UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

accounts (as poor as they are). However, in the DME it is the audiovisuals that gain an important
role in co-creating and co-narrating the story. Thus, via media archaeology conducted by digital
enthusiasts, users are in many vita memorials presented with a large selection of audiovisual
material. In a pop-cultural historical manner the past and the present are much more eloquently
depicted and, importantly, lent to further interpretation.
In line with the ‗enhanced immediacy of remembering‘ of the past, memory and remembering as
mediated and mediatised in DME:
[b]ecome[s] increasingly insinuated by the rapid spread of digital networks and a
potentially continuous connectivity. This includes social networking sites, which host a
continuous, accumulating, dormant memory, with the ongoing and often unseen potential
to transform past relations through the re-activation of latent and semi-latent
connections. 405
In line with what I have argued in this Chapter, this leads to a conclusion, which is really another
question: as seen in many Facebook digital memorials dedicated to the former Yugoslavia, the
potential of DME and its enabling technologies to democratise public spaces of remembering can
hardly be seen happening. True, many different views can be voiced and also heard, but can they
really be translated into offline action? Are they ‗mere‘ action-hindering nostalgia? Has the talk of
new Yugoslavia, as a potential socio-cultural and even political alternative, got enough
mobilisation potential, as compared to flourishing nationalist/racist online initiatives which seem
to resonate quite prominently offline? Or, to draw an analogy with Edison‘s intended use of the
gramophone, is the potential of digital media technologies to contribute/shape a knowledge space
indeed a course that the development should take? Is it reasonable and not naive to expect that the
technology in the state as it is today and in the world as it is today will ‗naturally‘ become a tool of
revolutionary global order toppling, a tool for promoting peace and convivenza? From what
history has taught us (or has it?), communications technologies may be used to propel political
opposition or projects that strive to better the world etc. But, as I discuss in the last chapter, this is
not enough.
405 Andrew Hoskins, ―Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn,‖ Parallax, forthcoming
2011.
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