Media Archaeologies, Micro-Archives and Storytelling: Re-presencing the Past

245 Pages·2016·2.85 MB·English

by  Martin Pogačar (auth.)

Media Archaeologies,
Micro-Archives and Storytelling
Re-presencing the Past
Martin Pogačar
palgrave macmillan memory studies
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
Series Editors
Andrew Hoskins
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, United Kingdom
John Sutton
Department of Cognitive Science
Macquarie University
Macquarie, Australia
Aim of the Series
The nascent fi eld of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends
that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to
that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes
in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory;
panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination
with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of
trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed
to an intensifi cation of public discourses on our past over the last thirty
years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts
affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This
groundbreaking new series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’
under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for
its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theo-
retical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?
International Advisory Board
Steven Brown, University of Leicester, UK
Mary Carruthers, New York University, USA
Paul Connerton, University of Cambridge, UK
Astrid Erll, University of Wuppertal, Germany
Robyn Fivush, Emory University, USA
Tilmann Habermas, University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia, USA
Susannah Radstone, University of East London, UK
Ann Rigney, Utrecht University, Netherlands
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14682
Martin   Pogačar
Media Archaeologies,
Micro-Archives and
Storytelling
Re-presencing the Past
Martin   P ogačar
Institute of Culture and Memory Studies
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
ISBN 978-1-137-52579-6 ISBN 978-1-137-52580-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52580-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943531
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For Lara, Mila and Val

P
REFACE
This is a book about the lives of the past and the ways they are recorded
in digital media. It is an account of how memory, remembering and sto-
rytelling are affected by digital media, and an attempt to understand how
our relationship to the past, but also to the present and the future, is
transformed in the time of the digitisation of everything. It is an attempt
to understand how we, as individuals and as collectivities, are intertwined,
across time and space, with the world around us. This book poses the
question of how media technologies affect our lives and how they struc-
ture the rhythms of our daily lives. The study is emotionally and gen-
erationally anchored within the historical and popular cultural legacies of
the latter part of the twentieth century, one of the most ambiguous peri-
ods in human history so far, undoubtedly because it is, by far, the most
excessively recorded and archived. Furthermore, it is embedded in the
context of unprecedented technological advances and grave socio-cultural
perturbances that bewilder humanity at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst
century.
This book is based on the research I conducted in the period between
the years 2010 and 2012, which focused on the memory of the Socialist
Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–91) in digital (social) media.
While engaged with memory in post-Yugoslavia, this book is also an
investigation of how we may think about, grasp and deal with memory
in digital media. To this end, I devised a framework, structured around
media archaeology and micro-archiving (see Chap. 3 ), which is based
on the view that the present is structured as a culture of the past (see
Introduction and Chap. 2 ) . This framework offers an approach to bridge the
vii
viii PREFACE
theorisation of memory and the practical approaches to disinterring and
publishing mediated traces of the past.
The study focuses on how the past and media are used in individual inter-
ventions into, and affective renditions of the past. In other words, I look
at what remains in the wake of the collapse of a country in social media. In
this context, I take Yugoslavia as a metaphor of the post-Second World War
period: its beginning is fi rmly rooted in the Second World War, the legacy
of the anti-fascist resistance and the disturbing aftermath of the penultimate
global slaughterhouse; the country’s infamous collapse coincides with the
collapse of socialism and the end of the Cold War. Moreover, Yugoslavia’s
history and post-Yugoslavs’ experientiality are divisively encoded through
the ambiguities of emancipatory and authoritarian legacies of socialism. 1
Not least, the end of Yugoslavia and the end of the Cold War—namely, the
emergence of the post-socialist countries and their mission to catch-up with
the West—coincide with the rise of digital media.
This exposes the central underpinning of this project: to think about
the redefi nition of communication and human lifeworlds in the liminal-
ity of the analogue and digital worlds. Being neck-deep in digital media
today, life prior to the connectivity turn seems increasingly unfathomable,
even to us ‘digital immigrants’ who have lived mobile- and Wi-Fi-free
lives, and who often look with nostalgia and admiration upon our pre-dig-
ital, analogue, mechanic and pre-instant-connectivity media-h omeland,
made of paper, ink, tape and vinyl. Overwhelmed by gadgets and applica-
tions, we can but wonder how we went about our lives without our little
mobile tech-helpers. In this view, the generations born before the late
1980s still living today are the last witnesses of an utterly unique historical
position, observing one of the most rapid changes in the history of human
communication. 2
What is more, in the liminality of the cultures of absence and post-
scarcity,3 we are witness to and active participants in an unprecedented
change that affects the bases of culturality and sociality and which Alvin
Toffl er, already back in the 1970s, defi ned as acceleration. 4 A wide array
of activities, skills and competences, sciences and pastimes, from medicine
and biology, to neuro-rewiring of the brain, artistic practices, music, cin-
ema, economy, conceptualisations of authorship and audience, the self and
the body, fandom, labour and technological unemployment, (non-)limits
of surveillance and, last but not least, memory and history are enhanced,
or rendered obsolete.
PREFACE ix
OTHER WORLDS, PALIMPSESTS AND BORDERS
The questions regarding memory have a long history and are widely dis-
tributed across time and space (Chap. 2 ) . Among others, they left traces
in Kurt Vonnegut’s S laughterhouse 5 and China Miéville’s T he City and
the City . These books are not singled out by coincidence or personal taste
alone but because they offer an invaluable metaphorical take on being in
the world. They add to the debate on how the past is veiled and unveiled,
‘dug out’, buried and re-presenced a bit of fi ctional dimension. They hint
at how different worlds, those of yesterday, today and tomorrow are inter-
twined in digital media looms that weave an intricate fabric of memory.
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 became part of my formation as a reader;
his take on the Second World War and Billy Pilgrim’s post-war life proved
an indelible infl uence on how I came to imagine and understand that
historical period. Exploring the source of this fascination, two things
have emerged prominent: the topic of memory and history of the Second
World War and the sci-fi aspects related to Billy Pilgrim’s encounter with
the extraterrestrial Tralfamadorians. Vonnegut’s story uncompromisingly
unravelled the horrors of the war that so radically shaped the latter part of
the twentieth century.
The Tralfamadorians illustrate the ways in which the past is approach-
able through its traces: as they move along and through time, these extra-
terrestrials leave traces of their presence in space and in time.5 They are, in
a way, dragging the ‘images’ of their past-selves through their space-timed
lifeworlds. Interestingly enough, and certainly pre-dated, this metaphor
serves as an illustrative example of human existence and agency in the age
of digital media. Although mostly unaware, the individual navigating the
media time and space, as a consequence, leaves traces of her presence. She
is thus entangled in navigating her own and other people’s traces of medi-
ated presences and absences, through which she can co-create an interpre-
tation of other people’s lives, their presents and pasts.
The above extrapolation of Tralfamadorian lifeworld, reader be warned,
is based on the memory of my fi rst reading the novel. Over time, the whole
idea has somewhat blended with my personal and professional interests.
In fact, I have managed to adapt the story in such way as to fi t it in my
vision of the mediated past. I may have simplifi ed and somewhat stretched
the interpretation of the novel in teasing out the illustrative model for the
workings of memory in the digital age. But the inevitable incongruence, as
evident from the passage quoted below, nevertheless says a good deal about