Aziz dedicated
himself to promoting Zyzz the brand by regularly posting pictures and
videos of Zyzz online. He amassed a following of 50,000+ Facebook fans,
and used his online celebrity to sell a book – Zyzz’s Bodybuilding Bible –
and a protein supplement – Protein of the Gods. At the same time he
worked part-time as a stripper with the male revue Sydney Hotshots,
266 Recalling States of Life

and studied business management at the University of Western Sydney

(Robinson & Whyte, 2011).
Zyzz first came to prominence in traditional mainstream media fol-
lowing the arrest of his brother, Said Shavershian (also known as
‘Chestbrah’), for the possession of anabolic steroids. This media cover-
age pointed to an explosion in the illicit sale and use of steroids outside
the rarefied context of elite sports, forming part of a culture of muscular
masculine aesthetics. Zyzz, his brother Said and their peers appeared to
be at the vanguard of this culture, with suspicions of steroid use seem-
ingly confirmed by Said’s arrest for possession. In an email to journalists
in response to the media coverage, Zyzz did not deny but certainly did
not admit to steroid use:

The article potrays me in a negative light, using my photo for what

was an article with anything related to drug use . . . What I have done,
however, is use the internet to build up my name and brand, I have
my own protein label and supplement sponsorships, all made pos-
sible through social media . . . As you may be able to tell from my
articulacy, im no idiot, Im a student studying business manage-
ment at university and essentially have been successful im marketing
myself – i have around 52000 facebook followers; that’s only a few
thousand short of Kyle and Jackie O’s Facebook support group.
(quoted in Robinson & Whyte, 2011)

Shortly after these events, in August 2011, Zyzz was found dead in a
Bangkok sauna. The circumstances of his death were ambiguous. On the
one hand he was only 22, was in most respects a very fit young man, he
died from a cardiac arrest, he moved in circles known to take steroids
and he was in Bangkok – a city well known for steroids ‘drug tourism’.
On the other, there is no admission of steroid use and an autopsy
revealed a congenital heart disorder (Robinson & Whyte, 2011).
Following his death, coverage of Zyzz exploded further across both
social and traditional media. The coverage focused on his untimely
death, his status as a role model and celebrity and the growing use of
steroids by amateur bodybuilders. Numerous threads devoted to Zyzz
appeared on dedicated bodybuilding forums, such as Simplyshredded
and Bodybuilding, whilst multiple public Facebook memorial tribute
pages were created following his death. In March 2012, his brother Said
released ‘Zyzz – the Legacy’, a 19-minute tribute on YouTube, which as of
November 2014 has been viewed over eight million times and has gen-
erated over 50,000 likes. There are also thousands of videos dedicated
 Bjorn Nansen et al. 267

to Zyzz on YouTube, collectively viewed by millions and commented on

by thousands. In this sense Zyzz is clearly not an example of an ordi-
nary death and its subsequent digital commemoration. Nevertheless,
his commemoration serves as an example of the potential for digitally
dispersed and collectively shaped memory.
We compared the posts about Zyzz following his death across dif-
ferent platforms, including niche bodybuilding fan sites (BodySpace,
Shredded), popular social networking sites (Facebook, YouTube) and
online information or discussion forums (Squidoo, ABC), using quali-
tative sampling and content analysis. Clearly the number of posts and
sites devoted to the memory of Zyzz make it difficult to conduct a
comprehensive or systematic qualitative analysis. There are certainly
opportunities for quantitative ‘big data’ approaches here; however, our
aim was to explore digital commemoration through public memories,
multiple actor perspectives and their interactions, sociotechnical con-
text and contested meanings, which a qualitative approach is well
positioned to capture. We engaged in qualitative content analysis, a
method designed to capture the detail and context of online video
and asynchronous online discussion of associated comment threads
(Ackland, 2013; Horst et al., 2012). We searched, explored and navi-
gated the multiple platforms where memories of Zyzz were shared or
shaped and sorted these into three main types: niche, popular SNS and
other discussion or information forums. We then took screenshots and
scraped images and comments of publicly available material from six
sites: BodySpace, Shredded, Facebook, YouTube, Squidoo and the ABC.
We coded and analysed the comments and conversations within each of
these sites using an inductive approach common in grounded theory to
locate and compare themes in the interactions between practices, plat-
forms and social formations of commemoration. Despite the necessary
partiality of the method, an iterative analysis of the themes within the
data proceeded until an assessment of saturation was reached. Themes
included the forms of expression, the topics of conversation and the
modes of address within the digital networks that come to shape and
re-shape the collective memory of Zyzz.

