UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

publicly shared videos and music, forum debates and comments, numerous blog entries, party
photos, etc once gone public lose their status of private property and are ‗out there‘ freely to be recontextualised,
reinterpreted.
Thus in a way, rather than disappearance of the private, we are witnessing the colonisation of the
public by the private. Truth be told, the private is also changing, but hardly shrinking (albeit it is
heavily controlled, trackable and securitised). Slavoj Ţiţek‘s claim in is agreeable: ―It is often said
that privacy is disappearing. But the reality is inverted: it is the public space which is
disappearing, and its dignity. In everyday life we often find ourselves in situations where the only
correct conduct is not to say everything.‖ 65 This also has consequences for the practice and study
of memory in the DME. The co-created memories are subject to twofold ‗distortion‘: first, in line
with the classic McLuhanian ―the medium is the message‖ postulate it is the medium that
determines (or screens off, see the discussion on the acousmatic above) what and predominantly
how can be created and shared; second, the redefinition of private/public relationship drives users
to actively engage in selection and in-formation of the content they produce, doing so infrequently
imposing severe self-censorship measures. 66
In the process of selecting, editing and publishing stuff online, there are technologically supported
protocols in operation that bring together the user and the ‗visitor,‘ the past and the present, and
importantly define the way DME is shaped by the progressive ‗intrusion‘ of mediated images.
These, in an audiovisually dominated culture are the key vessels for communicating a wide variety
of different types of content.
Mediated Memories
A concept that adequately subsumes the variegated individual and collective, private and public
actions is one proposed by Jose van Dijck, mediated memories. She sees mediated memories as
―magnifiers of the intersections between personal and collective, past and future [that] involve
individuals carving out their places in history, defining personal remembrance in the face of larger
65 Slavoj Ţiţek, ―Lepi maniri u doba WikiLeaksa, Sramota me, dakle postojim,‖ www.e-novine.com/stav/43964-
Sramota-dakle-postojim.html, accessed 1 February 2011.
66 The concept of private is a relatively new invention (intensely correlated with establishment of print culture) and the
digital technologies might facilitate a process of blurring the boundaries between the public and private, not unlike the
situation in pre-print cultures where much of an individual‘s private life unravelled in a public, if relatively small,
space of face-to-face community. What is more, privacy as we tend to think of it today, is deeply related to the
emergence of writing and print (and electronic and digital media later on) and the related radical reshaping of oralitybased
systems of communication. Privacy in oral culture would mean putting out a fire in the hearth, i.e. shutting
down any social contact, whereas in the DME one can eliminate all physical social contact and still remain
‗connected.‘
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