Trauma Online: Public Exposure of Personal Grief and Suffering (original) (raw)

2009, Traumatology

This article considers how traditional physical memorials to war and other catastrophic events differ from online memorials in the Web 2.0 environment and it asks what the benefits and drawbacks of each may be. There has always been an awkward fit between the public statements embodied in monuments to those who died in war and the personal stories told by individuals who returned. This disjuncture serves to demonstrate that the two ways of remembering traumatic events-the collective and the individual-have traditionally been poles apart and often contradictory. Gradually, over the past two decades, with the increasing influence of critical theories that have questioned national and other dominating discourses-and also with growing interest within the field of clinical psychology in what is now labeled posttraumatic stress disorder-there has been an increasing interest in the vast underlayer of personal stories that national narratives have shut out or silenced. What can new interactive digital modes for representing cataclysmic events offer to both witnesses and the users who access the Web sites? Online environments provide public spaces for expressing, sharing, and working through experiences of trauma and crisis. New communities are created and new kinds of records and histories are produced. But what are the effects of making private trauma so public? What can online commemoration achieve? What kinds of communities are created and how are these different from physical communities? This article addresses these and other related questions with reference to recent examples.

The Internet Politics, Time, and Remembering Trauma

This article shows that the Internet is a technology to remember trauma. The Internet allows us to realise trauma of people being placed in violent incident. Three main considerations are worth taking for granted. First, the Internet leads to a convergence of the past and the present. The Internet illuminates a trauma supposedly buried in and by the past to the present recognition. Second, the Internet underlines a distinction between life that is worth remembering and life that is not as if time makes a decision to remember or to forget a traumatised life. If time permits a memorisation of some deadly people, such life will be a particular form of life that time chooses to remember, which is different from life that time chooses not. Third, the violent image does travel beyond one border as the Internet displays trauma globally. Those considerations are conditions for a reflection of the politics of the Internet philosophically. That is to say, the Internet creates a so-called ‘a zone of proximity’ in threefold. First, it highlights the proximity between the survivor from the atrocious incident and the listener. Second, it shows an attempt to forget trauma yet hardly possible to remove it from mind; this is implied that trauma exists eternally. Third, the last zone of proximity points out to the irony of modern society. The use of technology in a harmful way reflects how humans are heading towards becoming-animals.

The Digital Graveyard: Online Social Networking Sites as Vehicles of Remembrance

This essay explores practices of commemoration and memorilization through an ethnographic analysis of the online social networking sites MySpace, Facebook, and Tribe.net. These new forms of remembrance elicit the primary traits of remembrance articulated by Edward Casey: search, display, encapsulation, expansion, persistance, and pastness. Online shrines dedicated to the deceased arouse a unique set of conerns and possibilities regarding respect for the dead, the boundaries between public and private, and rituals of mourning. Ultimately, I suggest that the very notion of "embodiment" must be reconfugured in light of these new technologies, and suggest that we take these possibilities for "living on" through these mediums into account when we choose to represent ourselves through them.

An Exploration of Memory‐making in the Digital Era: Remembering the FEPOW Story Online

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 2014

Symptomatic of the digital era, web‐memorials and web‐communities have become highly prevalent as a means of commemorating the past. Drawing on the analysis of fepow‐community.org.uk, an online network devoted to honouring the stories of Allied soldiers interned by the Japanese during the Second World War (also known as FEPOWs), and an online survey of its members, this paper examines the extent that such platforms facilitate more inclusionary allowances for doing so vis‐à‐vis physical sites of memory. Specifically, while web‐memorials do remedy some of the shortcomings linked to the latter, they too are plagued by criticisms limiting them as a more democratic way of remembering. It also highlights how physical sites of memory provide certain affective resonances virtual memorials do not. Consequently, both genres of memory are often capitalised upon complementarily (rather than in a mutually exclusive way) as each feeds into the other, both salient to memory work.

Remember, remember, 11 September: memorializing 9/11 on the Internet

Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2010

The events of 11 September 2001 continue to attract the interest of political elites and publics across the world. This article takes as its focus an unusual and contemporary collection of efforts to commemorate those attacks and their victims, exploring the emergence of a series of Internet memorials dedicated to the preservation of their memory. By positioning these memorials both historically and politically via an investigation of their form and their functions, two lines of argument are pursued. First, that their multi-textual construction, participatory potential and dynamism signal an interesting and important mnemonic shift within social memory practices. And second, that the appeal of these websites lies in their location at the intersection of two related political logics: the first a politics of symbolic exchange, the second a promissory politics of hope.

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