UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

initial way for the past to ‗survive‘ was via nostalgicising it. It is probably also for this reason that
music blogs find sufficient audience who find interest in these ‗activists‘ striving to preserve what
would normally be preserved both in official records/institutions and in the media everyday. The
post-Yugoslavs‘ conduct in relation to their past is thus primarily a search for a lost stability in
individual memory narratives. These blogs attract an audience from across the former Yugoslavia
yet judging by the ―who‘s among us‖ feature on Jugozvuk (its counter turned over 600,000 visitors
in good two years of the blog‘s existence; at the time of writing the number is 751,597) the just as
many visitors come from the rest of Europe and North America, with some form South America
and Australia.
On music blogs (multimodal media objects) the bits, beats and pieces of Yugoslav past are
preserved and distributed globally; music blogging as a practice of vernacular history contributes
significantly to creating a worldwide archive of Yugoslav popular music, i.e. via music blogging,
Yugoslav popular music becomes a mediator of memories. What is more, as further explicated
below, the mediality of digitised music becomes an opportunity to express personal (blogger‘s or
commentators) views about the music and other social and cultural issues concerning the role and
meaning of the past, present and future in contemporary identity management in DME. Moreover,
music in DME is not ‗just‘ music (if music ever is ‗just‘ music) but a powerful tool to co-create
and convey if but a fraction of a shattered past. The grass-roots practice of ‗digital preservation of
heritage‘ is a tool of mediation of memories; the facets of everyday life as mediated through music
are renarrated/remediated on music blogs and thus ‗transmitted‘ beyond the limitations and
obscurisation regularly attempted in the first two decades after the break-up of the country.
In the section below I discuss several blogs that aim to preserve and distribute parts of Yugoslav
popular music heritage, i.e. blogs that in their distinct personalised ways mediate memories: both
of the blogger and consequently of the visitor by facilitating the mobility of media objects. In
these processes aspects of nostalgia, either first or second-hand, are imminent. This distinction is
often conceived along the lines of ‗we were there‘ vs. ‗you weren‘t and ain‘t got a clue.‘ The blogs
in many cases assume such stance but rarely use it as a tool for any kind of exclusion. On the
contrary, second-hand nostalgia is often attributed to practices that supposedly lack ‗real‘ memory
or experience with the matter of nostalgia. And are thus rendered false. However, nostalgia in a
mediated age is not only limited to first-hand experience, but is, due to condensed presence of
mediated content, applicable beyond the in-the-know collectivities.
The blogs discussed generally feature not only music but also ‗personal musings‘—which further
adds to ‗mani-hand‘ nostalgia—and to that effect employ multimodal media objectification
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