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cultural frameworks.‖ 67 Moreover, apart from carving out places in history, the individuals are, via
mediated memories more or less actively engaged in carving out their places and roles in their
highly mediated presents. Thus an individual co-creator of memory is involved in contributing to
the collectively consumed and produced (prosumed) visions of the past that go well beyond the
limits of (national) historiography, and quite often against it.
The concept of mediated memories, as developed by Van Dijck, is related to Jan Assmann‘s
theoretical distinction between cultural and communicative memory, 68
29
whereas the former is
understood here as a more latent, storage memory, and the latter as memory as a process under
constant negotiation. Crucially, it can be seen as a ―tool for analysis of dynamic, continuously
changing memory artefacts and items of mediated culture.‖ 69
Memory artefacts are, essentially, compounds of ―many autonomous objects [which can] be used
in many different contexts and combinations, and undergo various transformations.‖ 70 In DME,
the representations of the past via media objects are necessarily distributed/fragmented between
various digital media (or genres). At the same time the content thus co-created is in itself often
fragmented, both in terms of what it has to say and how it says it. Yet, this is not necessarily a bad
thing. The mediation of digital representations (endowing these objects with the status of
mediality) 71
results in bringing together various types and modes of representation, various
utilisations of different available digital media and, not least, people. This essentially results in
multimodal mediation of memories which not only influences how the memories are mediatised,
but also how they are represented, shared, distributed, interlinked, etc. More to the point, as
Andrew Hoskins argues, ―contemporary memory is not principally constituted either through
retrieval or through the representation of some content of the past in the present, but, rather, it is
embedded in and distributed through our sociotechnical practices.‖ 72
In DME, the questions of distribution of memory and mediation refer to certain aspects concerning
the interplay of technology and (memory) cultures that were not deemed important or relevant in
previous dealing with media and memory. Now, if the short 20th century coincides with the
beginning of the Great War and the collapse of socialism, it also coincides with the rise and reign
67 Jose van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007, 25.
68 Jan Assmann, ―Communicative and Cultural Memory,‖ in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning (eds.), Cultural Memory
Studies, 109–118, 116–7.
69 Jose van Dijck, Mediated Memories, 24.
70 Marie-Laure Ryan, ―Multivariant Narratives,‖ 2004.
71 See discussion on ―Representation and Mediality‖ below.
72 Andrew Hoskins, ―Digital Network Memory,‖ in Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (eds.), Mediation, Remediation, and
the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2009, 91–106, 91. Hoskins continues: ―The use of websites
and services such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter allow users to continually display and to shape biographical
information, post commentaries on their unfolding lives and to interact publicly or semi-publicly with one another.‖