MONUMENTS
OF A
YUGO-SIZED
GLOBAL
VILLAGE
Petra Milički
CONTENT
INTRODUCTION 2
YOUTUBE VIDEOS AS MONUMENTS 4
YUGOSLAV AND POST-YUGOSLAV MEMORY CULTURE AND POLITICS 12
COLLECTIVE AND COMMUNICATIVE MEMORY 14
EVOLUTION OF MONUMENTAL STRUCTURES 15
SOUND AND IDENTITY 17
ARCHIVE AND MEMORY 18
CONNECTIVE MEMORY 19
CONCLUSION 21
BIBLIOGRAPHY 25
'Monuments of a Yugo-sized Global Village'
was initiated as a master thesis at the Piet Zwart Institute,
Rotterdam, 2013
INTRODUCTION
Some societies are preoccupied with their past more than others. The problematic
phenomenon of “the past refusing to become history” is clearly visible within the
1
post-Yugoslav society. The narratives related to ethno-ideological conflicts that
Pavlaković V., ‘Croatia’s (New) Commemorative Culture and Politics of the Past’, 2011
emerged with WWII and were kept under control during the period of the SFRY,
only to erupt with the 90s Yugoslav war, remain active in all levels of social life
— from contemporary political discourse to everyday conversations. Due to the
technological infrastructures of the new media ecology, the excessive consumption of the past has become overwhelming. Not only are past narratives being
re-mediated by various media on a daily basis, but the increasing digitalization
and democratization of the media driven by availability and interactivity has enabled users to initiate such residual narratives themselves, in both appropriate and
inappropriate situations and media spaces. There is even a saying about every
topic initiated online sooner or later ending up in conflicting attitudes and discussions related to Partisans, Chetniks and Ustashe .* These opposing narratives
The opposing sides of the complex conflict that took
can be seen in almost every digital media format today — from news portals and
place during WWII — “The terrorist and fascist Croatian,
social media, to forums and blogs, where they still make up a big a part of “public
Ustashes, the nationalist radical Serbian, Chetniks, and
discourse, historiographical polemics, media sensationalism, and even sporting
the multiethnic anti-fascist, Partisans” (Pavlakovic, 2011)
events and popular culture” 1
A good example of a media space caught up in the perpetuating narratives of
the past is the interactive platform of YouTube, where different types of popular music videos dating from the Yugoslav and post- Yugoslav era, whether of a
political or apolitical nature, trigger strong emotional reactions by inducing both
personal and collective memories. These reactions span from yugo-nostalgic, personal stories to comments provoking heated political arguments inspired by the
problematic common past of the peoples and ethnicities of the former Yugoslavia,
and are displayed in the videos’ comments section. This practice has become so
widespread that the YouTube videos, along with the social interaction around
them, started to function as some sort of a memory culture. Within this memorial activity YouTube videos serve as monuments that get “erected” and “visited”
due to their ability to act as catalysts and activators of personal and collective
memories.
Following-up on Pavlaković’s premise that one of the reasons causing the excessive consumption of the past might be lying in the society’s inability to process its
past through its collective memory, the concept of the YouTube monuments will
be used as an example of coping with this inability within the new media ecology.
In order to investigate the possibility of YouTube videos serving as monuments,
this text will:
– give the respective historic overview to see how they relate to the most visible
and exposed elements of the society’s collective memory — the Yugoslav and
post-Yugoslav monuments;
– investigate the media architecture behind them;
– engage in placing the idea of YouTube monuments into the conceptual and
technological trends of monumental structures in general;
– look into their driving mechanisms — individual’s psychological stimuli and
community’s social characteristics and predispositions;
– explore the effects of the new media ecology on the notions of collective
memory, and the excessive consumption of the past.
3
YOUTUBE VIDEOS AS MONUMENTS
YouTube is a platform used for uploading, viewing and sharing video content.
