UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

narrativisations, sampling, remixing and remeshing, or remediating existing media forms, genres
and content, while also to new, born digital renditions of a certain historical person or event, time
and/or place. This includes various digitised collections and databases, digital museums,
memorials and monuments, numerous websites and blogs, video and music used in inventive
ways, the mani-forms of e-literature, etc. If, dangerously generalisingly speaking, the ‗old‘
channels of distributing historical knowledge were ideologically centralised and censored and
restricted to a few only, the ‗new‘ digital media facilitate a different ecology: one of more
decentralised, de-hierarchised, dispersed, fragmented sources and interpreters of knowledge, one
of and tools for knowledge production available (ideally) to many. Hence, in DME the ideology
subscribed to is to become one‘s own, and so are the ‗technological means of content production.‘
Grasping Digital Memory: Concepts and Theory
The interrogation of memory in the ‗age of digital reproduction‘ of audiovisuals (including any
combination of sound, image and video and text) 63
necessarily runs the risk of conceptual
conflation and walking the techno-utopian/dystopian razorblade. In order to avoid this, a more
detailed clarification is needed of several concepts I use in dealing with vernacular ‗digital
memory‘ or remembering in DME. This will also serve to devise a theoretical and conceptual
research framework of the study.
Any research of the past, and—because of its ambiguous redefinition of the private/public and
official/unofficial distinctions—all the more so in DME, necessarily comes across issues of
historiographical or lay appropriation, reinterpretation and renarration of the past. Moreover, any
dealing with (representations of) the past in DME has to take into account, perhaps more than ever
before, the processes of creating, co-creating, sharing and responding to ‗digital memories,‘ which
seem to be contributing greatly to ‗enhanced immediacy of remembering.‘ 64 The ‗lives‘ of (quite
likely very private) memories in DME significantly shape and redefine the public spaces and at the
same time, as they are made ‗inhabitants‘ of DME, become in a way public property; for instance
63 On audiovisuality see Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions, Cinema and Television as entr‘actes in history,
Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 1999 [1989]. In Audiovisions (14) Zielinski says that ―Audiovision has
become an amalgam of many media communication forms that used to be separate.‖ With this in mind, an observation
is in order: cinema, television, video, music, radio do not need text to be transmitted. Yet with the internet text
regained importance, but in exchange became just as ephemeral as audiovisuals.
64 On enhanced immediacy of remembering see Chapter 3, see also Paul Virilo, Open Sky, London, Verso, 1997, 24.
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