Findings: The collective commemoration and distributed

memory of Zyzz

The proliferation of posts and comments that inscribed what was

remembered and forgotten about Zyzz, and contested his past and future
significance, were often idiosyncratic, always incomplete, subject to
268 Recalling States of Life

deletion and revision and thus challenging for researchers to capture,

comprehend or analyse. Nevertheless, certain themes emerged around
the competing forms of expression, topics of conversation and modes
of address, through a close reading across different platforms.

Response to the death of Zyzz on niche bodybuilding forums

Zyzz had been a regular contributor to bodybuilding sites such as
SimplyShredded.com and Bodybuilding.com. Both of these sites provide
information on different aspects of bodybuilding and fitness culture,
from news articles, training advice, supplement and nutritional infor-
mation and so on. They feature advertising for food supplements and
accessories for fitness training, as well as options for posting user-
generated content, such as images and views on discussion forums.
Within the Bodybuilding.com website is a social networking site (SNS)
called BodySpace, on which Zyzz had an active profile. Like other SNS,
BodySpace allows people within the bodybuilding culture to create
a profile page to publicly present themselves, establish a network of
connections and exchange messages. In addition, the site has features
that allow users to post and monitor weight training goals and perfor-
mance statistics, to share images on a photo galley or links to videos
on YouTube. Ploderer et al. (2010) cite BodySpace as an example of a
‘passion-centric’ social network site, which facilitates self-presentation,
peer recognition and mutual appreciation for amateur bodybuilders. Fol-
lowing Zyzz’s death, the comments posted on discussion forums within
these sites were mostly tributes, expressing a sense of loss or admiration
or personal inspiration:

R.I.P to fallen brah (Bodybuilding.com)

i love zyzz, ill start training from now on! R.I.P (Simplyshredded.com)
everyday im lazy I come visit this page, I N S P I R A T I O N
(Simplyshredded.com)

Moreover, posts on these sites were often written in the lexicon of the
amateur bodybuilding subculture, expressing a sense of community and
solidarity, but also employing a grammar to implicitly restrict access or
exclude participation from others outside:

Forever mirin in your name brah! reps in peace (Simplyshredded.com)

Zyzz got me on the right path to lose weight, get lean and look AES-
THETIC AS FUARRKKKKKKKK. Completely changed the way I view
 Bjorn Nansen et al. 269

life and opened up a new and exciting chapter for me. My new goal
in life is not to become a legend, but a true inspiration, just like zyzz
(Simplyshredded.com)

To get ‘aesthetic’ is to achieve a shredded muscular body, and ‘mirin’

or ‘mire’ is to admire another’s physique and achievements. This lex-
icon also included oblique references to riding a cycle of anabolic
steroids (‘bicycles’), and blurred with more general internet slang in the
moderation of the tribute threads on the discussion forums:

Official R.I.P Zyzz Memorial thread. be respectful (SRS) (Bodybuild-

ing.com)

I was never a fanboy and i hated the zyzz nut huggers but there is
no denying you were an inspiration. you will be missed brah (srs)
(Bodybuilding.com)

everyone fell free to post pics and vids of him to memorialize

him . . . im sure he would have wanted that. anyone disrespecting the
srs tag or trolling will be negged(srs) (Bodybuilding.com)

The threads were also premised with a call to be treated seriously (‘SRS’)
and not disrespectfully, with a warning that any stranger who trolled
the site and posted offensive comments would get ‘negged’ (rejected or
denied access by moderators). The use of slang, warnings and modera-
tion highlight the way commemorative conduct is governed, and thus
ostensibly open and participatory platforms are limited to particular
forms, expressions or subjects of remembrance based around a culture
of shared interests and activities such as bodybuilding.

Response to the death of Zyzz on participatory platforms Facebook

and YouTube
In 2009 Facebook enacted a number of protocols to deal with posthu-
mous profiles as a consequence of a series of events, including the
death of a Facebook employee in 2005, the Virginia Tech massacre in
2007 and the introduction of functions that generated ‘suggestions’ to
‘reconnect’ with friends (including dead ones). Facebook created two
options: remove the account or memorialize the account. A memori-
alized account is converted from an existing user profile, and limits
some of the functions associated with it; it is hidden from public view
and only accessible by people who were existing friends before becom-
ing memorialized who can continue to post comments and interact.
270 Recalling States of Life