The platform is often used for sharing popular, old music videos (be they original videos or just original music with a self-made video/image placed a visual
background) that were once produced to be broadcasted on local, national and
international televisions and radio stations. In the former Yugoslavia this type of
an archive has a specific characteristic, as its videos were produced, broadcasted
and made popular in one ideological, political and social context, while they were
digitalized, uploaded and shared in another one. It is a media space tangled in the
narratives of a problematic common past that has its roots in the Second World
War, which for multicultural Yugoslavia was not only a war of liberation against
the aggressor Nazi Germany, but also a civil war with complex oppositions
between it’s ethno-ideological groups. After the war had finished, the ideological
opponents had to collectively build a new country and smooth over their former
conflicts. Since the Partisans won the war, the country was built according to the
socialist model of society and the values of brotherhood and unity, in which promotion of separate national or religious identities was controlled or even banned.
The 90s Yugoslav wars opened old wounds and reinforced old narratives with the
new ones. When talking about the opposing narratives permeating all the levels of
social life, YouTube is an example of their presence in popular culture. As already
mentioned, the social interaction of uploading, viewing, listening and sharing music and music-videos, started to form a certain kind of a memory culture in which
the YouTube videos serve as objects of memory, while their respective interactive
virtual spaces serve as the sites of memory.
Three different types of videos provoking the mentioned reactions can be distinguished. The first type are the videos from the Yugoslav period, which, more
or less directly, promote political and social values of that time and context.
Although peaceful in their nature, they attract both political sympathizers
and opponents, which naturally leads to provocation and verbal conflicts. The
second type of videos are the ones with the nationalist (mostly post-Yugoslav)
political connotations embedded in the music, lyrics, or general context, and
which are designed to provoke nationalist sentiments, and consequently aggressive reactions. The third type are the ones that are completely apolitical and
unprovocative in their nature, and have for that reason been chosen to represent
the particular phenomenon explored in this paper. These videos come from a
mainstream pop/rock genre and were/are performed by musicians coming from
different republics of the former Yugoslavia. They gained their popularity through
the mainstream mass media and are dating from the period of the 70s and 80s
(but also 90s and 00s). In order to illustrate the phenomenon, a few examples
were extracted to represent the analyzed material. The selected comments are
not shown in any one particular order, but are presented here to illustrate the
phenomenon of this particular YouTube memory culture, and to give an overview
of the problematics in question. (For the occasion of this booklet the comments
won't be translated to english.)
The comments are grouped in 3 sections:
A) nostalgic and yugo-nostalgic comments
B) discussions and provocations
C) comments indicating the prevalence of the A and B types of comments
5
A
7
B
9
C
11
YUGOSLAV AND POST-YUGOSLAV MEMORY CULTURE AND POLITICS
When analysing the content of YouTube comments, one can find different kinds of
activities users engage in — from the nostalgic rememberings and story-telling,
to amateur historiographical discussions and verbal abuse. These attitudes towards the (arguably) common popular music heritage resemble the attitudes and
treatment of former Yugoslavia’s other heritage — its public monuments, but also
describe the principles of the recalibrated memory politics of the newly formed
republics.
