Remediating the past: YouTube and Second World War memory in Ukraine and Russia

Abstract

This article examines how Second World War memory is circulated, reproduced, and challenged in the transnational space of digital media by Ukrainian and Russian Internet users. Using as a case study one episode of the war on the Eastern Front—the capture of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, by the Red Army in 1943—it investigates how this event is commemorated through YouTube, which is a popular online platform for uploading, viewing, and commenting on audiovisual materials. This article employs content analysis to assess audiovisual tributes to the Battle of Kyiv from two perspectives: that of representation (how the event is presented on YouTube) and that of interaction (how YouTube users interact with memory of the event). This article concludes that although YouTube is frequently used for the propagation of nationalistic interpretations of the past in Ukraine and Russia, it still has the potential to democratize collective remembrance of the Second World War.

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

“…The findings of this study suggest that meaningful memory discourses emerge around war-themed popular culture. This view complies with other researchers who argue that YouTube potentially enriches remembrance by offering an experience unavailable via traditional forms of commemoration (Gibson and Jones, 2012; Makhortykh, 2017). In addition, acts of remembrance in a media-based collectivity differ in their accidental and informal nature, supporting commemoration from a multitude of viewpoints.…”

“…YouTube is a platform where formal and user-generated content meet (Burgess and Green, 2013[2007]), making it an important medium for commemoration and remembrance. Although commemoration on YouTube has garnered nationalistic interpretations of the past, YouTube also possesses a democratizing potential for collective remembrance because it allows users to experience the past outside official frames of reference (De Smale, 2019a, forthcoming; Knudsen and Stage, 2013; Makhortykh, 2017, 2018). YouTube allows for creative forms of remembrance through self-expression, participation and collaboration, such as the remixing of news representations of migrant suffering as a strategy to counter hegemonic Eurocentric imagery (Horsti, 2017), or Holocaust remembrance through YouTube videos such as ‘Dancing Auschwitz’, featuring a Jewish family dancing at various memorial sites (Gibson and Jones, 2012).…”

Moonwalking together: Tracing Redditors’ digital memory work on Michael Jackson

“…Digital memory may indeed be continually emergent, but it is increasingly shaped by the socio-technical parameters of platforms. Moreover, as much as such platforms dynamics can democratize mnemonic processes, they can also have harmful effects on, for example, the memory of conflict (Makhortykh, 2020;Rutten et al, 2013). This may also hold true for the past lives of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, whose remembered persona is very much the result of public negotiations on social media today.…”

Cyberplace: From fantasies of placelessness to connective emplacement

“…YouTube’s status as a democratising forum for the exchange of diverse ideas is likewise called into question by the prevalence of antagonism, incivility, one-upmanship and hypermasculinised nationalistic discourse, and by the relative absence of significant introspection, flexibility and sustained dialogue (Benzaquen, 2014; Drinot, 2011; Goode et al, 2011). A growing number of studies occupy a middle ground, acknowledging the potential for Web 2.0 platforms to open up discussion, democratise access to resources and support counter-hegemonic narratives and transcultural exchange, whilst also emphasising their capacity simultaneously to act as incubators of nationalism and bigotry and to be shaped fundamentally by powerful political and economic forces not dissimilar to those that dominated pre-digital media (Danilova, 2015; Garde-Hansen, 2011: 82–84, 107, 117; Halstead, 2018; Haskins, 2007; Makhortykh, 2020; Miller and Horst, 2013: 8–11; Van Dijck, 2013: 12, 159).…”