However, there is a third option available within the architecture, which

is to create a memorial page. Unlike a memorialized account, which
repurposes an existing profile, a memorial page is created after the per-
son has died. Unlike the private status of most memorialized accounts,
a memorial page is usually open to the public for participation (Karppi,
2013; Kern et al., 2013). By highlighting the embedded role of dead users
within the architecture of the platform, Karppi (2013) extends the obser-
vation that life is now inseparable from and lived within media (Deuze,
2012) to the conditions of death within digital networks. In doing so,
he shifts our attention from the perspective of the user, which largely
subordinates the dead to processes of online grieving, and towards the
medium itself. Thinking about the media technology rather than the
participation of the user demands a platform-sensitive and material
approach to understanding how the dead are shaped and endure within
network culture (Gibbs et al., 2014). In the case of Zyzz, whilst his
pre-existing Facebook profile remained publicly inaccessible, eight sepa-
rate public Facebook memorial tribute pages were created following his
death. This multitude of public data can be tracked, mined, aggregated
and sold by Facebook (Karppi, 2013), but also searched, duplicated,
shared and amended by publics with an interest in Zyzz.
On the so-called official Zyzz RIP Facebook memorial page, we see
public outpourings of loss and grief that in some ways resemble the trib-
utes, admiration and personal inspiration on the bodybuilding forums.
Yet, as a more publicly visible and shared space than bodybuilding
forums, many of the Facebook tributes appear to be from a broader
audience of fans, in addition to known peers within the bodybuilding
community, which is reflected in the persistent but less pronounced use
of the lexicon of the amateur bodybuilding subculture:

Even though Aziz has passed away, the Zyzz legacy still lives on
(‘official’ Zyzz RIP Facebook)
RIP zyzz he died for our gains we shall honor zyzz by becoming
aesthetics as fuck (‘official’ Zyzz RIP Facebook)

I will shred 4life thanks to zyzz (‘official’ Zyzz RIP Facebook)

Going to go smash my legs today in the gym in honor of ZYZZ!

(‘official’ Zyzz RIP Facebook)

The fan culture on the Facebook memorial is further revealed through

the visual tributes, such as tattoos and drawings, dedicated to Zyzz and
his muscular physique (Figure 15.1).
 Bjorn Nansen et al. 271

Figure 15.1 Screenshot of Zyzz RIP Facebook memorial page

There is a clearly diverse mix of publics and diverse forms of participa-

tion on Facebook, and this spreads from relatives and fans to tourists and
trolls. We see intimate and direct forms of commemoration juxtaposed,
as in a post from Zyzz’s brother Said below, as well as aggressive and
provocative posts from strangers, particularly in reference to accusations
of steroid abuse:

Come back to me baby brother, I dont think you know just how
much I love you. I’ve always looked out for you all your life and
protected you . . . I’m soo sorry I coulnt be there and save you this
time. My heart is broken and I can’t stop crying. You weren’t just my
272 Recalling States of Life

brother, you were my best mate too. Love you with all my heart and
soul and will never forget you. Rip Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian -Said
Sergeyevich (Brother of Zyzz)
its not sad! what would you think was going to happen when tak-
ing too much roids and drugs? think the heart wont stop sometime!
feel sorry for the family! may he rest in roids and coke as he will be
remebered! (‘official’ Zyzz RIP Facebook)

Yet, when comments and conduct are deemed inappropriate, they

are quickly policed through a collective and participatory mode of
governance from other contributors within the site:

shut up . . . dont be disrespectfull to a person that was an insperation

to every one (‘official’ Zyzz RIP Facebook)

Your a selfish cold hearted person. Regardless of what he did or what

people thought, its not for you to say or judge! Keep your opinion to
yourself. Its sad over the fact he was young to pass away. If you read
the recent news update he also had a heart defect! No one is perfect!
(‘official’ Zyzz RIP Facebook)

Memories of the dead on public Facebook memorials clearly conflict,

but in aggregate appear to be revised through consensus and contesta-
tion within the site, rather than through exclusive modes of cultural
expression, or a sense of tight-knit community that are prevalent on
niche sites such as those dedicated to bodybuilding.
In contrast, comments on a YouTube memorial video, Zyzz – The
Legacy, posted by Zyzz’s brother, Said, reveal how the volume and diver-
sity of comments challenges the possibility of maintaining any kind of
coherent narrative or collective memory. A number of affordances of
the platform are helping to shape this messy proliferation of posts and
contradiction in memories constructing Zyzz. YouTube is a spectacularly
popular video-sharing platform and uploading to YouTube is a decision
to make a video publicly accessible, allowing anybody to view and con-
tribute comments on the video. These visual and participatory qualities
of YouTube have ensured that the platform has generated a larger and
more diverse public and a greater quantity and scope of contributions
in shaping the collective memory of Zyzz. The Legacy video has been
viewed over seven million times and generated over 30,000 comments,
45,000 likes (and 4,000 dislikes), and comments continue to be posted
on a regular basis.
 Bjorn Nansen et al. 273

