UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

author traces in both the ―importance of a successful mediation in order to render its consumers a
valuable, ‗prosthetic‘ experience.‖ 339
Designed in similar vein there are several historical profiles, which effectively are hoaxes, but that
attempt at remediating and re-presencing a historical period, a country, an event... This is
particularly relevant for the former socialist countries that have gone through a regime change, but
less for the west, as unlike the entire socialist eastern bloc, no western regime has yet expired. For
instance, one can find a number of profiles dedicated to the former DDR president, Erich
Honecker, Ostalgie 340 and the DDR itself, which rarely have more than a few dozen followers. 341
Czechoslovakia, likewise, is not too exuberantly resurrected on Facebook; there are several
profiles which do not seem to attract large numbers of followers. The Soviet Union features on
Facebook with more than 100 profiles, but only a few with more than 1,000 followers.
Other countries once filed under the ‗Eastern Bloc‘ are even less present on Facebook, particularly
as compared to Yugoslavia which, for reasons evidently related to the characteristics of the
collapse of Yugoslavia—the wars and the dissolution of the country at the brink of the digital
era—seems to dominate the former Eastern Bloc-country-specific Facebook profiles. The search
term ‗Jugoslavija‘ yields more than 300 results in Facebook profiles. Much like in other postsocialist
historical profiles, Yugoslavia related profiles rarely exceed 1,000 members or followers.
One exception is the profile SFR Jugoslavija – SFR Yugoslavia with more than 118,000 people
who ‗liked‘ it in early June 2011, with the next in line reaching slightly above 4,000.
Now, whereas an ordinary ‗real‘ user usually has one profile, Yugoslavia has many. Apart from
the Facebook profiles that explicitly refer to Yugoslavia, even more (above 500) take as their main
point of reference/departure the name of Josip Broz Tito or Marshal Tito, perhaps the most
recognisable and most widely used icon of Yugoslav past online. 342 Thus one can find profiles
such as the above mentioned SFR Jugoslavija, Jugosloveni smo zauvijek [We, Yugoslavs, are
forever], Josip Broz Tito, etc.
339 Ibid., 60.
340 On Ostalgie see Daphne Berdhal, Daphne Berdahl, On the social life of postsocialism, Memory, consumption,
Germany, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2010.
341 Search term ―Deutsche Demokratische Republik,‖ http://www.facebook.com/pages/Deutsche-Demokratische-
Republik/147192811966943#!/search.php?q=deutsche%20demokratische%20republik
&init=quick&tas=0.5241627246387202, accessed 18 September 2011.
342 It should be noted that not all of these profiles are ‗commemorative profiles‘ as many use the name as an alias and
go about their digital sociability as usual, with no other references to this historical figure.
173