UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

(cultural reference). Today, in a time of dominant ―sense of lost unity and disappeared community
[and the] disaffection with democratic pluralism and market economy,‖ 422 it seems radically
absent. And it seems that many online endeavours are essentially tracing that lost historicity.
One of the key characteristics of online memorial practices is the vernacular character and
individual initiative in delimiting both the scope (themes and topics) and the tone of
remembering/commemorating in DME. Above all, and despite the co-creative qualities of
externalising memories and remembering, the practice of remembering online is singular,
individual, fragmented. As opposed to the universalising tendencies of historiography and political
and ideological interpretations, online remembering is singular in that an interpretation is cocreated
in an on-the-fly community of which ‗I‘ (or any other individual, or another on-the-fly
collectivity for that matter; remember the commentators discussed above taking no notice of each
other) may have no experiential knowledge: ―If the bits can mean something to someone they can
only do so if experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the
storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate
information.‖ 423
What nevertheless makes remembering in DME impactive in broader, societal terms, is the cocreative
aspect of ‗produsing‘ memories/memorial narratives and kernels around which a
renarrativisation or reinterpretation of the past can unravel. For it is the ―[p]articular voices [that]
can, nevertheless, be crucial in understanding the dynamic between collective memories and
everyday life, in illuminating the ways the past is read through the lens of the present.‖ 424 Despite
the singularity, the co-creative aspects of reading the past, collecting, editing and publishing
(digital or digitised) re-interpretations/re-narrativisations into cyberplaces of memory, nevertheless
feature prominently in substantiating, if only relatively insular on-the-fly collectivities.
Now to extract the basic characteristics defining the memory practices and politics in the analysed
cases, it has to be noted that these vernacular attempts at remediating the past are essentially
archiving practices that can be defined as nostalgic practices. And it is also in this view—making
public the results of intimate archival work—that the singularity of endeavours is transcended or
at least mitigated, i.e. translated into broader/more universal perspective. In the variegated ways
that remembering and re-presencing of the Yugoslav past are developed by particular users, it is
archive and nostalgia that feature as the founding elements used in digital memories, memorials
422 Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-communist Europe,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998, 14.
423 Jaron Lanier, You are not a gadget. A manifesto, London, Penguin Group, 2011, 29.
424 Oto Luthar, ―FORGETTING DOES (NOT) HURT.‖
219