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(potential) action are being built. Now, to refer again to Michel Chion and the discussion in the
―Popular Music: Heritage and Memory‖ of Chapter 2, what in the practice of listening to the
music is done internally, mentally, is (not only) in the digital memorial videos taken a bit further:
typically a three-minute number (as long as the typical single record song) used in making a
digital memorial involves adding and editing of images to the sound, rhythm, words of the song,
for real. Not just in your head. Thus, apart from mere entertainment, nostalgia or pure subversion
and private-made-public dealing with one‘s past, 316 the past online becomes, through remediation,
an important factor in externalising and vocalising individual mediated memories.
In the case of Yugoslavia where after the break-up of the country the past was (is) subject to
thorough revision, if not annihilation, this is all the more relevant. With the newly established
countries ‗producing‘ their separate national histories, the ‗shared,‘ ‗Yugoslav,‘ ‗socialist,‘
‗communist‘ past finds little space in grand national narratives. Or, at best, as alluded above, this
is predominantly to create a symbolic distance on which the new democratic transition is based.
Online interventions such as the videos discussed above certainly question the very idea of the
(new) national in the digital (post-socialist) age, and also propose a sort of undermining of
nationalist narrativisations of history, by creating and voicing particular, singular, individual
stories. The nationalistic escapades on the other hand clearly demonstrate the rising reappraisal of
territoriality (reterritorialisation) and nationalism (renationalisation) in post-Yugoslavia, and
contemporary Europe as well, which is to a great extent also the result of increasing insecurity
emerging in contemporary world. The following exchange in the dugmicMala ―Jugoslavija‖ 4MO
nicely illustrates the bitter reality of post-socialist displacement and even despair:
what are you fuckers drying over yuga and none of you is living in ex yuga. this bane and
yugoslavija1945 are really funny.Are you not ashamed???Posting here but living in
germany.I live with my own [parents] because I don‘t have the money to live on my own
with 350 euros.Talking about the frontlines LOL what frontline is that you went to
stealing home appliances.Where do you get the money to go to germany you stinking
cunt. And not just you but everyone from ex yuga who are full of shit like you are traitors.
gremlinBG
@gremlinBG,
look now, I came to Germany in 2006, do you think it‘s easy to live abroad without your
own people, in a land where you‘re a stranger although you speak the language. I was
forced to go because of the shortage, to work and study as my parents were not able to
support me financially, and I couldn‘t find work there. I‘m here all by myself, and I miss
316 Not to overrate the exposure on the private in public digital spaces, one should have in mind Nick Couldry (2008),
who notes: ―Young people are holding back personal material that might in theory gave gone into their MySpace or
Facebook site. This problematises any idea that social networking sites represent simply the mediatisation (and
publicisation) of formerly private self-narratives. [W]e might argue young people, by holding back personal narratives
from such sites are protecting an older private/public boundary, rather than tolerating a shift in that boundary because
of the significant social pressures to have an online presence.‖
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