Our relationship with the past is implied through the way we describe, and remember history. History is one of the things that we affiliate ourselves with. Since it forges and maintains one’s identity, it is important to be conscious of what we take as history. This blog stems from my curiosity about how history is remembered and narrated through digital media, especially in this post-digital age!
Wait! What is post digital age?
Technical condition that followed the so-called digital revolution and is constituted by the naturalization of pervasive and connected computing processes and outcomes in everyday life, such that digitality is now inextricable from the way we live while forms, functions and effects are no longer perceptible.
Post – digital | Diggit Magazine
Some history is pleasant to know, while some are not. For instance, colonial history, genocide, and collective traumatic incidents and disasters are the case of unpleasant history. Although they are negative memories, it is pivotal to know them to not repeat the same scenario, as well as to commemorate the victims of the event.
Since history itself is the formless but edited accumulation of storytelling of pasts, when we look back and narrate history, we need a material thing to situate history in. That is to say, history usually unfolds through material cultures.
There are so many different forms of hosting history, ranging from the museum, and monuments to memorials. In this essay, I want to focus on memorials specifically, which are the materialized structures that work as a tool/space/facilitator to propel public remembrance.
Here, I was wondering how digital media takes a role in the remembrance of negative history. There are many internet platforms dedicated to the exercise of collective commemorations. How this digital platform affects us to relate to the past and commemorate collective traumatic events or/and negative history.
Digital Memorials
Before we dive into analyzing this phenomenon of digital memorials, here are some examples!
1. Digital Jewish Monuments
This archival digital Jewish monument is dedicated to Jewish people who were persecuted in the Netherlands during the German occupation time.
These memorial pages are designed like a cluster of pixels. As you zoom in, the pixel becomes the pile of boxes that contains the names of the victims and sometimes images of them.
2. The September 11 digital archives
Those archives are a community-built website, where people can freely upload and edit information. They aim at collecting, preserving, and presenting the history of 9.11 and offering the space of commemoration.
Digital Memorials with their presumption function
One of the common features that we can see through many digital memorials is the presumption function, where people can produce and consume its content. Those digital archives allow users to upload images, music files, links, news items, and personal messages or stories to an archive that other users may then browse or search.
There are so many anecdotes, with this presumption function, such as when the bereaved family of a tragic event visited the memorial site and learned about new things that they didn’t know about their family member before. This kind of interaction with other people over a collective traumatic event partially becomes a therapeutic process for those who got affected by the event directly and indirectly.
Digital memorials vs Physical memorials
I am not here to say that this kind of digitized memorial will be the future of memorials or to say that a physical memorial is better. These two different forms of the memorial have different hallmarks, sometimes sharing their features and sometimes absolutely incompatible. For instance, physical memorials are more embedded into daily life’s landscape than digital ones. That is to say, physical memorials can add a layer to the actual landscape. Therefore it actively participates in enriching a perception of the space with information not only to the local people but even to the stranger. This brings up spontaneous commemoration: Whenever people encounter it, the memorials remind them of the event.
But at the same time, there are certain situations that digital memorials would fit more than physical memorials. For instance, if there is no specific site for commemorating tragic events, such as if the tragic event happened all over the place and was not centered or narrowed down into one location. In that case, It will be hard to designate one place. If I go deeper and predict a little bit more about the future, digital memorials can be the accurate space to commemorate any events that mainly or only happened in the digital space, for instance, cyber war, etc. (Yet, I haven’t found any digital memorials dedicated toward digital violence)
In order to wrap up, what I want to convey through this blog is different aspects of the site of memorials, and its changing form in this post-digital age! As we incorporate a lot of digitized forms into our life, the aspect of commemoration also actively embraces digital platforms. When we think about history, we often forget that this moment, this daily life will be history to somedays. This phenomenon of building digital memorials is an indication of our era, as well as the records of the history of our past.
References
Digital commemoration: Human-Computer Interaction, The University of Melbourne (unimelb.edu.au)
First of all, thank you for this post. I think the entire topic of commemoration and memorials is extremely interesting and important, especially once the events that are being commemorated are further back in time and communicative memory is not really existent anymore. We encounter so many physical monuments in our day-to-day life that we do not even recognize them as such and thus subconsciously ignore them. Especially your example of the Joods Monument is a nice one because it shows the enormous amount of the victims of the Holocaust while not leaving them anonymous. And in cases like the Holocaust, I do agree with you, these digital monuments can be a great addition to the existing physical monuments, which are in many cases rather abstract and thus only comprehensible to those actively engaging with them.
However, I also stand with you on the point that physical monuments are more embedded into and present in our daily lives, because, at least for now, digital monuments seem to include the necessity to either know about them or actively search for them.
I would be very interested to know if there indeed already is a digital monument for a digital event, and if there isn’t, I am sure we will see some of those in the future.
In addition to your argument that in certain situations digital memorials could be more appropriate, in a podcast we did with Lucia we discussed a digital modelling of an ancient structure that was destroyed by the terrorist organization ISIS. In situations that are very recent physical monuments can be too confronting and insensitive.
Also, there is a digital memorial website (http://anitsayac.com/) “Monument Counter” which is a digital counter for the femicide victims in Turkey. As you said there is no specific location to place a monument, and physical monument would be stagnant, whereas this websites is being updated almost everyday and shows the graveness of the situations and functions as an archive.
Thank you for bringing up such interesting topic! Now I can see a new perspective on the digital commemoration. I have been contemplating a similar thing but only in a smaller scale such as using my instagram as a digital photo archive when I am running out of space in my smartphone. But using digitalization to commemorate events that mainly or only happened in the digital space is absolutely a genuine way of thinking! I was rather thinking about making a digital museum about cyber bullying that might be a good project to stop bullying within the digital space. I believe that it wont be wasteful to make an investment in such project.