Witnessing absences: social media as archives and public spheres

Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media | Special Issue: Digital Trauma in Eastern and Central Europe, 2018

This paper seeks to map theoretical and practical preoccupations in the contemporary relationship between places of commemoration and more abstract spaces of Holocaust memory. While the range of this topic is broad, I narrow the scope by interrogating specific ways in which the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum engages with Holocaust-related visual content on Instagram. The direction in which the memory of the Holocaust is moving and the ubiquity of social media posts, forces institutions like the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum to valorize, react, and engage with new media content. Therefore, the case study of 'selfies from Auschwitz' resonates in productive ways with questions of individual and institutional socio-historical agency in curatorship of 21 st century Holocaust memory, as well as discussions on guardianship and claims to ownership of memory in the digital age. Contending that the Museum asserts itself as an increasingly visible actor in the transnational social media Holocaust discourse, I trace the history of the Museum's social media presence and engagement.

This article examines responses to the loss of heritage places through an analysis of a Facebook group, 'Beautiful buildings and cool places Perth has lost', which includes photos and discussion about buildings and places that have been demolished or obliterated in the city of Perth, Western Australia. In doing so, it grapples with a number of issues; feelings about the loss of heritage, the nature of social media and the social capital it generates, and emotional communities and nostalgia. It argues that in showcasing lost buildings and places from the past, social media such as Facebook enhances both awareness of and collective attachment to the past by facilitating public expression of emotional responses to the past and forming an emotional community that can be utilised to generate the social capital needed to mobilise against the destruction of heritage buildings and places.

Italian Studies, 2012

Memories are increasingly shaped and shared through the media, in particular visual media such as photography. However, it is not just the images that allow for memories to enter our individual and collective identities: the latter take shape in the mediation of the past through images. In other words, the very act of selecting, storing, and sharing visual data has an impact on the way the past is recalled and identities are reconstructed in the present. What happens, though, when photo albums go digital, and private snapshots become available to all? This article analyses the collective sharing of a series of photo albums of the 1977 student movement in Bologna, on the social networking site Facebook, in 2011. It explores how the collective (hi)story of the 1977 generation is reproduced online, why this specific medium was so successful in reconnecting these people thirty-five years later, and what the impact is of digital media and social networks on the reconstruction of collective identities in the present.

Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict Unwanted Memories, 2022

This book investigates the study of memory activism and memory of activism, emerging after conflict, as a political civic action. It examines the appearance and growth of memory activism in Serbia amid the legacies of unwanted memories of the wars of the 1990s, approaching the post-Yugoslav region as a region of memory and tracing the alternative calendars and alternative commemorative practices of memory activists as they have evolved over a period of more than two decades. By presenting in-depth accounts of memory activism practices, on-site and online, Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories analyses this evolution in the context of generational belonging and introduces frameworks for the study of #hashtag #memoryactivism, alternative commemorations and commemorative solidarity.

The focus of my contribute is on the relation between individual and collective memory and social media. Social media are taken into account not only as communication realm but also as memory places, where individuals construct their memories and select what will be remembered or erased. Secondly, we can suppose that in social media individual and collective memories can be constructed in a more participated way, thank to connection and contents sharing technologies. Starting from the hypothesis of a mutual shaping of memory and media and that the users are able to shape technologies of memory in order to construct a meaningful world, the paper intend reflect on potential and actual capacities of social technologies to generate new pattern of remembrance and forgetting. I attempt to inquire about this question through the analysis of some case studies. We can indeed observe many new technologies of memory at work and many different kind of memory practices in the WWW: while Wikipedia can be observed as an objectification of a participate cultural memory, the web logs emerge as places of construction of individual memory and identity and Flickr as a shared archive of personal visual memories. Concurrently, new forms of participate social archive about historical events are rising and so on. The aim is to design a first phenomenology of grassroots memories in connection to social media and to reflect about the “social media memory”, that is characterized by new problems and new possibilities related both to remembrance and to oblivion.

kultura popularna, 2017

Essachess Journal For Communication Studies, 2012

A new generation is changing the face of Holocaust remembrance, a morally laden subject that continues to captivate public imagination, spark controversy and generate dialogue, now by using social media. In summer 2010, controversy erupted worldwide as "Dancing Auschwitz," a YouTube video of a Jewish family dancing at various Holocaust remembrance sites, defied the existing cultural narrative through a novel expression of Holocaust remembrance. The artifact exemplifies the larger debate whether technology aids memory as successfully as we believe or whether by freeing us from the burden encourages us to forget. We argue that virtual memorials can fulfill roles left vacant by more traditional forms of remembrance and open new avenues of communication and expression that allow participants, especially Germans and Jews, to re-mediate their 108 Paige L. GIBSON, Steve JONES Remediation and remembrance… identities. Virtual memorials can enhance the remembrance experience by cultivating fluid, interactive and creative spaces that encourage high degrees of participation, collaboration and self-expression. In the case study, YouTube users implemented three forms of remediation: role switching, redefinition, and disassociation. Despite the obstacles (e.g., destructive identity forces, commercial culture, and temporalities of social media trends), technology ultimately act as an aid to humanity's deep-seated desire to remember.

Revista ICONO14, 2022

This paper addresses the potential of social media as places for citizen dialogue around memory and cultural identity of territories and their inhabitants. From the perspective of cultural anthropology and memory studies, an exploratory study is presented based on the content analysis of two Facebook groups linked to the city of Cartagena de Indias(Colombia), accompanied by qualitative interviews with their administrators and with historians of the territory. The results explain some of the factors that contribute to thepopularity of these virtual groups, based on the use of vernacular photography, and show how digital social networks have come to complement or replace functions that were once restricted to public and academic institutions, museums and archives. It is concluded that despite their limitations, these groups, born in a specific historical and technological context, constitute important virtual places of memory.

2013

The understanding of memory process is tied up with the techniques and technologies used to construct and preserve images, narratives and stories about a specific event in the past. The digitalization of devices for recording and preserving content gives a new push to the debate about the process and the strategies of negotiating, sharing and collecting memories. From a sociological and communicative perspective, the debate deals with the question of how technologies are involved in the process of constructing both autobiographical and collective memory. This contribution is focused on the analysis of a social platform called "Noi, L'Aquila" ("We, L'Aquila"), created by Google to contribute to the social reconstruction of the city of L'Aquila (Italy), struck by a powerful earthquake in April 2009. The platform is composed of two different parts: 1) "Explore and Remember", allows people to virtually explore the city with Google Street View, share their memories, testimonies and feelings tied to specific geographic locations and upload photos, videos and short life stories to remember the city and the days before the earthquake; 2) "Inspire the Future", allows to model the city in 3D to contribute to reviving the city's heritage and inspiring its physical reconstruction. The paper presents the results of the qualitative-quantitative content analysis of the posts published on the platform. The goal of the research is to verify if and how an online social platform intervenes and contributes to the construction and preservation of the memory of L'Aquila. More specifically, we focused our attention on the "locations" of memory; the narrative characteristics of the posts; the role of the temporal dimension in the content shared online and in the processes of construction of collective memory. The main findings of our analysis show that, in the case of the "Noi, L'Aquila", citizens use the platform in order to preserve biographical remembrances interwoven with the collective memory of the past of the city; to express emotions and biographical anecdotes; to overcome the trauma.

2022