Collective memory can serve as an instrument of power and change the ways in
which events are remembered and recorded, or discarded and forgotten. Politics
built on a strong ideological basis often play a very important role in shaping it,
and thus “[...] the topography of Tito’s Yugoslavia was ideologically delineated in
order to reinforce the Communist Party’s monopoly over the past [...].” 1 The event
that determined the future and the character of the SFRY was the political and
ideological separation of the Yugoslav president Tito and the Soviet leader Stalin
and the Soviet regime, which took place in 1948. This key event changed the style
and aesthetics of the monuments erected at this time. The reversal is seen in the
rejection of sculptural monuments, often figural portraying of heroic leaders or
patriotic workers in soc-realist style, and in the acceptance of the progressive
art tendencies and abstract forms celebrating the eternity of the revolutionary anti-fascist struggle. Once there were hundreds of massive and thousands
of smaller ones scattered throughout cities, towns, villages and rural deserted
landscapes, representing power, confidence and strength of Yugoslavia. The most
important ones were usually of gigantic scale and designed by different Yugoslavian sculptors and architects, and up until the 1990s were attracting millions of
visitors. They embodied the values that the socialist country stood for, but only
until the ideology supporting the system collapsed. The death of the Yugoslav
president Tito in 1980, followed by the economic crisis and years of rising ethnic
nationalism, led to dissidence among the multiple ethnicities within the constituent republics. This eventually led the country to collapse along the ethnic lines,
followed by its final downfall in 1991 — the Yugoslav Wars. “Many commentators
on the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s thus declared that the events unfolding
were the inevitable extension of the Second World War. The fury unleashed upon
the Spomeniks after 1992 was not merely settling the score with the old socialist
system, but was also the exposure of that hidden history which had led to the reo2
pening of Pandora’s box in the first place.”
Neutelings W. J., ‘Spomenik, the Monuments of Former Yugoslavia’, 2010
The “censorship” by ideological and ethno-national transformation of the monuments and public spaces in general included not only their removal by the au-
thorities, but vandalism or complete destruction by soldiers or paramilitaries.
13
In the 1990s, only in Croatia over three thousand Partisan memorials were damaged or destroyed. “The devastation of the monuments was particularly extensive
in regions mostly affected by the war, they were shot at with machine guns, rocket launchers, tanks, and even blasted to pieces with set explosives.” (Pavlaković,
2011) In other parts of Yugoslavia most of the monuments are still being vandalised by graffiti expressing extreme nationalist symbols, while some of them
were depreciated by the placement of religious objects in or around them, or by
reappropriation. The monuments that were built to resist the transience of time
ended up being completely abandoned, rarely visited and left to decompose and
rot. In order to understand the significance of the destruction and neglect of the
monuments, one has to see the symbolic context of such politics. The destruction
of their physical state means the destruction of the valuable socialist legacy that
had been nurtured for decades — the workers’ rights and labor organizations,
public health and education, public spaces and community institutions, industry
3
and the economy.
What, How & for Whom, ‘Spomenici u tranziciji. Rušenje spomenika NOB-e u Hrvatskoj’, 2010
The developments of the post-war memory culture have been characterized not
only by the mentioned removal of the former regime’s ideological marks, but
also by the establishment of new symbols and the construction of new politics
of memory. Monuments embodying the rehabilitated nationalist values, which
continue to deepen the unresolved conflicts and are characterized by a low level
of aesthetic value, have been emerging since. Seven new countries were formed
since (the first stage of) the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1990, and each of those
newly formed countries had started to construct their own version of history and
identity in a place of the once shared and now discredited Yugoslav one.
The majority of the early post-war monuments was built to commemorate victims
of different sides of Yugoslav wars, often displaying various religious symbols,
iconography and/or leaders. Some are carrying heavy political connotations by
celebrating national leaders and heroes, some of whom are inappropriate
or even controversial. In order to reconstruct the entire country’s history, to form
a separate national mythology, and to praise the purity of the nation, language
and culture, the newly formed countries have started to monumentalize kings,
dukes and other historical figures from a far away past, while omitting anything
with a socialist connotation.
COLLECTIVE MEMORY
As already noted, the problematic excessive consumption of the past might be an
indicator of a society’s inability to process its past through its collective memory.
French sociologist and developer of the collective memory concept, Maurice
Halbwachs, argues that all memory is socially constructed. Both collective (institutionalized) and individual memory are subject to the needs of the present and
can serve as an instrument of power, and change the ways in which events are
remembered or forgotten. For Halbwachs, studying memory is not a matter of the
characteristics of the subjective, individual mind, rather, memory is a matter of
how minds work together in society using a “... shared pool of information held in
4
the memories of two or more members of a group”. Social groups construct their
Halbwachs, M., ‘On Collective Memory’, 1992
own images of the world and the self by constantly shaping and reshaping versions of the past. The construction of collective memory is a continuous, multidirectional process in which current events and beliefs guide our reading of the
past, while frames of references learned from the past shape our understanding
of the present. It is a multidirectional process of concretizing a narrative of the
5
past into a functional, socio-political construct.
