UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

that was made during the era of socialism. And it is this which is largely the reason for continually
reinvigorated interest and sometimes obsession with things Yugoslav (as it will be seen in the
following Chapters), particularly the country‘s pop-cultural heritage, which remediates ‗old‘
imageries/imaginaries into ‗new.‘
Although substantial research has been made in the area of transformation of media ecologies in
the former socialist countries in terms of changes in media systems and culture, the field of
mediated memories of and remembering Yugoslavia in DME remains under-researched. 115
Interrogating these aspects this research relies on studies memory 116 and (new) media studies 117
and attempts to innovate the emerging field of ‗digital memory studies‘ by bringing into
discussion the relationship between the dynamics of post-socialist memory and digital
communications technologies. With regards to of post-socialist studies, an important aspect is
nostalgia: 118 various types of post-socialist nostalgias (e.g. Yugonostalgia and Titostalgia in the
former Yugoslavia; Ostalgie in the former DDR) prove to be a permanent and recurrent topic all
over former socialist countries, distinctly marking the political and cultural spheres and everyday
lives.
Building on the multimodal discourse analysis conducted via non-participant observation of
4MO, 119
i.e. the audiovisual and textual online ‗social conduct,‘ it provides a framework to
analyse multimodal media objects (including text, audio, video and image, as indicated above), i.e.
the individual externalisations of Yugoslav past. Additionally, it offers a tool to grasp individual
115 Maria Bakardjieva, ―Virtual Togetherness: An Everyday Life Perspective,‖ Media, Culture & Society 25(3), 2003,
291–313; Tanja Oblak and Breda Luthar (eds.), Mobilni telefon in transformacija vsakdana; Franc Trĉek (ed.),
Community-net in South and East Europe, Ljubljana, Centre for Spatial Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, 2003;
Orlin Spassov and Kristo Todorov (eds.), New media in Southeast Europe, Sofia, Southeast European Media Centre,
2003; see also Reana Senjković & Davor Dukić, ―Virtual Homeland? Reading Music on Offer on a Particular Web
Page,‖ International Journal of Cultural Studies 8(1), 44–62, 2005, 44–62; Ana Hofman, ―Sounding Yugoslavia:
Music and Nostalgic Practices on the Internet,‖ http://sites.google.com/site/musicandminorities/conferencepapers2,
2008.
116 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992, Jan Assmann,
―Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,‖ New German Critique 65, 1995, 125—133, Frederic C. Bartlett,
Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1932,
Andreas Huysen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, New York, Routledge, 1995.
117 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command, Henry Jenkins,
Convergence Culture, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation, Nick Couldry, ―Mediatization or
mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling,‖ New Media & Society, 10(3),
373—391, 2006, Knut Lundby (ed.), Digital Storytelling, Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization.
118 Mitja Velikonja, Titostalgia: A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz, Ljubljana, Mirovni inštitut, 2009; Tanja Petrović,
―The Territory of the Former Yugoslavia in the Mental Maps of Former Yugoslavs: Nostalgia for Space,‖ Sprawy
Narodowościowe, Seria Nova, 31, 2007; Zala Volĉiĉ, ―Yugo-nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former
Yugoslavia,‖ Critical Studies in Media Communication 24(1) March 2007, 21–38; Svetlana Boym, The Future of
Nostalgia, New York, Basic Books, 2001; Daphne Berdhal, On the Social Life in Postsocialism, Memory,
Consumption, Germany, 2010, Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (eds.), Post-communist Nostalgia, New York,
Oxford, Bergham Books, 2010.
119 Kay L. O‘Halloran, ―Multimodal Discourse Analysis,‖ in K. Hyland and B. Paltridge (eds.), Companion to
Discourse, London and New York, Continuum, in press 2011.
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