UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

Figure 17 | A screen shot of CY webpage, preserved in the Internet Archive, www.archive.org.
The difference in these instances to offline commemorative places, monuments and memorials is
in that digital memorials, precisely via their detemporalisation and deterritorialisation, provide for
a deterritorialised and detemporalised participation in a commemorating community. Or, to turn
this perspective around, digital commemoration enables a somewhat revised temporality and
territoriality to emerge: even more so than in the mass media era (print, TV, radio) where the
community could identify with a specific topicality and/or materiality (news, commemoration)
still in territorial terms, the sense of belonging in the DME is redefined through the perspective of
individual‘s participation in the process. Or, in the mediatised event, which in terms of web
publication can be seen as the ―most condensed and semantically wealthy unit of time.‖ 248 The
pervasive fascination and determinant of online temporality, the ‗real time‘ of publication and
experience/consumption, as Lisa Gitelman argues, is an act ―unlabored, immediately lived and
immediately real [...] more of an effect, then, an experience of data ‗on the fly,‘ than it is the literal
copresence or cotemporality of users and events.‖ 249 Yet, the anticipation of co-presence and cotemporality
is, apart from the on-the-fly-ness, an important aspect of online (commemorative)
participation.
Following Frank Kessler and Mirko Tobias Schäfer, participation can be seen as explicit—
uploading, commenting, flagging, tagging; and implicit—random, accidental click, unintentional
cybertracing that feel into the database. 250 In the case of YouTube they argue that ―every
interaction with the YouTube site leads to a trace in the system and becomes a record relevant to
the statistics that can be read at the surface as an indicator for ‗popularity.‘‖ 251
As liberating as this (ideally) may seem, such vernacular, private, individual initiatives may in fact
sap the traditional national edifices, which despite the globalising structural trends still exert
significant influence over the everyday. It is not my intention here to argue that the internet or
globalisation (should) necessarily lead to withering away of the national. On the contrary, it is
fairly obvious that the globalising trends and the new communications technologies importantly
248 Mary Ann Doane, quoted in Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, 138.
249 Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, 2009, 138.
250 Frank Kessler and Mirko Tobias Schäfer, ―Navigating YouTube: Constituting a Hybrid Information Management
System,‖ in Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader, 275–291, 285.
251 Frank Kessler and Mirko Tobias Schäfer, ―Navigating YouTube: Constituting a Hybrid Information Management
System,‖ in Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vanderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader, 275-291, 285.
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