Neiger, Meyers, Zandberg, ‘On Media Memory:
Collective Memory in a new Media Age’, 2011.
The phenomenon of YouTube memory practice seems to be showing how a dysfunctional collective memory can lead to the development of a particular aspect
of collective memory — ‘communicative memory’. This aspect was introduced by
Jan Assman when making a distinction between official and unofficial collective
memory. He described communicative memory as a form of memory similar to the
exchanges in oral, vernacular culture, or the memories collected and made collective through oral history. It includes all the varieties of collective memory that are
based on everyday communication. According to Assman, the everyday communication is characterized by a high degree of non-specialization, reciprocity of roles,
thematic instability, and disorganisation. Unlike communicative memory, ‘cultural
memory’ is characterised by its distance from the everyday, which is maintained
through cultural formation — texts, rites, monuments, and institutional communi6
cation — recitation, practice, observance.
Assmann, J., Czaplicka J., ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, 1995
It seems that the communicative aspect of collective memory has experienced
a new relevance with the development of Web 2.0, in which the rapidly-evolving
networked ways of communication have been deconstructing and disassembling
the linear one-way communicative space of mediation by establishing multiperspectival forms of mediation. To describe the transition from an ‘ordered mediascape’ to a ‘disordered media ecology,’ William Merrin coined the term ‘postbroadcast era’, which he describes as “the era in which the totality of broadcast
production is supplemented by the entire world of media — of personal commu-
nications, collaborative productions, shared information, user- generated con15
tent, and networked relationships”. In the post-broadcast era the role of a once
passive media consumer is shifting to one of an active media user within the new
media ecology, which is a result of a media paradigm shift in which: “In place of
a top-down, one-to-many vertical cascade from centralised industry sources we
discover today bottom-up, many-to-many, horizontal, peer-to-peer communication. ‘Pull’ media challenge ‘push’ media; open structures challenge hierarchical
structures; micro-production challenges macro-production; open-access amateur
production challenges closed access, elite-professions; economic and technological barriers to media production are transformed by cheap, democratised, easy7
to-use technologies.“
Merrin W., ‘Studying Media: the Problem of Method in a Post-Broadcast Age’, 2010
EVOLUTION OF MONUMENTAL STRUCTURES
Embodying memories in a form of a monument has always been one of the most
common ways of dealing with, processing and reflecting on historical events and
figures. The collective memory of a nation is represented and constructed by
the monuments it chooses, discards or ignores to erect. They serve as symbols
of identity as well as marks of personal and collective memory, and are therefore
8
places where we both recognize and remember. While they mostly preserved
Šimpraga S., ‘Grand Ideas, Erased Memories
their social function, the evolution of monumental structures has gone “[...] from
Neglected Landmarks of Yugoslavia’, 2010
solidity to ephemerality, from the mass to the open network, from substance to
light, from a focus on death to a focus on life, from the sacred to the mundane,
9
from one occupant to many.”
Adams P. C., ‘Television as Gathering Place’, 1992
Postmodernist theorists have been announcing the end of monuments as we
know them by criticizing their obsolete static forms and suggesting they be replaced by a whole spectrum of technological advances. According to Carpo,
the kind of monuments that are increasingly losing their value are the ones
conceived in the Romantic tradition, since in order to experience them as totemic
catalysts and activators of memory one is expected to go somewhere and have a
direct physical experience of the original monument, be it optic or tactile.
“Remembrance was predicated upon, and activated by, the experience of a special place or object, often remote or unique, and the view, or vision, of something
10
special.“ The ability of electronic technologies to blur the traditional distinction
Carpo M., ‘The Postmodern Cult of Monuments’, 2007
between originals and reproductions or copies are diminishing the value of an
original, while their distribution has the same effect by making them all-pervasive.