What emerges in the bustle of YouTube memorial comments repeats

what we see across other platforms discussed, including tribute, loss,
admiration, fandom and so on. And like on the Facebook memorial, we
see a diverse and conflicting audience. But what is novel to this plat-
form is the breadth and intensity of conflict around the inscription of
Zyzz’s public memory, and the manner in which any collective coher-
ence becomes unmanageable. The many posts that argue for respect for
the dead in general and Zyzz in particular, and inscribe a memory of
Zyzz as a personal inspiration and role model, are drowned out by the
cacophony of comments that have different patterns of remembering
and forgetting, patterns that seek to de-value the celebratory discourse
and cultural significance of Zyzz through references that remember his
decadent lifestyle and use of steroids:

fuck this spastic (Zyzz – The Legacy, YouTube)

Heart defect noob (Zyzz – The Legacy, YouTube)

All faggots who do roids should die. Get big like a real man you pussy.
I’m gonna go stomp on your grave (Zyzz – The Legacy, YouTube)

thank you zyzz for dieing. now we have one less steroid junkie on this
earth and one less person to pass abysmal genes (mental and physical
genes) to future offspring. RIP where you belong (Zyzz – The Legacy,
YouTube)

Through these inscriptions the fans’ efforts to construct a uniformly

clean image and positive memory of Zyzz are undermined, and by
extension, his status as a role model for young men is challenged:

this zyzz fanatism is sick. you use streroids in day and drugs in the
night. bodybuilding and strength training was developed to make
you healthy not sick (Zyzz – The Legacy, YouTube)
On the start of this video . . . what drug is he on (aside from
steroids) . . . i believe cocaine . . . aggressive talk without much sense,
some weird face articulation . . . is this the guy that today’s youth looks
up to?? Ridiculous (Zyzz – The Legacy, YouTube)

Thus, whilst the memory of the dead may be shaped within some plat-
forms to create a coherent narrative, there remains a partiality that is
potentially challenged by the proliferation, dispersal and disaggregation
of digital memories across distributed networks.
274 Recalling States of Life

Remembering Zyzz on other social media platforms

The distributed data and collective memory of the dead are also available
for repurposing in different contexts and media platforms. As Karppi
(2013) notes, archives of and interactions with the dead on Facebook
continue to offer value to the platform in ways that exceed their social
memory to mourners. Yet, the broader ecologies of media in which data
and memories of the dead now spread across distributed networks also
offers further opportunities for extracting value, whether economic or
social.
A page dedicated to Zyzz on Squidoo attempted to create economic
value by digitally harnessing memories of the dead. Before its purchase
and closure by HubPages in 2014, Squidoo was a platform that allowed
users to create pages, known as lenses, dedicated to the sharing of infor-
mation on particular topics. Much like a website or blog, but contained
within a single platform, Squidoo offered user-friendly tools to create
subject-specific content within a page. The purpose of a lens was to
generate traffic, and through integrated advertising generate clicks and
revenue. Squidoo charged 50 per cent commission on any page profits,
of which 5 per cent was donated to charity. Users who created lenses
(known as Lensmasters) could also choose to donate their 50 per cent
portion of revenue to charity, and hence the platform was advertised as a
community-based website. Nevertheless, Lensmasters could also choose
to keep their profits, and so as a money-making venture required lenses
that would attract high volumes of traffic.
A Lensmaster known as Epic_Noob created a lens on Squidoo ded-
icated to Zyzz. The lens, titled Zyzz RIP – The ‘YOU MIRIN’ Memorial
Gallery ∗ UPDATED WITH ALL PICTURES EVER∗ , was a picture gallery
that aggregated images of Zyzz from across the Web to attract fans,
and whose purpose was described as ‘motivating all you skinnyfat
dudes to attain killer aesthetics’. Nevertheless, the page was also dedi-
cated to monetizing the memory of Zyzz, which was facilitated through
built-in links to purchase protein supplements, and whose purpose was
questioned by at least one comment1 :

if you’re actually here for motivation and you’re looking for the best
supplement to assist you on your journey to becoming Zyzz-mode,
I’ve placed a link below to the best deal on 100 whey protein by Opti-
mum Nutrition. I’ve found it to be the best and most cost-effective
supplement online and it really can help you with those post workout
aches and pains, so if you want that added energy and excitement in
your lifting, check it out (Squidoo)
 Bjorn Nansen et al. 275

bahahaha . . . . after all those photos ‘buy whey protein’. If this website
was accurate it would say ‘buy anabolic steroids’ (Squidoo)

