Witnessing Eva Stories: Media witnessing and self-inscription in social media memory

Abstract

This study examines the relations between memory, social media experience, and testimony in the Eva Stories Instagram project. By conducting a combined visual and multimodal analysis of the stories, as well as a close analysis of the relations between social media experience and testimony, we claim that Eva Stories establishes a new responsive space for remembering the Holocaust. This space enables users to inscribe themselves into mediated Holocaust memory and to become media witnesses through the co-creation of socially mediated experiences. The self-inscription of the user is made possible by three interrelated modes of media witnessing, which continuously evoke user engagement. These new modes, we argue, indicate a new kind of agency in relation to media witnessing: the ability to testify on one’s own present social media engagement with mediated memory, and become a witness to it.

“I Am Not Myself, You See?”: Remediation and Mediatization in the Insta Novels Project

“…Thus, the tension between the personal and public story underscores that Instagram is a platform for storytellers to a greater extent than a platform of stories, where documentation is more welcome than fictional stories. Had the story been told personally by one of the library workers or story characters, as in Eva's stories (Henig & Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020), the personal dimension would have been preserved and could have contributed to the project's relevance.…”

“…Burgess (2007) named the creative practices underlining social networks “vernacular creativity,” which, unlike highbrow ingenuity resulting from formal artistic education, involves innovations and communicative conventions that arise from mundane practices. Social media creativity includes selfies, text layers, interactive tools, emojis, hashtags, and aftereffects (Henig & Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020).…”

Commemorating from a distance: the digital transformation of Holocaust memory in times of COVID-19

“…Digital media offer modes of experiencing the sites from afar, thus enabling the users "to grasp some knowledge from the past, whilst retaining their temporal [and in times of COVID-19 also physical] distance from it" (Walden, 2019: 32). However, in particular with the shift of digital memory culture toward social media, Holocaust memory merges with other forms of social media engagement: Presence connects to the dominant social media mode of self-witnessing (Henig and Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020). Thus, in the absence of collective forms of on-site commemoration, users themselves become agents of (social media) memory.…”

“…In the context of social media this paradigm shift led to distinct forms of social media memory. A recent example for this phenomenon is the Instagram Stories project Eva Stories that was globally shared online during Yom HaShoah in 2019 (Henig and Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020). This digital commemorative project was initiated and produced by Mati and Maya Kochavi, Israeli high-tech entrepreneurs with no connection to any memorial or other official commemorative agent.…”

“…Finally, Eva Stories (3) transforms analogue into digital forms of commemoration. By adopting the multi-layered visual and textual structure of Instagram, using hashtags and geo-tagging, Eva Stories offers new ways of engaging with Eva's memory through responding to, sharing, and integrating the stories into their own social media feeds (Henig and Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2020).…”