UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

certain location. Beyond that point, however, the (narrative) space created by a user is freed from
any constraints of physical space apart from that of the visitor and her ability to connect. Thus,
such memorial may potentially be present anywhere and anytime. It provides a locus where
visitors‘ paths may intersect, where people meet and interact. In such spatially and temporally
unbound connectivity they can jointly participate in the process of remembering. And it is such
interactions that posit digital memorials as perpetually changing cyberplaces of memory.
With regard to Yugoslavia this seems particularly interesting: the ‗fragmentation‘ of the country in
territorial sense is now reflected in further fragmentation of remembering online: the many
websites, blogs, and other digitally mediated content necessarily facilitate mutually ignorant,
experientially not shared, processes of remembering. And as much as they may facilitate ‗virtual
re-territorialisation,‘ i.e. gathering people in a specific cyberplace of memory, they may just as
well lead to parallel digital afterlives, hindering commonality of remembering outside a particular
group, which in many cases is not a territorially or nationally defined. 105
An offline memorial requires physical presence of people at a commemorating event in order to
exercise the collective re-inscription of shared memory; television allows for displaced, yet
relatively nationally bound and (only to a certain extent, particularly with the cable and ondemand
TV) still synchronous, ‗participation‘ of the masses at an event. Digital memorials
provide an opportunity for deterritorialised and detemporalised participation and interaction
beyond the geo-locality of an offline monument/memorial or the user. Such practice of
remembering positions the viewer in front of the screen within a collectivity with which one can
interact, be detached from it physically and at the same time individually participate (actively or
passively) in a collective commemoration.
And what is crucial in this respect is that digital memory, memorials and storytelling seem to be
even more infused by both socio-political and intimately personal eventualities/happenings in the
present post-Yugoslav realities.
105 See for instance Cyber Yugoslavia at the Internet Archive,
http://web.archive.org/web/20000229143641/http://www.juga.com/. The site was available at www.juga.com in late
1999, but has apparently been shut down; today it displays the words: ―It works!,‖ accessed 31 August 2011.
40