The Prosumption of Commemoration

Abstract

The Internet has created innumerable possibilities for the construction of memorials devoted to tragic or catastrophic events and the exercise of collective memory. Two recent American disasters, the September 11, 2001 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, have been widely commemorated and memorialized online. This article examines the nature of online disaster commemoration through an analysis of the messages and stories submitted to two digital archives devoted to these disasters: the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. By viewing these online archives as sites of prosumption, inasmuch as the sites’ users both produce and consume its content, the article is able to tease out connections to other prosumer-oriented trends surrounding commemoration and collective memory in the physical landscape. These trends include the increasing popularity of spontaneous shrines and the growing acceptance of therapeutic monuments. These two forms of prosumption also manifest themselves online in the digital memory banks studied here, in that they allow a wide variety of different users to contribute to the commemoration of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina in ways that often seek to enact a kind of therapeutic self-help and emotional catharsis. However, an analysis of the messages and stories left at these archives also points to some of the political limitations of such therapeutic forms of prosumption.

Beyond the encyclopedia: Collective memories in Wikipedia

“…Similar to Arthur (2008), Recumber (2012) analyzed the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, interpreting them as sites of prosumption, where users can both consume and produce content. Recumber studied the messages uploaded by users to these two digital archives in order to better understand online commemoration practices, and found that the stories recounted are often related to emotions and healing, and therefore have a therapeutic significance.…”

The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands: a meaningful, ritual place for commemoration

“…20 The Australian scholar Paul Arthur studied how traditional physical memorials to war and other catastrophic events differ from online memorials and concludes that nowadays "online environments provide public spaces for expressing, sharing, and working through experiences of trauma and crisis" (Arthur, 2009). These observations are confirmed by scholars from various disciplines, and it seems, from a worldwide perspective, that webbased memorializing practices have become accepted commemoration practices (Foot, Warnick, & Schneider, 2006;Geser, 1998;Haskins, 2007;Marschall, 2013;Recuber, 2012).…”

“…These observations are confirmed by scholars from various disciplines, and it seems, from a worldwide perspective, that web-based memorializing practices have become accepted commemoration practices (Foot et al, 2006;Geser, 1998;Haskins, 2007;Marschall, 2013;Recuber, 2012).…”

Online Gruplarda İletişimsel Bellek: Aracılı ve Müşterek Bilgi

“…By referring again to van Dijk, we could discuss that creating an online community can be related with our culture of connectivity which is "a post-broadcast, networked culture where social interactions and culture products are inseparably enmeshed in technological systems" (2006,404). Such a cultural approach to connectivity opens to us a way of reconceptualising the notion of memory in an online environment, which is not an unusual concept in studies of online communities: Online archives; encyclopaedias on disasters (Recuber 2012, Gustafsson 2017; online mourning as a collective practice (Bhattacharya 2010, McEwen and Scheaffer 2013, Wagner 2018; and online reflections of migration, ethnicity, and identity (Davis 2010, Di Renzo 2017, Marino 2015. This reconceptualisation is already accepted as a presupposition for online communities.…”