“No need to go there if the original, or a digital reproduction of it, may come
here.” 9 Furthermore, Marković predicts that the activities of collecting, archiving
and listing, supported by the transmissible and replicable media, suggest a pat-
tern according to which traditional monuments may be destined to play a
lesser role in the future. “[Monuments] will most likely be replaced by music,
voices, words, and all that can be digitally recorded, transmitted, and reen11
acted.”
Marković, I., ‘Čemu još (jedna
rasprava o) spomenici(ma)?’, 2011
When it comes to monuments’ evolutionary path in terms of media and technology, YouTube monuments seem to be following the historical trend and a
legitimate predecessor. In his essay “Television as Gathering Place,” Adams
observes mass media not only as a means for establishing personal and collective memory, but as a monument itself. According to him, the extent to which
different kinds of monumental structures differ from each other is no less radical than the extent to which they all differ from television. While their physical
forms are almost incomparable, it is in their social function that we can find
characteristics common to traditional monuments and TV. “Television can be
seen and heard by virtually any member of a modern society; it allows people to
rise above the chaos of daily life and survey the world from a position of omniscience; it separates one class of people — politicians, entertainers, and public
figures from the rest of people, and puts them in a privileged position where
they can be seen and emulated and yet remain separate from society”. 9 With the
emergence of television, centrality and visibility as the most important characteristic of monumental structures are being challenged by a form that surpasses
them in both of those characteristics. When talking about persons appearing
on TV, Adams sees their monumentality and social power in the fact that they
differ from people that can’t appear on TV. Not only are they preconditioned by
wealth, beauty, authority, talent and luck, but by appearing on TV their power is
conferred. “While this power transforms the living into stars, it transforms the
dead into symbols.” 9 Adams notices one obvious difference between TV and
physical monumental structures — it is the fact that television is not static, but
he also sees this difference as an improvement on monumental architecture.
If television is defined by a flow of images from multiple sources, rather than
static individual receivers, it would mean that it doesn’t decompose at all. We
can see this permanence as a satisfaction of a basic human need of overcoming
erosion and creating something immortal — which is one of the main conceptual
goals of monumental structures in general.
SOUND AND IDENTITY
Since the TV and radio distribution made them a part of the collective memory,
one could say that the videos that constitute the YouTube archive in question
mostly rely on the powerful ability of sound and music to evoke past memories
12
and emotions. Bijsterveld and van Dijck state that sound and memory are inexBijsterveld K., Van Dijck J., ‘Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies,
tricably intertwined not only through the repetition of familiar tunes, but through
Memory and Cultural Practices’, 2009
the cultural practices such as collecting, archiving, listing and exchanging valued
songs. The new digital audio technologies allow people to reopen their experiences and to elicit, reconstruct, celebrate, and manage their memories, but also
to use them as symbolic resources in the construction of identity and community.
Hearing a song that is an exact reproduction of an original arouses an experience
stored in one’s memory, and when practiced in public spaces between individuals and communities, auditory nostalgia can shape and negotiate personal and
13
collective memories. The idea of a record reiterating the same content each time
Van Dijck, J., ‘Mediated memories: a snapshot of remembered experience.’, 2008
it is played is subconsciously transposed to the experience attached to hearing
music. “People’s expectation that they will feel the same response each time a
record is played stems from a craving to relive the past-as-it-was — as if the past
13
were also a record.” As a result of the repeated listening, an initial, original emotion gets warn out and instead of the initial listening experience gets replaced by
a “fixed pattern of associations”. An experience of a memory changes each time
it’s recalled — the patterns take over, making the content more connected to the
12
present and less to the past.
