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commemorative act, crucially (co-)determined by the ―continuous present tense of Web
publication [...] imbued with the cultural logic of timelessness [which aids to] make a new
medium authoritative in a sense by co-opting cultural authority, by entwining the new means and
existing subjects of public memory.‖ 256 Still, to curb the somewhat enthusiastic tone of the
enhanced immediacy of remembering it is necessary first to remind the reader of all the previous
(understandably unfulfilled) promises by the technological in(ter)ventions: to bring the
communication closer. And second, to relate it to Paul Virilio‘s concept of ‗residual abundance‘;
Andrew Hoskins argues that it is not just that ―the infinite scale of the Internet and digital archives
tests the parameters of human imagination, but it is their availability in the here-and-now that is
both exhilarating and overwhelming.‖ 257
Regarding the ‗ways and places of circulation,‘ it seems adequate enough to understand the videos
commemorating the former Yugoslavia posted on YouTube largely as cases of private initiative,
grass-roots, vernacular endeavours, which, importantly, often ‗fail to reproduce‘ the official or
revisionist renarrativisations of the post-WWII history in post-1991 socio-political environments.
Rather, they counter them.
The content on the internet as a remediating medium is to some extent bereft of the materiality of
offline representations of the past and instead merges four basic discursive elements, text, sound,
image and video into cyberplaces of memory. When a digital memorial is put up on the internet, it
physically only requires a server located at certain geographical position, and it only may come to
life if accessed from a physical location. Beyond that point, however, the (narrative) space created
by a user is freed from any constraints of physical space apart from that of the visitor and her
ability to connect. Thus, such artefact may potentially be present anywhere/time and provide a
locus where visitors‘ paths may intersect, where people meet and interact. In such spatially and
temporally unbound connectivity they can jointly participate in the process of remembering. And
it is such interactions that make the audiovisual and textual artefacts the ‗living‘/changing
cyberplaces of memory.
The very private and often intimate raison d‘être of a YouTube digital memorial is essentially in
opposition to much offline, material, architectural constructions dedicated to
remember/commemorate the dead, as they intervene in a public sphere with a most private agenda
which may or may not appeal to or attract other users into the community of mourning. Despite its
256 Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, 145, 141.
257 Andrew Hoskins, ―Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn,‖ Parallax, forthcoming
2011.
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