In contrast to such explicit endeavours to harness the economic value

of Zyzz’s distributed data, social media has also been deployed to lever-
age the collective memory of Zyzz for a wider social project debating
the growing culture and impacts of amateur steroid use on male health
and notions of masculinity. Zyzz was used as an extreme example of the
potential consequences of steroid use and abuse within male body cul-
ture on a programme broadcast on radio and subsequently posted online
along with a discussion forum. The programme, Boys and the Buff Culture
by reporter Brendan King, was aired on Radio National, an Australian-
wide non-commercial radio network dedicated to current affairs and
social programming, which is run by the public broadcaster, the ABC.
On the online discussion forum accompanying the posting of the
broadcast, comments and debate about Zyzz shifted from how he was
posthumously remembered to what the prospective significance of his
death represents:

What a good documentary. The drift of steroid use from sports to

social arenas (dance clubs, music festivals, the street), as discussed
in the program, is really a worrying trend. Programs that make us
aware of this trend, and do so in such a realistic, authentic way, can
only be applauded. Essential listening for all young people, males and
females.

This is very true, Sydney and now Australia have serious issues with
their body image, it is an obsession that needs to stop. I know so
many of my friends who are on roids, I had to stop my cousin from
taking them and one of my mates. Every single male in Aus wants
to look like this, with the tatoos and all, its stupid and makes life
difficult for everyone, lol, I have to start working out because I feel
intimidated because every single Sydney male under the age of forty
is buff, WTF is going on people?

Discussion: Media, death and memory

Media have long been associated with death and memory, with media
technologies operating as both a means of communicating news of
a death and as a means of memorializing the deceased (Carroll &
Landry, 2010; Jones, 2004). The material and symbolic mediation of
276 Recalling States of Life

remembrance has grown to include more than the narratives of tra-

ditional epitaphs, eulogies, wakes and funerals (all of which go back
millennia). It has extended beyond centuries-old obituaries printed and
circulated in newspapers to embrace today’s social media, the latest
phase in this process of remediating memories of the dead (Garde-
Hansen et al., 2009). In contrast to these long-established practices,
commemoration online offers an extensive range of media for construct-
ing narratives of the dead and platforms to collaboratively store and
circulate memories. Therefore, a variety of distributed spaces emerge as
meeting places for publics to commemorate the life and death of an
individual.
Yet, the relationship between memory and media is not straight-
forward. Stretching back to ancient Greece, media have either been
positioned as a prosthesis to memory, faithfully storing content for later
retrieval, or alternatively as a threat to human capacities for remem-
bering. Materialist approaches in media theory have proposed that
media technologies are historically intertwined with and constitutive
of human memory. French anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan, for example,
conceived the evolution of the human as a technical exteriorization of
memory in media:

The whole of our evolution has been oriented toward placing outside
ourselves what in the rest of the animal world is achieved inside by
species adaptation.
(Leroi-Gourhan, 1993, p. 236)

This understanding is helpful for encouraging us to think about the ways

media technologies and human memory are intertwined, not simply for
individual remembrance but for the development of a collective, social
memory. German media theorist Hartmut Winkler identifies such collec-
tive relations by tracing the technological connections between written
and oral cultures (Winkler, 2002). He notes that at first glance writing
and orality appear to produce two distinct forms for establishing cul-
tural memory – one invested in the durability of a material medium,
the other in the repetition of ritual practice. Yet he goes on to show
how the material persistence of written media initiates encounters, such
as reading, that ‘dissolve’ into daily practices. In turn, the repetition of
communication in oral traditions is ‘condensed’ in the material storage
device of human memory. Thus, different technologies mediate mem-
ory through specific processes encompassing both material affordances
 Bjorn Nansen et al. 277

or ‘inscriptions’ and social practices or ‘rescriptions’ to shape media

cultures (Winkler, 2002). And this raises questions about how specific
technologies mediate memory, and not just for the living but also for
the dead. How are memories of the dead collectively assembled, shared
and stored?
Digitalization may increase our opportunities for accessing, recording
and sharing memories through affordances of persistence, replicabil-
ity, scalability and searchability. Yet, at the same time, the material
and networked qualities of digital media also challenge these very
affordances. The distributed authorship, audience and platforms that
constitute collective memories of the dead online are subject to a
tension between coherence and dispersal. Collective memory is not sim-
ply about representation. The material architecture of platforms (see
Karppi, 2013) is also implicated in the formation and contestation of
collective memories, continually modulated and defined by specific
networks:

They become points where memories are activated and in some cases
fabricated. As platforms for online grieving the dead become nodes
that open up towards other nodes and other agencies. (p. 14)