When it comes to people’s motivation to write comments under the music videos,
14
van Dijck’s research, in which she’s dealing with people’s need to share memoVan Dijck, J., ‘Remembering Songs through Telling Stories: Pop Music as a Resource for Memory’, 2009
ries and stories publicy, can give some answers. She uses the case study of ‘Top
2000’, a radio event happening in the Netherlands every year in which millions
of people vote for their favorite popular song and share stories that the particular song triggers. Van Dijck states that those “mediated memories” are shaped
precisely at the intersections of personal and collective memory, meaning that
recorded music insinuates itself in our collective memory and our personal
memories at the same time. “Stories about songs and the memories connected to
them constitute channels for shaping individuality while concurrently defining the
larger collectivity we (want to) belong to — ensuring autobiographical as well as
14
historical continuity.” These stories, states Van Dijck, are not only about emotions triggered by music, but directly indicate personal and group identity that
gets evoked through musical memory and is often transferred from generation to
generation.
17
ARCHIVE AND MEMORY
When the activities of collecting, filing, sharing, listing and exchanging of digital
material reach a certain continuity in time, space and content, a place of scattered data gets formed into an archive. In recent years, the term ‘archive’ has
experienced a great revival within cultural and other social studies and gained
momentum with the most recent developments of digital technologies that have
made the practice of creation, storage and sharing of different kinds of digital
material into an everyday practice, and changed the archive from a stable entity
into a flexible system.
In his paper ‘Archive and Aspiration,’ Appadurai focuses on a specific kind of
archives — ones that have been built by migrants. According to him, migrants
have been using digital technologies to edit, distribute and collectively build
15
archives into a product of anticipation of collective memory. He suggests new
Appadurai A., ‘Archive and
perspectives on the archive based on the “new disjunctures between location,
Aspiration, Information is Alive’,
imagination and identity”, which have been implied by the era of globalization,
2003
circulation of media and the movement of migrants. He states that the specificity of the archives being built by migrants is the identity that’s being built with
it. The archives range from “the most intimate and personal to the most public
and collective”, while the latter usually includes shared narratives and practices.
For migrants, the practice of archiving becomes an important activity because
of their complex relationship to the past. “[...] because memory becomes hypervalued for many migrants — the practices through which collective memory is
constructed are especially subject to cultural contestation and to simplification.”
(Appadurai, 2003) Although Appadurai talks about spatial migration with “disjunctures between location, imagination and identity”, the post-Yugoslav society
is not only a society of spatial migrants but can also be characterized as a society
of temporal migration. Temporal migrants share some of the same characteristics
with the spatial migrants, as they too are aspiring to reproduce a sustainable cultural identity in their new societies that have undergone severe changes in their
ideological, political and social structures with the transition from SFRY to the
newly formed, separate countries.
One of the important characteristics of migration is the confusion about what’s
been lost, and therefore what needs to be recovered and remembered. This often
results in a deliberate effort to construct a variety of archives. In an effort to find
sources and content for the construction of these archives, migrants turn to media for images, narratives, models and scripts. They engage in various instances
of the new media machinery accessible to them, where they can “find, debate and
consolidate their own memory traces and stories into a more widely plausible nar-
15
rative.” Appadurai states that the activity of building an archive often includes 19
contest and debate, which sometimes takes the form of a ‘long-distance nationalism’ (a concept introduced by Benedict Anderson), that is characterized by the
presence of voice, agency and debate, rather than of mere reading, reception and
interpellation. “The migrant archive is a continuous and conscious work of the
immigration, seeking in collective memory on ethnical basis for the sustainable
reproduction of cultural identities in the new society. For migrants, more than for
others, the archive is a map. It is a guide to the uncertainties of identity- building
15
under adverse conditions.” From the perspective of the migrant archive and with
the development of electronic forms of mediation, Appadurai describes it as a
platform serving as a conscious site of debate and desire where collective memory is interactively designed and socially produced. For the migrants, archives
are active and interactive tools for the construction of sustainable identities and
aspiration.
