UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

Nevertheless, many of these profiles increasingly figure as places for post-Yugoslavs to represence
topics spanning the country‘s past and the post-Yugoslav present(s). The profiles at that
also tend to feature as forums where one can ‗nostalgicise‘ while visiting massive amounts of
posted (links to) content (predominantly YouTube videos and news papers). Or, one can actively
engage in heated debates on the country‘s past, and, more importantly, its future. Among
numerous profiles dedicated to socialist countries, a conspicuous number openly calls for ‗reforming‘
or resurrecting, recreating this or that socialist country.
This is particularly relevant with regards to the ‗historical profiles‘ in the case of Yugoslavia
where ―the central architectural organisation of Facebook as a fluid hypertext of interconnected
profiles‖ 345 enables for a rapid diffusion and, in the next turn, also for the potential for establishing
contact between post-Yugoslavs based on a historical commonly shared historical and cultural
referential framework. Living in exile, at ‗home‘ or abroad, those who come to ‗like‘ or befriend
Yugoslavia historical profiles tend to have one thing in common: they continue to like the country
also in its afterlife and seem to a considerable extent ‗convinced‘ by the truthfulness of both the
profiles and the ‗commomoratee.‘
Memories are Made of ... Popular Culture
Departing from Boyd‘s observation on the cursory rather than more substantial interaction above,
it can be argued that the unofficiality of Facebook spaces, in all its ‗gossipy predisposition,‘
renders practices of remembering evermore informal, presupposing unfixed, face-to-face quotidian
communication, with all the works: linguistic inaccuracies, affective and emotional responses,
superficial commenting. All this, importantly, tends to (yet not always) remain much more
restrained as compared to outbursts of rage in YouTube. 346 Remembering and sharing-in someone
else‘s audiovisualised memory is, for instance, performed either through more ‗digitally engaged‘
emphatic commenting on a holiday photo (also using emoticons) or via less engaged actions such
345 Dieter de Bruyn, ―World War 2.0,‖ 47.
346 To go into much more detail regarding the distinction between YouTube and Facebook sociability would be out of
the scope of this writing. Suffice to say that communication in Facebook (between friends and stranger alike) seems
much more restrained and deliberate as compared to YouTube, to some extent because of the ‗status of acquaintance‘
(not entirely, as in the memorials such as those analysed here, absolute strangers meet as well) but predominantly
because in most cases, the users ‗perform‘ via their real names. In this respect, it has to be noted that the
communication on Facebook unravels on two levels: public (e.g. Wall posts) and private (e.g. emailing and instant
messaging) and that this study only looks at the public level.
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