In the case of Zyzz, memories of his life and death were constructed and
consumed by different (though overlapping) publics, and through this
process Zyzz multiplies. Zyzz is remembered on Facebook fan tribute
sites as an inspiration to a tight-knit subculture and its defining norma-
tive values, and as a vulnerable and imperfect person who died far too
young. On YouTube his life and death is represented in terms of deca-
dence, egotism and uncontrolled drug taking, whilst on other discussion
forums his memory serves as an opportunity to sell protein products or
to warn other young men about the dangers of steroids. These conflict-
ing memories are each collaboratively constructed and shared, blurring
the distinction between personal and public, individual and collective
(Hoskins, 2009; van Dijck, 2007). Moreover, at stake in these compet-
ing memories are efforts to secure how the past significance and the
future value of his memory are socially consumed – is he a folk hero who
inspires imitation, or is his death read as a cautionary tale that serves as
a warning? The democratizing possibilities for publishing and recording
are challenged by the ‘chaotic and uncontrolled’ scale of publics and
agendas (Arthur, 2009), and by the conflicting norms and accounts that
arise in these circumstances.
278 Recalling States of Life

Conclusion

As the case study of Zyzz reveals, digital networks imply that content
persists, and while memories are ostensibly preserved online, they are
subject to forms of forgetting, alongside human memory, through the
limits and failures of technology. In addition, the content that repre-
sents memory of a life and a death is also mobile and easily dispersed
and fragmented through different networks and publics. Content can
be easily duplicated and shared, yet also revised and repurposed in ways
that make it messy and uncontrolled. Zyzz used representations of his
body and the life that produced it to serve his own purposes, but these
representations have now been repurposed and have been used to serve
other agendas – in particular, Facebook’s commercial purposes (through
his memorial sites), his intimates’ bonding and boundary-guarding pur-
poses (through his ongoing presence on bodybuilding sites) and his
critics’ anti-drug purposes (through criticizing his YouTube presence as
a warning to others).
What is missing in current scholarship on memorials is an under-
standing of the multiple ontologies of the deceased, how memories are
collectively shaped and dynamic, and how they are re-shaped in dif-
ferent online spaces and ecologies of interaction in contested efforts to
secure particular social remembrance of the past and/or prospective sig-
nificance for future legacy. Both the distributed data and the collective
memory of the dead are subject to opportunities of coherence, whether
economic or social, within specific platforms; yet at the same time have
the potential to proliferate and disperse in ways that may conflict or
disaggregate across distributed networks – having different relational
ontologies and thus forms of value in different contexts.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by funding from the Australian Research

Council (DP140101871).

Note
1. We note here that this archive has not been accessible since HubPages
acquired Squidoo. This highlights that, while online platforms promise the
ability to store, share and scale our memories, they too are susceptible to loss
when businesses change hands, data becomes corrupted, or new legislature is
adopted.
 Bjorn Nansen et al. 279

