Session 5b (Digital Memories Track): New Media and Representations of the Past
5th Global Conference
Friday 12th March – Sunday 14th March 2010
Salzburg, Austria
Recontexualising the Yugoslav Popular Pasts: Blogging Monuments
Martin Pogačar
Section for Interdisciplinary Research, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia
Imagining, interpreting and appropriating the past in the digital age is a complex and manifold set of practices and processes no longer exclusively based on textual accounts but extensively employing audio-visual components (sound, image, video) in ways quite different than before. Particularly in terms of production, dissemination and consumption of digital content, the interspersing of text-image-sound has become widely used in digital storytelling, information industry etc. At that, such content is also being made available for real time response, comment, critique. Individual agency is crucial in constructing the past, i.e. in re-narrating the past, much more explicitly than before. Among others, uses of digital technologies in renarrating the past span official (museums) and unofficial (digital storytelling, blogging, websites) narrativisations, and problematise the role of national meta-narratives. Particularly in the newly established post-socialist states, which largely experienced an annihilation or revision of their socialist pasts, renarrativisations of the past in the era of ubiquitous media feature prominently. One of the many means available to re-appropriate the past (in the case of the former Yugoslavia) is the emergent medium of photo/video/audio blogging, i.e., blogs that employ video-image-text-audio (textual comments, images, sounds, videos) to renarrate and preserve the disappearing facets of Yugoslav popular culture. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the potential of such blogging for preserving/archiving the remnants of popular culture and everyday life. To that end the author investigates several blogs, which attempt to preserve/archive Yugoslav audio (and visual) heritage (e.g. http://jugozvuk.blogspot.com/, http://yugoslavian.blogspot.com/, http://kasetomanija.wordpress.com/, http://jugosvirke.wordpress.com/, http://nevaljaleploce.blogspot.com/), in terms of presentation of content, their inter-relatedness to other similar attempts, and in terms of user/visitor response. Additionally, the author investigates the potential of such blogging for wider use in historiography.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Democracy in Digital Age: Uses of New Media in Czech Republic after 1989
Jindra Ticha
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
In my paper I would like to explore the usage of new media in Czech Republic during first decade after revolutionary year 1989, which was the period of social and cultural transformation from the communism to democracy. I will concern on institutional and discursive practices of using the new media as the instrument for reconciling with the past and constituing new social system.
Concerned as „democratic media“ new media were taken as an improvement on older „passive“ media, as they appear to hold out the opportunity for more open and democratic social and political communication. In czech society after revolution in 1989 the new media were used as tool for separation from the old totalitarian regime with its ideologically loaded broadcast and print media. The hopes were placed in new media to participate on establishing the democracy according to the western model of a liberal civil society.
The ethical and political dimension of the new media and their possible contribution to a new kind of democracy were frequent issues discussed in czech media in nineties. On the search for an ethic of the media there were several questions asked: What kind of responsibility do we have for the decision on what kind of reality is represented? Who has access to the media systems? To what extent do these systems mirror the needs of the citizens? Is it the membership in the community of users of the media that makes us human beings? Is it, on the contrary, leading us into the loss of freedom?
Through exploring the institutonal and discursive practices for answering these questions at that time, I would like to explore the usage of new media as a part of democratic concept in the period of social transformation from totalitarian regime. I belive doing this could contribute to the discussion about political uses of new media as „democratic“.
New Media Use in the Production of National Identity and the Preservation of National History: The Digital Emirates Project
Harris Breslow and Herman Coutinho
Department of Mass Communication, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
This paper addresses the use of new media in the production of historical knowledge and the preservation of national identity and memory within the framework of an interactive multimedia academic research database and archive. One method for the preservation of national historical knowledge and identity is the integration of multiple sources and forms of information within an interactive multimedia archive; the more sources and media within the archive, the more complex the overall informational effect, and thus the more deeply and complex the experience of national identity and memory. We will demonstrate this in the following ways.
1. A demonstration and discussion of a prototype of the Digital Emirates Project, an interactive multimedia database and archive based on an historical timeline, and allowing for the real time interaction of maps, still photography, video, research archives and academic and popular databases.
2. The delivery, through the database, of a project concerning the uses and depiction of roadway roundabout art as historical markers, communal symbols, and cultural icons. This paper argues that roundabout art plays a complex role in the reproduction of local and national Emirati culture, and that the most effective way to discuss, describe and display the complex conjunctural functions of roundabout art is through the use of a new medium, such as the Digital Emirates Project.
3. In order to demonstrate the potential of the software as a repository for multiple sources/types of information we will also demonstrate the delivery of a second academic project, “The Changing Space of the Arab City”. The project’s thesis is that changes to the nature of urban space have fundamental effects upon the national cultural formation within which the changes occur. This project uses Dubai as a case study and will be discussed within the framework of the Digital Emirates Project.
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