A Web of Remembrance: Public Memory in the

Digital Age

Jason Kalin | March 31, 2009

Public Memory - What & How?

A shared sense of the past, fashioned from the symbolic resources of community and subject to its particular history, hierarchies, and aspirations. (Browne, 1995, p. 248)

Public memory lives as it is given expressive form. (Browne, p. 248)

The performative dimension of public memory is embodied most clearly in the numerous rituals and ceremonies that shape and reshape the body of beliefs and ideas about the past. (Jasinski, 2001, p. 356)

Public Memory - Who?

Official Culture has a Collective Memory: what is remembered by the dominant

civic culture

Vernacular Culture has a Popular Memory: what ordinary folks remember

Who decides what and how to remember?

Public Memory – Why?

Source of power and authority

Collective identity

Symbolic resource for mobilizing and legitimating action

What is forgotten?

Carole Blair – Rhetoric’s Materiality

What is the significance of the text’s material existence?

What are the apparatuses and degrees of durability displayed by the text?

What are the text’s modes or possibilities of reproduction or preservation?

What does the text do to (or with, or against) other texts?

How does the text act on person(s)?

Blair – Texture of Materiality

What does a text do to, or with, or against other texts?

EnablingAppropriating

ContextualizingSupplementing

CorrectingChallenging

CompetingSilencing

Hess – In Digital Remembrance

How do web memorials provide a forum and medium for expression for the vernacular voice?

In what ways does the construction of memorials function to strengthen the rhetorical impact of an individual voice?

Vernacular Web Memorials

FDNY LODD

America Attacked 9 11

Mike’s 9/11 Memorial Page

September 11, 2001 memorial page

MySpace: 9/11/07 Ground Zero

Facebook causes/movements

Contested Memory

Official Web Memorials

National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center

The September 11 Digital Archive

Voices of September 11th

Sonic Memorial

Conspiracy Culture

Loose Change 9/11

What are we selecting or forgetting to remember?

Haskins – Archive & Participation

When technology offers the ability of instant recall, individual impulse to remember withers away. If archival preservation and retrieval are not balanced by mechanisms that stimulate participatory engagement, electronic memory may lead to self-congratulatory amnesia (p. 407)

Although making multiple fragments of the 9/11 discourse publicly visible and accessible, however, this approach also shifts the burden of active remembrance to individuals and groups, effectively disavowing the public nature of the enterprise (p. 419).

Zehfuss – Forget September 11

Curtails civil liberties in the WestCreates an us v. them mentality

Limits what it means to be a citizen:We did not ask for this mission, but we will fulfill it. I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children.

Forgive the unforgiveable

Who are we?

References• Blair, C. (1999). Contemporary US memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric's materiality. In J.

Selzer, & S. Crowley (Eds.), Rhetorical bodies (pp. 16-57). Madison: University of Wisconsin.• Browne, S. H. (1993). Reading public memory in Daniel Webster's Plymouth Rock Oration.

Western Journal of Communication , 57, 464-477.• Browne, S. H. (1995). Reading, rhetoric, and the texture of public memory. Quarterly

Journal of Speech , 81, 237-265.• Cohen, E. L., & Willis, C. (2004). One nation under radio: Digital and public memory after

September 11. New Media Society , 6 (5), 591-610.• Foot, K., Warnick, B., & Schneider, S. M. (2006). Web-based memorializing after September

11: Toward a conceptual framework. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication , 11, 72-96.

• Haskins, E. (2007). Between archive and participation: Public memory in a digital age. Rhetoric Society Quarterly , 37, 401-422.

• Hess, A. (2007). In digital remembrance: Vernacular memory and the rhetorical construction of web memorials. Media Culture Society , 29, 812-830.

• Jasinksi, J. (2001). Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

• Zehfuss, M. (2003). Forget September 11. Third World Quarterly , 24 (3), 513-528.