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private function these memorials doubtlessly have a public status; they indeed are on an overt
mission to not only address a mourning community but to create one. This is enabled by
technological functionalities such as posting videos, creating channels, making friends, posting
video-responses and textual comments.
As argued above, digital memorials—official and vernacular—are marked by media convergence
renarrativisation and remediation. At the same time, different or modified techniques and
strategies of establishing, maintaining and promulgating such representations are being developed.
In light of remediation and media convergence, this significantly affects the conceptions of space,
time, memory and remembering, representations of the past, identity, individuality-collectivity,
and the closely related sense of belonging, credibility, immersion, interactivity, and participation
in DME.
On the other hand, an offline memorial requires physical presence of people at a commemorating
event in order to exercise the collective re/inscription of shared memory; television allows for
displaced, yet nationally bound and (to a certain extent) still synchronous, ‗participation‘ of the
masses at an event decidedly marked by liveness. 258 In DME an opportunity arises for
deterritorialised and detemporalised participation and interaction beyond the geo-locality of a
monument/memorial. The practice of remembering thus enabled positions the viewer in front of
the screen in a collectivity with which one can interact, be detached from it physically and at the
same time individually participate in a collective commemoration on-the-fly. Cyberplaces of
memory thus provide a collective/shared space for a person to immerse in, while at the same time
retain/reinstate/express his/her individuality/identity, i.e. a very personal reinterpretation of
history. But, does it really and if so to what effect? In the next section I investigate several cases of
digital (video) memorials where the Yugoslav past, the wars and the possible future(s) are digitally
remediated in forms of vernacular externalisations of memory.
Some cases in vernacular digital memorials
In terms of rough, unofficial, individual, bottom-up and hence far more numerous vernacular
externalisations, YouTube offers numerous interesting cases that would qualify, due to its content
258 On liveness see for instance Lisa Gitelman‘s discussion on in the chapter ―New Media ‖ in her Always
Already New; see also Phillip Auslander, Liveness, New York, Routledge, 2008.
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