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Index
affordances, 118, 196–200, 230, 231,
239, 263–5, 272, 276–7
archive, 4, 14, 17, 20–6, 32, 56–9,
62–3, 65, 69, 75, 82, 85–7, 91, 97,
135, 161–2, 169–70, 202, 203,
257–8, 274
art, 4, 99, 122
asbestos, 158–72
Asturian miners, 142, 144, 148–55
Asturian revolution, 148, 154
August Putsch, 212, 217
Black Liberation Army, 113, 114
Black Nationalist organizations, 114
Black Panther Party (BPP), 114, 117,
123–4
Black Power Movement, 117, 119
blogosphere, 180, 185, 192
blogs, 8, 56, 57, 180–9
generic, 152
diasporic, 185
BPP, see under Black Panther Party
burial, 244–5, 248, 251–2, 254, 256–7
celebrity, 42, 202, 261, 265–6
ceremony, 43, 86, 244–54, 247–54
Civil Rights Movement, 114–25
Civil War, see under Spanish Civil War
class, 45, 121, 189
middle class, 45, 192
upper class, 179
working class, 45, 152, 190
commemoration, 20, 31, 40–4, 76–7,
79, 81–6, 131, 134, 137–8, 140,
188, 190, 195, 197, 212, 217, 230,
233, 238, 244, 247–8, 250–7,
261–3, 265, 267, 269, 271, 276
communism, 139, 210–12, 214, 215,
217–23
community, 6, 48, 49, 84, 85, 86, 87,
90, 92, 93, 96, 101, 122, 130, 132,
281
137–8, 143, 144, 148, 150, 155,
244, 246, 248, 252, 268
Australian, 165, 169
Black, 123
blogging, 216
bodybuilding, 270, 272, 274
Bosnian, 245, 249, 257
diasporic, see under diaspora
of flood memory, 56–62, 65, 68,
70–2; see also under resilience
imagined, 81, 86
information, 211
online, 230
of remembrance, 195, 198, 204–5
Taiwanese, 84, 86
victim, 84
virtual, 84
see also under identity, community
and memory, community
conflict, 2, 7, 30, 41, 50, 113, 130–5,
143–7, 203, 246, 264, 272–8
connective turn, see under media,
connective
Cuban-Americans, see under Cuban
Emigrants
Cuban Emigrants, 3–4, 179–91
demonstration, 4, 131, 135, 138, 140,
149, 155, 210, 212
diary, 13, 43, 82, 182, 185, 230, 233–5
diaspora
Bosnian, 245–6, 249, 257
Cuban, see under Cuban Emigrants
disaster, 48, 60, 62, 64, 84–5, 90, 100,
see also under earthquake
national, 47
natural, 7, 58–9, 70, 71, 74–6,
78–82, 86–7, 94–9, 105
discourse, 2, 3, 6, 28, 47, 55, 57, 59,
100, 114, 119, 129, 132, 150, 151,
155, 247, 248, 254
Duma, 211, 214, 217
282 Index
earthquake
L’Aquila (Italy), 90, 95–8, 100–1, 105
921 (Taiwan), 74–5, 79, 80–3, 87
ethics, 16, 17, 49–50, 120, 123, 161,
163
eyewitness, see under witnessing
Facebook, 20–2, 68–9, 129, 131, 134,
136, 137, 195–206, 229–41,
261–7, 269–78
feminism, 131–9
15M, see under indignados
flood, see under community, of flood
memory
generation, 18, 21, 24, 47, 50, 57, 60,
70, 76, 96, 132, 134–8, 143, 148,
150, 155, 159, 161, 180, 191
geolocation, 28, 101, 167, 172
health, 24, 28, 70, 122, 135, 137, 149,
158–72, 179, 180, 273, 275
hyperconnective, 21
hypertext, 115–19
identification, see under identity
identity, 14, 15, 17, 43, 75, 130, 136,
138, 148, 155, 180–1, 184, 191–2,
195, 197, 215, 232, 238, 247–50,
252, 257
collective, 78, 95, 130
community, 94, 103, 104
cultural, 143, 151, 184, 190
feminist, 136
formation, 180, 183, 187
national, 62, 114, 119, 184, 186, 189
ideology, 3, 16–17, 75–6, 114, 117,
120, 146, 150, 152–3, 155, 180,
182–3, 188–9, 191
image, 4, 17, 18, 22–3, 25, 38, 48,
59–60, 62, 65, 66, 68–70, 76, 81,
97–8, 106, 117, 130, 132, 137,
182, 210, 222–3, 240, 251, 253,
262, 267–8, 273–5
imagery, see under image
Indignados, 4, 149, 151
Indignants movement, see under
indignados
intergenerational, see under generation
internet, 19, 24, 37, 55, 59, 75–87,
90–2, 95, 105, 118, 129, 171, 180,
182, 184, 189, 192, 196, 213–17,
244–5, 249–50, 252, 256, 257,
261, 262–3, 266, 269
interscalarity, 39, 41–3, 45–6, 48
liminality, 244–5, 248–9, 251–2, 256–7
Marea negra, see under indigandos
Mareas ciudadanas, see under
indignados
media
broadcast, 15, 42, 57, 59, 60, 67, 68,
105, 200, 204, 216, 258, 275
connective, 6, 15, 61, 68, 197
digital, 7, 22, 31–2, 56, 90–3, 106,
196–7, 205, 261, 277
independent, 215–16, 222
mass, 78, 206, 216
social, 6, 20–2, 26, 31–2, 37, 47, 56,
58, 59, 68–9, 129, 131, 135–6,
138–9, 149, 171, 189, 215, 223,
241, 261–6, 274–6
media practice, 107, 195–205
mediation, 5–6, 17, 37, 62, 68, 163
competitive, 59
journalistic, 160–1, 164
material, 275
social, 231
symbolic, 275
technological, 40, 231
mediatization, 5, 27, 29, 57, 199
memorial, 28, 31, 68, 74–9, 83, 86,
236, 244, 247–9
centre, 247
ceremony, 244, 248–9, 253
digital, 75–87, 262–3
internet, see under digital
monument, 257
online, see under digital
place-based, 75–8, 86
practice, 251
sites, 284, 286
space-based, 76–7
Srebrenica-Potočari, 249, 257
websites, see under digital
memorialization, 42, 58, 65, 257, 262

