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The relation between on- and offline memorials needs some further explanation: along the
potential of participation, digital memorials differ significantly from offline ‗hardcopy‘ memorials
and monuments in the convergence of the media and in the strategies of mediation of memory. In
digital memorials (particularly the vernacular video memorials) the video, sound, image and text
are converged to create a digital media narrative. An offline memorial, for instance a statue or a
cenotaph, features inscriptions, a photo, a candle etc., while in digital memorials the channels of
mediation/mediatisation are converged into unimediality to create a 4MO. This schematic
distinction will necessarily fall when we consider many offline memorials that feature other
strategies of mediation/mediatisation, successfully employing video, sound etc. Yet, it is in digital
memorials that new temporalities and territorialities can come to their full: via mobile devices, a
memorial can be ‗visited‘ any time from any (connected) place, a trace of the visit can be visibly
left in the comment (or a lit pixel) and the act of commemoration can further be enhanced by
sharing-in the ‗digital contemporaneity‘ of experience. Additionally, the affect may further be
enhanced by fusing the location of viewing (where I am connecting from) with the location of
memorial.
What makes the digital memorials—and particularly the vernacular ones—significantly different
is their emplacement or embeddedness into the coordinates of public space and the potential for
social action this generates. What is crucial here is the detemporalisation and deterritorialisation
(or the new temporality/territoriality) of such memorials, i.e. the characteristic of them potentially
being present/accessible/changeable/archivable in many spaces at many different times (or
simultaneously). This became one of the main characteristics of the DME after the ―connectivity
turn,‖ which implies a shift in conceptualising social collectivity, propelled by digital technologyenabled
connectivity. 255 With this in mind it can be said that public remembering in digital media
ecology can in a way be seen even more as a ‗living matter‘: the externalisation of memory and
hence remembering in and through digital memorials is becoming a process ever more ongoing,
debated, contested, renarrated and recontextualised.
And what is important in this respect, as compared to material/offline memorials, ‗digital memory‘
seems to be even more infused by both socio-political and intimately personal
eventualities/happenings in the present; in a way we could speak of enhanced immediacy of
remembering—the events and the commemorative acts are brought closer to the user/on-the-fly
commemorating community. In view of the enhanced immediacy, the commemorated event—
through the technological tools and corresponding practices—entangles the user into an affective
255 On connectivity, see Chapter 1.
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