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? Enabling Appropriating Contextualizing Supplementing Correcting Challenging Competing Silencing

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 11 th 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 West Creates 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 ). Madison: University of Wisconsin. Browne, S. H. (1993). Reading public memory in Daniel Webster's Plymouth Rock Oration. Western Journal of Communication, 57, Browne, S. H. (1995). Reading, rhetoric, and the texture of public memory. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81, Cohen, E. L., & Willis, C. (2004). One nation under radio: Digital and public memory after September 11. New Media Society, 6 (5), Foot, K., Warnick, B., & Schneider, S. M. (2006). Web-based memorializing after September 11: Toward a conceptual framework. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11, Haskins, E. (2007). Between archive and participation: Public memory in a digital age. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37, Hess, A. (2007). In digital remembrance: Vernacular memory and the rhetorical construction of web memorials. Media Culture Society, 29, 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),