Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape

About the Book

This is a comprehensive study of Holocaust memory in the digital age of social media and an important examination of how social technology affects the way history is made and circulated online.

Social media has become a place where memories of the Holocaust take shape through user-driven content shared in elaborately interconnected communication networks. Curated exhibits, documentaries and scholarly research, smartphone photos, short videos and online texts act as windows into the popular consciousness. They document how everyday people make sense of the crime of genocide, presenting unique challenges to historians. Does participatory media create a different understanding of genocide than more traditional forms of writing? How does expertise manifest in the digital public sphere? Do YouTube tourist videos and concentration camp selfies undermine the seriousness of the Holocaust and Holocaust studies by extension? Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape provides valuable answers to these questions and much more.

The book comes with a range of helpful images and it also analyzes the way vernacular memory around the Holocaust and postwar reckoning and reconciliation is mobilized as well as contested in the digital sphere. It is an important volume for all scholars and students of the Holocaust, its history and memory.

Table of Contents:

List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Holocaust Spaces, Tourist Bodies, and Networked Memory on Instagram
2. Flickr, Photojournalism, and the Digital Archive
3. Holocaust Vlogs and the Quest for Authenticity on YouTube
4. Remediating and Remembering the Dresden Bombing on Twitter
5. Private Spaces/Public Interest: Facebook in the Digital Public Sphere
Conclusion - Networked Knowledge and Digital Memory Activism
Bibliography
Index

About the Author :

Jennifer V. Evans is Professor of History at Carleton University, Canada. She is the author of The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (2023) and Life Among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (2011).

Meghan Lundrigan received her PhD in History in 2019 from Carleton University, Canada. She lives and works as a researcher and analyst in Ottawa, Canada.

Erica Fagen received her PhD in History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. She currently lives and works in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Review :
[T]he book offers a most illuminating insight into how online platforms shape the memory and understanding of the Holocaust … Evans, Fagen, and Lundrigan have written a well-argued, richly illustrated and thoughtful book on the complex, multifaceted, and somewhat hard to ascertain issue of “Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape.” Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape is essential reading for anyone interested in the role that new media play in our understanding of the past and its construction in the present. The book marshals an impressive range of theoretical frameworks and methodologies, combining quantitative and qualitative analysis of a variety of media, including Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. It demonstrates convincingly how techniques used by media and communication scholars can be made useful for historians wanting to understand the importance of new media connectivity in the writing of the past. The authors skilfully weave a path between pessimism and optimism. They recognize the threat posed by a “post-truth” media ecology and its enabling of right populist extremism on the one hand, and the potential of social media to foster communities of opposition and democratic participation in the creation of historical knowledge on the other. Activism, mediatization, and archives are key terms across the volume, highlighting both the newness of these forms, but also how they are connected to older and institutionalized ways of memory-making. It is a particular strength of the volume that the authors consider both the mediation of content and its reception by and impact on audiences, who are also situated and act in the world “offline”. Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape combines a deep understanding of the multiple layers and historical evolution of Holocaust memory with an impressive grasp of how different technological platforms shape the way in which different actors and communities remember. Finely attuned to the challenges and dangers of addressing the legacies of mass violence online, the authors also point to the important opportunities for a new and productive engagement with public history that social media can provide. This volume is, moreover, an invaluable methodological guide for historians and others working with Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter/X, and more. With Holocaust memory now a fast moving and ever-changing target for scholars, Evans, Lundrigan and Fagen bring not only a fantastic breadth of knowledge and theoretical insight, but also sensitivity and nuance to a topic that lies at the heart of our most pressing discussions about democracy and its discontents, popular culture, and the role of memory in all of it. A massive achievement! [If] you embrace the idea of networked memories and follow the methodically inspiring analysis suggestions, the book offers helpful access to the sheer incalculable amount of data that is constantly being produced in and for social media. The authors take interested readers by the hand to approach the platforms' own logic as potentially exciting archives for researching digital memories.