Tweeting from the past: Commemorating the Anzac Centenary @ABCNews1915

Abstract

This article argues that the digital world has introduced new complexities to state commemoration of the past and public engagement with those efforts. It focuses on how national narratives are transmitted by and through particular digital lieux de mémoire; on how the archival trace of the past is presented as lively and emergent, even when the people it represents are long dead; and the implications for the temporalities of national history and memory of new digital forms of state commemoration. To make these arguments, it draws on the April 2015 ‘live tweeting’ by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation of the Anzac landing on the Gallipoli peninsula. It will use material from Twitter handle @ABCNews1915 to trace some of the links between state commemoration and the digital world, a relationship that has become more urgent in light of the increasing use of social media to articulate state-sponsored history and to communicate between states and individuals.

Difficult heritage on social network sites: An integrative review

“…The 20th-century history on SNS was mostly dominated by WW1 and WW2 ( N = 38). Studies related to WW1 address events such as the Greek–Turkish war (Halstead, 2018; Mylonas, 2017), the Finnish civil war (Heimo, 2014), the Anzac assault in Gallipoli (Sumartojo, 2020) and the fate of Austro-Hungarian Empire descendants in Italy (Irimiás and Volo, 2018). Additional studies, not related to WW1, addressed the traumatic social media memory of the Holodomor famine in Ukraine in 1932–1933 (Paulsen, 2013; Zhukova, 2020) and of the Italian Hall tragedy in 1913 during the Copper Strike in Michigan (Heimo, 2017).…”

An Ontology of Semiotic Activity and Epistemic Figuration of Heritage, Memory and Identity Practices on Social Network Sites

“…Moreover, the symbolic is perceived as a realm of social existence, where phenomena such as symbolic violence and symbolic trauma (González Zarandona et al, 2018; Kaprāns, 2016; Zhukova, 2020) take place. symbolic reality permeates actual reality (Ibrahim, 2016) in places which, after pierre nora , are identified as lieux de mémoire , both offline (Arrigoni & Galani, 2019; Zalewska, 2017) and online (Sumartojo, 2020). social construction here is situated in the process of semiosis (Damcevic & Rodik, 2018; Mahmutović & Baraković, 2021).…”

Togetherness after terror: The more or less digital commemorative public atmospheres of the Manchester Arena bombing’s first anniversary

“…Overall, we integrate an attention to digital media and technology that has been mostly lacking when the concept of atmosphere has been used to study other public events whether commemorative (see Closs Stephens et al., 2017, Sumartojo, 2015, 2016) or otherwise (see Closs Stephens, 2016; Edensor, 2012). We also contribute directly to recent academic efforts to understand the new forms of commemoration and togetherness that are emerging as governments and grassroots actors increasingly enroll digital technologies and social media when publicly commemorating past events (see Merrill, 2019, 2018; Sumartojo, 2017). In analysing the commemoration of a terror attack this article also connects with that research concerned with the politics of response to terrorism and the role of togetherness therein.…”