memory
collective, 38–50, 76, 91–105, 134,
139, 144–54, 160, 162, 190,
211, 223, 239, 261–77
community, 250, 256, 257
connective, 198, 203, 204–6
cultural, 5, 46, 47, 115, 130–8, 152,
186, 197, 244–56
debate, 144–8
mediated, 5, 6, 40, 59, 91, 184, 197
personal, 2, 30, 40, 102
practices, 56, 195–205, 249
prospective, 75, 87, 158–61, 166,
170, 172, 231
retrospective, 76, 79, 83, 87, 160,
166, 170, 172
studies, 2, 5, 7, 36–51, 78, 115, 142,
147–8, 198, 219, 250
travelling, 130–2, 135, 139
work, 6, 60, 118, 186, 188, 191,
197–206, 238, 239, 245, 254
methodology, 36, 37, 160, 162, 180
migrant, 4, 8, 96, 181–91
missing persons, 245–7
Mnémothèque, 230, 233, 237–40
mourning, 6, 48, 75, 229–31, 233,
239, 241, 244, 247, 251–6
music, 200, 204, 248, 251, 253–4,
275
narrative analysis, 75, 78–9, 101
narratives
commemorative, 79, 83
digital, see under online
family, 57
flood, 59, 62, 64, 69, 70
hegemonic, 90
historical, 114, 125
linear, 115, 118
multivocal vernacular, 87
online, 98, 171
personal, 154, 166
Nashi, 213
nationalism, 246, 248, 250
newspaper, 23, 47, 57–8, 62, 65, 85,
144, 145, 149, 150, 153, 202,
210–11, 215–19, 276
921 Internet Museum, 79–80, 82–7
Index 283
Occupy, 4
Ostalgia, 195
participation, 17, 71, 83, 92, 93, 200,
237, 248, 252, 268, 270
photograph, see under photography
photography, 3, 13, 16–7, 20, 22, 25,
37–8, 45, 58–9, 65–6, 68, 76, 81–2,
90, 131, 134, 137–8, 196, 238,
251, 253–4, 256
Podemos, 144–6, 153, 155
politics, 3, 17, 43, 49–50, 55, 59–60,
75–6, 81–2, 86, 95–6, 114–7,
120–6, 130, 132–5, 138, 139, 140,
142, 144–7, 150, 152–3, 155–6,
159, 189, 204, 210, 211–6, 222–3,
244–8, 250–6
prayer, 236–7
meditative, 236
petitionary, 236
place of, 230, 233, 235
psychological, 236–7
religious, 236
protests, 4, 103, 131–9, 142–54, 203,
212–15
race, 48, 55, 113–19, 121–5, 189–92
radio, 8, 162, 166, 195–7, 200–6, 216,
275
reconstruction, 5, 26, 41, 75, 81–5,
96–106, 116, 180–91, 206,
238
recovery, 2, 22, 75–87, 236
religion, 82, 193, 236, 237
remediation, 62, 78, 99, 131–2,
134–8
resilience, 56–64, 68, 70–1, 94, 104,
106
resistance stories, 119–23
resolution, 2, 151, 236
restoration, 2, 183
revolution, 3, 15, 95, 123, 129, 139,
143–4, 148, 153–4, 179–83,
187–90, 212–14
rites of passage, 248
scales, 7, 39–51, 57, 71
second-wave feminism, see under
feminism
284 Index
social movements, 3, 7
solidarity, 6, 150, 268
Soviet collapse, 210–23
Spanish Civil War, 142–5, 148
Srebrenica, 8, 244–57
storytelling, 77, 79, 93, 95, 99,
100, 105, 159–69, 238, 239
sustainability, 15, 56–60, 68, 71,
93
tactics, 3, 213
television, 40–7, 57, 62, 63,
76, 131, 143, 179, 196, 206,
216, 251
topic model, 210–20
transmediality, 200, 205
trauma, 1, 87, 94–106
Collective, 99, 100, 106,
150
Twitter, 4, 26, 60, 129
Typhoon Morakot, 74, 75, 84
uncertainty, 17, 18, 96, 248, 255
uses of memory, 148
exemplary, 148
literal, 148
video, 18, 22, 25, 38, 56, 59, 62, 67,
69, 70, 80, 91, 98, 137, 197,
203–4, 212, 232, 238, 240, 244–5,
250–4, 256–7, 261, 263, 265–8,
272–3
virtual ethnography, 231
war, 1, 2, 41, 55, 62–4, 95, 100, 142–8,
153, 158, 219, 220, 245–8, 250,
254–7
wish card, 230, 233–4
witnessing, 3, 41, 61, 69, 129, 138,
167, 244–5, 249–50, 253, 255–7
YouTube, 60, 197, 212, 244–57,
261–78