CONNECTIVE MEMORY
Collective memory serves as an important mechanism for preserving and transferring society’s cultural capital, identity, coherence, and its existence, while
government policies, social rules, popular culture and media can make a great
influence in shaping it. Media and memory are closely intertwined — media can
enhance, corrupt, extend or replace memory. While personal memory feeds on
media technologies, collective memory is defined by the media’s shaping powers.
On the one hand, media can be seen an enhancer of human memory, and on the
other as its corruption and threat to its purity. Mass media can influence collective memory either by filtering, ordering, editing and inscribing past events, or
through its function as an archival resource. Nevertheless, the decline of centralized ideological, social and technological systems have undoubtedly changed the
production, distribution, function and impact of collective memory. Even though
the concept of collective memory maintains its influence through the still active
broadcast media practices, recent technological and media developments have
stared to challenge their influence on contemporary remembering.
When talking about the influence of collective memory on the excessive consumption of the past, the question must be expanded — what is happening
with individual and collective memory today, when the shaping powers of the
‘old‘, broadcast mass media are weakening and getting replaced by new, digital,
interactive, networked media. Andrew Hoskin’s contribution to memory studies
provides an insight into the influence of digital mass communication on individual
memory, collective memory and the monumentalization of historical narratives, by
describing how memories are being made in the age of digital media. He is examining the prospects for development and maintenance of individual memories in
the ‘post-scarcity’ era, which he defines as an era in which there is “an emergent
tension between the scale of the volume of material that can be made available
online and the decreasing capacity of anyone to consume it, or to make sense of
16
it.”
Hoskins, A., ‘Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn’, 2011
According to Hoskins, in a disordered mediascape contemporary remembering can only be conceived as navigation in and through emergent and shifting
complexities of connections in and through media. He defines contemporary
memory as a movement of selves or groups as interactional trajectories, that both
intersect with and compete against an ongoing series of encounters with people,
digital technologies and media and calls it — ‘connective memory‘. In this mixture,
‘traditional‘ media are not excluded, but intertwined with the ‘new‘ media cultures,
where each is shaped or remediated through the other. From the perspective
of connective memory, such encounters serve as moments of connection, and
therefore — moments of memory. “Our interactional trajectories of remembering
do become embedded in and rotate around other people, objects, archives, media
and events that have trajectories of their own, operating different gravitational
17
pulls on what is remembered and how and when.” Hoskins, A., ‘7/7 and connective memory: Interactional
trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture’, 2011
The relation between memorial culture and the digital is achieved through
archives and their ability to aggregate and store infinite amounts of data. In the
post-scarcity culture, digital technologies are used for interpretation of memories
of the self and society. But, unlike the traditional archive, that has been acting as
a monumentalizator of the past by sealing off a data bank from immediate access,
the digital archival media memory is de-monumentalized as “... there is no ending
online. There’s no closure, no linear basis. It’s about bringing it in, checking it out,
constantly evaluating.” (Hoskins citing Wolfgang Ernst and in part citing Mark U.
17
Edwards)
Furthermore, with open structures replacing hierarchical structures, and openaccess amateur production challenging closed access production, the narratives
coming from the realm of vernacular, communicative memory are able to easily
enter the archival media memory, challenging the liability of cultural memory and
the classification as such.
CONCLUSION
Collective memory serves an important function of preserving and transferring
society’s cultural capital, coherence, and identity. The constant calibration and
recalibration of memory culture, together with the decline of centralized ideological, social and technological systems has led to the post-Yugoslav society’s
collective memory crisis. Without the ability to overcome the complex opposing narratives of its collective memory, the society gets imprisoned by its own
past, which consequently insinuates itself on all levels of social and political life
causing endless loops of production and consumption of those narratives. In the
post-Yugoslav society the interactive platform of YouTube is an example of this
phenomenon occurring in popular culture.
