UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

celebrities or war victims (from WWII to the most recent military adventures), 327
and even
countries (although non-personal profiles are actively discouraged). These in turn get an afterlife,
make friends and attract followers. Let us consider Danah Boyd‘s argument for a moment:
The dominant networked publics have shifted from being topically organized to being
structured around personal networks. Most users [...] are hanging out online with people
that they already know. SNSes [social networking sites] are explicitly designed to be
about ―me and my friends‖ [meaning that] people are exposed to the things that their
friends choose to share. 328
This bears some important consequences for this study: if we see SNSes as being about ―me and
my friends‖ than it can be argued that in the case of ‗impersonal‘ historical profiles they can
nevertheless be viewed as essentially personal endeavours. As such they (usually) evade any
official, top-down ideologico-political imposition, but precisely through the ephemerality and
transience (which is so problematic for research) of content create an extremely ‗oral‘ (in terms of
immediacy and unofficiality) environment for the co-creation of renarrativisations of the Yugoslav
past. The profiles are all the more personal in the sense that the life of a profile is initiated and
managed by a ‗real‘ person (or more of them) and also that it is understood by the users in very
‗personal‘ terms. Hence, the renarrativisation and remembering Yugoslavia in such a particularly
on-the-fly manner might, due to the erroneous transience and intraceability, prove irrelevant. Yet,
the number of people engaged in ‗following‘ and ‗liking‘ the life of Yugoslavia in Facebook prove
that this is no marginal matter. To borrow a quote from Nagisa Oshima‘s Night and Fog in Japan:
Man 1: Forget about your theories and join hands with us.
Man 2: Theorising is not good for group cohesion. There are plenty of girls tonight.
Man 3: What‘s that got to do with Marxism? What has singing Russian or Swiss folk
songs got to do with revolution?
Man 2: You‘re always so direct.
Man 3: Last year during the street protests of ‘52 you called us fence-sitters. Now we‘re
too direct?
Man 1: Things have changed after the Korean war. We must discuss matters to resolve
them.
Man 3: I know, our policy changed. That‘s why we hold meetings.
Man 1: I hope this doesn‘t lead you away from the others. Singing together makes us feel
united. The revolution won‘t advance unless the student movement feels unity. 329
327 See Dieter de Bruyn, ―World War 2.0: Commemorating War and Holocaust in Poland through Facebook,‖ Digital
Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, 4 (2010): 45–62, also available at
http://www.digitalicons.org/issue04/dieter-de-bruyn/.
328 Danah Boyd, ―Can social networking sites enable political action,‖ in Allison Fine, Micah Sifry, Andrew Raseij
and Josh Levi (eds.), Rebooting America, New York, Creative Commons, 2008, 112–116, 115.
329 Nagisa Oshima, Night and Fog in Japan, Yume Pictures Ltd., 2008. 6:20–7:30.
168