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social bonds among 22 million people were attributed a status of ‗historical unfitness.‘ 436 In such
an ideological constellation personal memories were displaced from the wider socio-culturopolitical
narratives. Important, often formative episodes of individual histories related to
childhood, education, serving the army, friends and family, were no longer the legitimate stuff of
memory. From an individual perspective, this is, in fact, an utterly unbearable situation.
The least illogical response action then is to try and reassemble the shards of personal pasts. The
internet, itself a deterritorialising media, provided a useful tool for reinvigoration of the Yurchak
style deterritorialisation: a bottom-up, vernacular take on popular uses of technology served the
role of the voice-disseminator of opposing, un-official, alternative, subversive renarrations and
remediations of the past. Representing media archaeological ‗excavations‘ and re-presencing the
past in nostalgic terms features as a strategy to make sense of the present and of the past. It is
indeed a vehicle of the quest for normalcy.
***
What, finally, are the implications for memory and remembering online? What is the role the
technology plays in changing practices of remembering? And what use users make of the
technology in their interventions? As I have argued throughout this thesis, the technology and the
related changes in conceptualisation of connectivity, the individual and collectivity, and the
incessant redefinitions of space and time show that memory cannot be associated exclusively to
territorial/material traces of the past. Instead, in response to ever swifter ‗consignment to the past‘
of ‗everything,‘ practices of memory and remembering seem to be becoming ever more
immediate: much of the mediated life is always already past, yet via mediated memories always
readily available for endless consumption. This in turn fosters (at least ideally) greater access and
participation (residing on ‗digital empathy‘), 437 admittedly heavily relying on click-engagement.
Remembering practices thus seem to be becoming more flexible and adjustable to contemporary
needs of a remembering individual or collectivity, yet at the same time far more ‗vulnerable‘ to
random whimsical interventions. This, however, is not an assessment of quality or accuracy of
remembering in respect to historical facts: of how and what is represented. For better or worse, the
quality may have very well degraded, but this is not really the point. Especially if we take into
consideration that remembering in the history of humankind has never been any more accurate.
436 See the discussion of Yugoslav Army soldiers‘ memories, Tanja Petrović, ―Nostalgia for the JNA? Remembering
the Army in the former Yugoslavia,‖ in Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (eds.), Post-communist nostalgia, 61–81.
437 See Chapter 3.
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