Networked Collective Memory

Networked Collective Memory A media-archeological approach towards digital collective memory Networked Collective Memory A media-archeological approach towards digital collective memory Patty Jansen Student number: 10219455 [email protected] [email protected] RMA Thesis Arts and Culture: Artistic Research Supervisor: dr. J.H. Hoogstad Second Reader: dr. J. Boomgaard Universiteit van Amsterdam Index 0.0 Introduction...........................................................................................................................4 1.0 Mediating Memory............................................................................................................... 7 Collective Memory ................................................................................................................................7 Official, Vernacular and Public Memory................................................................................................ 9 Portraits of Grief and Resilience............................................................................................................. 9 The Role of the User in Collective Memory.........................................................................................13 2.0 Network Memory................................................................................................................14 Timeless Time....................................................................................................................................... 14 Beyond News Paradigms and Network Diagrams................................................................................ 15 Wolfgang Ernst's Processual Memory...................................................................................................18 3.0 Networked Collective Memory...........................................................................................20 The Deleted Collective Memory...........................................................................................................20 The Retrievable Collective Memory.....................................................................................................24 The Real-Time Collective Memory ..................................................................................................... 28 The Open Collective Memory ..............................................................................................................34 The Augmented Collective Memory ....................................................................................................38 The Updated Collective Memory .........................................................................................................41 The Animated Collective Memory .......................................................................................................45 4.0 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................... 51 5.0 Bibliography........................................................................................................................55 Literature............................................................................................................................................... 55 Websources............................................................................................................................................56 Image sources........................................................................................................................................57 0.0 Introduction The past has become remarkably adjustable. The digital medium enables individuals to edit our past and present for the future to come. Collective memories are open to entire communities and their form has become as fluid and in flux as their traditional concept inherently is. Recent research has focussed on studying digital memory behavior such as digital memorials, digital memory archives, social media memorialization and the complexity of collective memories open to interaction.1 In my previous artistic research, which resulted in the practical work The Private, The Public and The Nation (2012), I focused on the underlying media and political tactics concerning the depiction of death in the news and how this works into our collective memory of these events. Continuing my research, I concentrated on the development of these images into national symbols as for example the symbolic use of the Twin Towers in mass media. It was already back then, I traced the complex structures of collective memory as presented to us in the digital medium. Whereas in my earlier work, I approached events as presented for us by the media, the presentation of events as they appear on the web seem to be more ambiguous, due to the open source nature of the digital medium. Collective memory first was mostly in hands of those with the power to collect, represent and shape these memories; official institutions such as museums and other cultural institutions, where the digital medium allows for multiple voices to shape the same collective memory into versions of this memory. Memory and commemoration, official and vernacular memory now co-exist in the same medium. How do these developments influence the way we perceive and experience collective memory? Collective memory is an abstract and complex concept. Many academics draw back on French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) as a point of reference for the theory of collective memory. In 1925, Halbwachs wrote Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire where he introduced collective memory as a social or cultural phenomenon, later also described as cultural memory. The concept has been developed throughout time, since historians depart from Halbwach's theory but shortly after draw back from his theory because Halbwachs asserts that individual memory is entirely socially determined.2 Most academics are convinced that there is a notion of individual agency in collective memory. Cultural theorist Jan Assmann (1938) further develops the notion of cultural memory as a distinction from Halbwachs theory of collective memory, which Assmann describes as 'communicative memory'. Cultural memory is a form of collective memory which is mediated and shared by a number of people, conveying to these people a collective identity, where Halbwachs concept of collective memory is not concerned with mediation through traditions, institutions and archives but lives in everyday interaction and communication about the past.3 It becomes a 1 Andrew Hoskins, The Diffusion of Media/Memory: the new complexity, text cited from: Warwick Books <http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/warwickbooks/complexity/andrew_hoskins/> (31 May 2015). 2 Wulf Kansteiner, 'Finding Meaning in Memory, A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies', in: History and Theory, Vol. 41, No. 2, p. 181. 3 Jan Assmann, 'Communicative and Cultural Memory', in: Cultural Memory Studies, Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (ed), Berlin 2008, p. 110 – 111. 4 collective memory in the terms of my research when this memory, paraphrasing Wolf Kansteiner, exists in the world and not only in the mind of a person, sharing a certain meaning about the past which is part of the life-worlds of individuals who join and want to join this certain collective.4 I hereby choose to follow Assmann's definition of cultural memory as a form of collective memory. The earlier addressed 'collective' individual agency is a key aspect to contemporary collective memory since the digital medium has become an important factor in the shaping of this collective memory. It allows users to actively and simultaneously produce and reproduce their and other versions of a collective past. A generative multi-memory, in which the browser is used as a collective memory-tool, providing the possibility to react and upload real-time. We can write our past for the future to come from our homes, in our chairs, at our desks. There are no longer constraints for everyday users to upload and delete whatever it is what they want to say, show or react to. Web dynamics do not have the same power dynamics and hierarchy physical collective memory places do tend to have. However, once uploaded, these shared contributions are delivered to the unpredictable laws of the digital medium. Digital time, in comparison to static time as presented by historical writing, is an inherent temporal and fluid concept. There is the possibility to publish immediately and what is uploaded can be altered minutes later, sometimes lost forever. Memory, also a fluid concept, is constructed in another dynamic fluid concept, where it changes while being produced and reproduced. The appearance of our collective memory has become, due to the digital medium, a progressive state in flux. As a theoretical point of departure, I consider the archive-oriented media archeology of media theorist Wolfgang Ernst (1952) to be relevant to my research. Drawing from German media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011) and French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Ernst's object oriented approach concentrates on the underlying processes that are unique to the digital medium itself and how these processes are influencing the way memory is archived. According to Ernst, the digital medium has come to generate meaning, as the archive does in Foucauldian sense - a dynamic agency; archive and memory have become metaphorical terms.5 In the digital medium they are in fact transfer processes

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