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storytelling, memories and memorials related or dedicated to Yugoslavia intertwine to create not
only a place for remembering, but primarily a space for people to participate in a joint process of
co-creative remembering. The internet, I argue, technologically and symbolically adds to the
establishment, maintenance and development of the changing practices and protocols of
consigning to and retrieving stuff from memory.
The starting hypotheses are that the internet (i.e. the internet enabled media, such as blogs,
websites, YouTube, social networking sites, etc.) in relation to the processes of memory and
remembering is:
1) Decisively influencing the processes of appropriation of the past and, more importantly,
the processes of co-creation of digital places of remembering.
2) Largely taking over the spaces, ways and tools to (publicly) create, co-create and
distribute vernacular memory.
In other words, digital places of memory (lieu de mémoire digitaux) significantly influence the
ways in which ‗traditional‘ lieu de mémoire are (re)conceptualised and (re)thematised, in the
emerging ‗cyberplaces of memory.‘ In the process of technologising memory and democratising
technology, the interpretative authority has been relegated from the institutional bodies (archives,
governments, education systems) to individual bodies (individuals who have access to technology
and knowledge). In this view, and drawing on Geoffrey Bowker‘s discussion on memory traces, 7
one might argue that the ‗cybertraces of memory‘ provide crucial signposts in transient vernacular
medial externalisations of memory and remembering in digital media ecology (DME). At its very
core, I understand digital media ecology as a techno-cultural environment significantly defined
through the relationship between individuals and institutions—as producers and consumers of
content and power relations—entangled in interactions in a more-than-mere technological system.
Crucial for this writing, the DME, its enabling technologies and socio-politico-culturo-economical
aspects, are seen also to importantly contribute to the changing ways in which an individual is able
to externalise memories or at all remember. 8 With respect to my research topic, DME is seen as an
enabling environment where the preservation of the past, history and memory is underway on an
unprecedented scale both in terms of quantity of preserved material and numbers of people taking
more or less active part in these processes.
7 Geoffrey C. Bowker, Memory practices in the Sciences, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2008, 1–34.
8 On changing the ways the thought is preserved and communicated see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, The
Technologizing of the Word, London, New York, Routledge, 2003 [1983].
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