229 / 658
227
Friday, November 11
0 9 : 0 0 – 1 0 : 3 0
PN 192
Memory Online: Exploring the Democratic Potential and Political Uses of Nostalgia
E. Kalinina
1
, M. Menke
2
1
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
2
University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany
In today´s digital era we find segmented online public spheres that exist next to and often interrelated with the established mass media driven public
sphere. How the past is negotiated seems to be reconfigured to a significant extend under these circumstances. Depending on the media specificity, the pro‑
cess of memory work can be more open, fluid or inter-exchangeable to various degrees. Nevertheless, while communication on some platforms provides
space for dialogue others might stir the discussions in the“needed”direction. Often the same platforms might contain both dialogical narrations and more
authoritarian variants. Yet, mediated communication on social networking sites does not replace dominant historical narratives but rather allows for re-in‑
terpretations of the past by bringing them with individual memories of people’s personal life-worlds. The overlapping of individual mnemonic narratives
with the grand narratives creates situations where the past can be reciprocally reframed with consideration of both the official versions of the past dominat‑
ing mass media and the ones produced among the people. In our presentation, we explore the democratic potential of digital cultural memory production
and shed light on possible political uses of nostalgic representations of the past. Nostalgia shapes narratives of individual and collective memories in social
media and contributes to the construction of collective identity. At the same time, due to its immense affective appeal, nostalgia is politically exploited in
official historical narratives aiming at national identity building. Therefore, we analysed Russian online communities, such as“Born in the USSR”and“Ency‑
clopaedia of our childhood” (hosted by the online platforms Vkontakte and LiveJournal respectively) where users share memories about life in the former
Soviet Union. By applying qualitative content analysis, we investigated how people shape their memories aligned to the official Post-Soviet narratives dom‑
inant in contemporary Russia and thereby are able to show how counter-memories challenge its uncritical nostalgic re-production in digital public spheres.
We will demonstrate in which ways media and mediated communication account to the connectedness of temporally and spatially dislocated groups by
the construction and communication of collective memories. We argue that even initiated from below by the participants of past events, the mediated col‑
lective memories do not provide the“true”past. The image of the past becomes a calibration between the members´ memories and the historical narrative
about the former Soviet Union provided by the state. We want to elaborate on this process that comes with a normative conflict: the comfort of nostalgic
romanticization of a shared past and the common historical narrative are often incongruent. Longing for aspects of one´s former life-world, e.g. lost social
relations and cultural traditions, is often understood as a glorification of the state. This reveals that many historical narratives are state- or politics-centric
and are not representing the variety of life conceptions within such states, even though most of themwere clearly limited by suppressive systems. Ekaterina
Kalinina is post-doctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen Manuel Menke is research and teaching assistant at the Department for Media, Knowl‑
edge and Communication (imwk) at Augsburg University, Germany.