Memory in the margins: The connecting and colliding of vernacular war memories

Abstract

This article examines how war memory circulates, connects and collides on digital media platforms driven by digital publics that form around popular culture. Through a case study of vernacular memory discourses emerging around a game inspired by the Yugoslav war, the article investigates how the commenting practices of YouTube users provide insights into the feelings of belonging of conflict-affected subjects that go beyond ethnicity and exceed geographical boundaries. The comments of 331 videos were analysed, using an open source tool and sequential mixed-method content analysis. Media-based collectivities emerging on YouTube are influenced by the reactive and asynchronous dynamics of comments that stimulate the emergence of micro-narratives. Within this plurality of voices, connective moments focus on shared memories of trauma and displacement beyond ethnicity. However, clashing collective memories cause disputes that reify identification along ethnic lines. The article concludes that memory discourses emerging in the margins of YouTube represent the affective reactions of serendipitous encounters between users of audio-visual content.

Digital Games as Media for Teaching and Learning: A Template for Critical Evaluation

“…Alternatively, the processual dimension can be explored by studying the play practices of others available in the form of Let's Plays, walkthroughs, and other genres of recorded game play. By using this method, the different possibilities for action offered by the game space can be assessed and compared thus bringing forth the tacit limitations game mechanics put on possible player performances (de Smale, 2019a(de Smale, , 2019b. This last method can be productively used by teachers when preparing gamebased sessions to gain an overview over variations in play practices and possible forms of counter-play.…”

Difficult heritage on social network sites: An integrative review

“…Several studies engaging with the post-war period in Europe focused on the dissonant heritage of the collapse of Yugoslavia and its aftermath on SNS (Baumann, 2020; Brentin, 2016; Damcevic and Rodik, 2018; Mahmutović and Baraković, 2021; Pogačar, 2011; de Smale, 2020; Knudsen, 2016). Other topics in the second part of the 20th century included the difficult heritage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1968–1998 (Crooke, 2018; Murphy and Aguiar, 2019) and the collapse of Portugal’s colonial power and subsequent fall of Salazar’s dictatorship in the 1980s (Peralta, 2019).…”

“…Collective memory was also related to the notion of the construction of national identity (Farrell-Banks, 2019). In addition, multiple studies engaged with theorisations emerging in the context of the recent ‘media turn’ in memory studies, such as the concept of ‘digital memories: memories stored, shared, and promoted online’ (Khlevnyuk, 2019; Mahmutović and Baraković, 2021; Pogačar, 2011; Rutten, 2013), Andrew Hoskins’ notions of the ‘multitude’ (Aouragh, 2015; Yachin and Tirosh, 2021) and ‘connective memory’ which ‘highlights the moment of connection as the moment of memory’ (Birkner and Donk, 2020; de Smale, 2020), as well as Astrid Erll’s work on transnational cultural memory (Buckley-Zistel and Williams, 2020) and its remediating effects in shaping the present (Kaprāns, 2016; Mylonas, 2017).…”

“…We also identified two leading publishing venues: the Memory Studies journal ( N = 7) and the International Journal of Heritage Studies ( N = 5). Only eight articles, or 10% of the corpus, appeared in journals related directly to communication and media studies (including some multidisciplinary journals): Media, Culture & Society ( N = 2: Benzaquen, 2014; Khlevnyuk, 2019), the International Journal of Communication ( N = 2: Behkalam and Ebeling, 2020; Liu, 2018), Crime, Media, Culture ( N = 1: Ferguson et al, 2015), Digital Journalism ( N = 1: Ibrahim, 2016), Media, War & Conflict ( N = 1: de Smale, 2020), and Social Media + Society ( N = 1: Ibrahim, 2017).…”

The Yalta World (1945-2021) As A Mythological Construct

“…Rather, there are separate myths: Anglo-Saxon and Soviet are rapidly encapsulated and cease to interact in their struggle, continuing to feed the episteme from their own and only their source of meanings, which creates a threat of rupture and death of the episteme as a single world power system. The technical tools in these processes are the formation of a certain mythological environment in a combination of photo/video and audio series when the consumer of the information product is introduced by subtle ethno-linguistic manipulations into the state of play, which was demonstrated in the practice of creating mythological constructs and eidos of a new episteme on the example of the Yugoslav wars and their submissions, in particular, on the YouTube platform (Smale, 2020).…”