Walking together? The mediatised performative commemoration of 7/7’s tenth anniversary

Abstract

This article investigates the #WalkTogether initiative which commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 7 July 2005 London bombings by encouraging people to individually re-enact and share on social media the moment when following the bombings, in the absence of a functioning public transport network, Londoners walked to and from work together. It asks what forms of togetherness did the initiative promote and what was the role of professional journalists and news organisations in facilitating this togetherness? To answer these questions, the article conceives of togetherness as hybrid and unfolding within broader media and memory ecologies. This encourages the use of innovative combinations of methods and the introduction of the concepts of ‘mediatised performative commemoration’ and ‘digital gestural remains’. In turn, this allows a number of specific enquiries into the characteristics of #WalkTogether’s commemoration, communities, remembrance and reporting a decade after 7/7 took place and a discussion of the extent to which the initiative resulted in forms of clicktivism and commemorative silos.

The rhythms of social movement memories: the mobilization of Silvio Meier’s activist remembrance across platforms

“…This convergence in mnemonic activity has also led to states of eurhythmia around the anniversaries of Meier's death. The beneficial interaction of different mnemonic rhythms during these moments has also been evident on YouTube and Twitter, two further social media platforms with mnemonic capacities that are frequently used by social movements within their different self-mediation strategies (see Askanius, 2013;Cammaerts, 2015;Merrill, 2017b;Smit el al 2017). The first YouTube videos relating to Meier were uploaded around the fifteenth anniversary of his death in 2007.…”

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.…”

The great get together as an experiment in convivial politics

“…A number of studies have focused on the role of social media in building solidarity and a sense of political belonging, especially through sharing images and other symbolic communication during moments of crisis, terror and commemoration (Berkowitz, 2017; Bruns and Hanusch, 2017; Merrill, 2019). Samuel Merrill (2019), for example, examined the #WalkTogether initiative which commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 7 July 2005 London bombings, in which Londoners walked to and from work together. The togetherness here was both physical and imagined, a ‘hybrid genre of commemoration’ (Merrill, 2019: 7) which relied on the walking procession, posting on social media, and remediation by news outlets.…”

“…Samuel Merrill (2019), for example, examined the #WalkTogether initiative which commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 7 July 2005 London bombings, in which Londoners walked to and from work together. The togetherness here was both physical and imagined, a ‘hybrid genre of commemoration’ (Merrill, 2019: 7) which relied on the walking procession, posting on social media, and remediation by news outlets. But Merrill notes that this ‘cosmopolitan understanding of togetherness’ (p. 9) may actually have created a ‘commemorative silo’ (p. 13) that rarely featured oppositional viewpoints, and which points to the limits of the togetherness it engendered.…”