UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

conceptual framework supporting this study, and lastly, I give the research outline and explain the
methodological approach.
11
Technologising Media and Memory
In this section I discuss the historicity of memory and media in view of the fascination with
technology. For centuries media and memory have been closely interrelated and in fact essential
for functioning and maintenance of any collectivity. Their interplay, crucially and not surprisingly,
revolves around communication. As the past is irreparably lost to time as we ‗make progress
through time,‘ it is, with a view to an at least approximately coherent social edifice, quite ‗natural‘
to try and fix and stabilise knowledge of it in the present. John Urry argues that ―there is no past
out there, or rather back there. There is only the present, in the context of which the past is being
continually recreated.‖ 11 Thus, in the process of stabilising the knowledge of the past, this past
will fall prey to each new interpretative authority (ideology, government, profession) or
interpretative tool (material externalisations, text, audiovideo).
For several centuries writing and print offered a useful and exploitable technological
communications solution and to a great extent also facilitated the development of (historiography
as a) science as we know it today. At the same time, the modes of memory, remembering and,
even more radically, the technologies for keeping record have developed and changed as well.
Yet, unlike historiography, which is chiefly defended by the written word, memory ―has projected
itself into multiple media and formats over the last few centuries: as script, audio, images,
artefacts, sculpture, artwork and architecture.‖ 12 Thus, memory eluded the fixity of the written or
printed word.
Over the past 20 or so years it was the internet (deeply textual in algorithmic code, yet far more
fluid and ephemeral than text itself) which has been predominantly defining and structuring the
spaces and ways of creating, co-creating and distributing memory. Moreover, the rise of the
internet has importantly also affected the concepts of historicising, the procedures and protocols of
‗consigning of the past to history.‘ It has done so via undermining (and sometimes excessive
complementing) the institutionalised, state-sponsored, i.e. official interpretations of the past by
giving voice to alternative, personal, intimate accounts, visions and understandings of what was ...
or rather of what should have been.
11 John Urry, Consuming Places, London, New York, Routledge, 1995, 6.
12 Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading (eds.), ―Introduction,‖ Save As... Digital Memories,
Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 1–19, 8.