YouTube monuments come from the realm of collective memory distributed by
the mass, broadcast media, that generated their “monumentality” by setteling
them between individual and collective memory. Today, in the post-broadcast era,
they become active in a completely different mediascape. Even when “erected”
and “visited” as neutral monuments of personal and collective memory YouTube
monuments get politicized very easily. Even the neutral, apolitical music tends to
provoke reactions going into both extremes — from yugo-nostalgia to ethno-ideological antagonisms. The vandalisation by comments always boils down to the
mere repetition of the offline social patterns, reflecting the problematics of the
post-Yugoslav society’s memory culture and its memory sites and objects. While
the nostalgic and brotherhood-and-unity-inspired comments can be observed
through the values embodied in monuments of the anti-fascist struggle erected
in the country’s golden age, the political context that has led to their unfortunate
fate and the post-war recalibration of memory culture provides the inspiration for
provocation and rage-driven comments.
Therefore, YouTube memory practice can be seen as the society’s way of coping
with the inability to process its past through its collective memory by “building”
and “visiting” monuments of communicative memory — a specific aspect of collective memory thriving on the dysfunctional collective memory within the new
media ecology.
The extent to which YouTube videos can be considered monuments depends on
the aspect from which they are observed. From the point of view of the recent
technological and media trends and predictions, YouTube monuments seem to be
following the expected evolution of monumental structures, by replacing solidity
with ephemerality; mass with the open network; substance with light; a focus on
death with a focus on life; the sacred with the mundane and one occupant with
21
many. They rely on sound as the transmissible and replicable carrier of emotions
and remebrances, and constitute a unique place in the virtual space in a form of
a URL address, which provides opportunities for small communities to form. Although they do not constitute monuments in the full sense of the term, YouTube
monuments do provide a very necessary social function by providing a virtual
space in which social groups use the cultural practices of collecting, archiving,
listing and exchanging in constructing their own images of the self and the world.
The relation between memorial culture and the digital is achieved through archives and their ability to aggregate and store infinite amounts of data. In its core,
YouTube monument is an archive, and moreover an archive built by a specific
social group — the migrants (be they of spatial or temporal nature). This specific
characteristic gives the archive an even bigger importance, as it has been built
out of a feeling of loss. For the migrants, the archive becomes important because
of the collective memory and identity that is being constructed with it. A YouTube monument, being a migrational archive, is the kind of a media space where
migrants turn to when looking for debate and consolidation of their own memory.
This can lead to the development of ‘long-distance nationalism’, as already recognized in the example of YouTube monuments. In the time of prevailing mass
broadcast media, collective memory has acted as a social practice for sharing and
negotiating memory politics that has been relevant for the formation and maintenance of national communities. Whereas today the networked communication
has opened a space where trans-national and sub-national communities can take
different shapes and sizes within the everchanging Global Village.
When talking about the influences of the new media ecology on the excessive
consumption of past, we can notice its many effects that only seem to be exacerbating the problematics. It is not only by developing a compulsive culture of
archiving enormous amounts of material that noone can consume or process, or
by exploiting the memorial culture by excessively re-mediating past conflicts and
catastrophes, but also by allowing various versions of the official, unofficial and
vernacular narratives to easily enter the pool of information from which collective
memory is supposed to be constructed.
One of the conditions for collective memory’s functionality is its concretization
through objects, rituals, institutions and education, but to achieve this within the
new media ecology is almost impossible, as the digital archive is de-monumentalized. Its accessibility, flexibility and the ability to store almost everything has
made new media narratives subject to infinite iterations and evaluations, which
prevents them from concretizing and monumentalizing.
The networked digital media of the post-broadcast era have also changed the
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ways memories are being made and maintained. Collective memory is getting
replaced by connective memory which depends on the encounters with other
people, objects, archives, media and events that intersect with individual trajectories of remembering. Each time one is confronted with one of those trajectories,
an opportunity for memory modification occurs. By aggravating the maintenance
of collective memories by making them subject to constant modifications, speculations and contestations, digital media are devaluing some of its most important
functions. What the long-term effects of these changes on society at large will be,
remains to be seen.
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