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Holocaust Remembrance on Facebook During the Lockdown: A Turning Point or a Token Gesture?
Abstract
In this chapter, we investigate how four Italian and five German Holocaust memorials and museums, as well as three major internationally relevant Holocaust organizations, employed Facebook for Holocaust remembrance purposes during the period of pandemic lockdown. A comparison was made of the quantity and variety of activity on their Facebook pages during the months of April and May 2020, as compared with the same time span in 2019 and 2021. Although the study revealed major changes and adjustments in Holocaust institutions’ Facebook activities, both in terms of volume and type of content and regarding interaction strategies, the results show that the COVID-19 lockdown did not appear to trigger a radical change in Holocaust remembrance institutions’ use of social media. Despite the changes found in many Holocaust remembrance practices on Facebook and their growing use of digital media, the memorials and museums considered in this study appear to adopt a conservative stance in terms of the topics and themes addressed via social media and a general little change in the framework of commemoration policies. Also, despite a drive toward internationalization, as demonstrated by the Holocaust institutions’ increased use of English, there still appears to be a certain tension between local and global memories of the Holocaust.
... By contrast, even though Holocaust memory has become one of the strongest Western collective memories and identities (Pakier and Stråth 2010), the Holocaust was a profoundly geographical event, rooted in specific physical spaces, times, and locations. As recently analysed (Manca, Rehm, and Haake 2022), even in Western Europe, national memories of the events of World War II may still differ and focus more on one aspect than others, thus intertwining local and transcultural memory of the Holocaust differently. For instance, countries such as Italy and Germany which were initially allied during World War II and later became enemies, today perpetuate different official and vernacular narratives of the Holocaust, mostly as part of intricate narratives of perpetration and victimhood (Sierp 2012). ...
... This is despite increasing homogenisation of Holocaust memory, at least in Europe (Kovács 2018), resulting from ever-greater digital globalisation (Pakier and Stråth 2010). For instance, recent analysis (Manca, Rehm, and Haake 2022) shows that during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, German Holocaust museums increased their use of languages other than German in their Facebook communication, while Italian Holocaust museums tended to publish only in Italian, thus targeting mostly the nationally based community. These two sets of Holocaust institutions demonstrate diverse degrees of digital internationalisation and globalisation intensified by the pandemic and show different degrees of priority in seeking to enable a wider audience to read and understand their contributions (see Bartolini 2021). ...
This study takes a social-technical systems approach to investigate how national and transnational memory of the Holocaust are intertwined on the social media profiles of a set of Italian museums and memorials. We examine how Italy’s four most important Holocaust museums and memorials use social media as ecosystems to provide historical content and engage their audiences in digital remembrance about the Holocaust on four social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Results show that posts on Facebook led to a higher volume of interactivity and positive responses than posts on the other platforms, while user activity in terms of creating new posts remains low on all four platforms. The four institutions tend to address a national audience and interweave transnational Holocaust memorial themes with distinctively national ones. Although the examined social media profiles demonstrate that museums and memorials are reliable sources of historical and trustworthy information through which they shape memory ecologies, their use reflects a conservational attitude, with a preference for a target audience over the age of 25, expressed both in the choice of platforms adopted and in the mostly one-way communication approach employed. The paper outlines implications for further social media practice in Digital Holocaust Memory.
This article investigates how fallen British soldiers of Operation TELIC (Iraq) and Operation Herrick (Afghanistan) are commemorated on the Facebook page British Troops Remembered. Based on an online ethnography and fifteen semi-structured interviews with users of this page, this article aims to better understand how online commemoration is performed, experienced and shaped in everyday life. It argues that people participate in the reproduction of militarism when they promote military values and frame military lives as grievable and worthy through commemorative practices. Paradoxically, although digital commemorative spaces offer new opportunities for people to counter official narratives of warfare and democratize national memory, it is precisely this possibility that keeps people from sharing alternative interpretations of military losses online. By analysing how the logics of militarism are reproduced in everyday encounters online, this article aims to contribute to discussions within critical military studies and memory studies about the relationship between online commemoration and militarism.
Cultural institutions responsible for preserving and transmitting the history and memory of the Holocaust include museums and memorials. These institutions remind visitors of the tragedy and aim to educate them about the events that led to it, the people affected and the lessons that can be learned from it. They also serve to honour the victims and those involved in relief efforts. Additionally, museums play a crucial role in disseminating cultural memory, which encompasses both individual and collective processes. As Nora describes, museums can be considered “lieux de mémoire”, symbolic elements of a community’s memory and ethical projects that encourage visitors to learn from the past, fostering a common sense of guilt and responsibility that binds the nation together. This is particularly true of memorial museums, which act as a form of public education and help community members remember and reflect on difficult events from the past. By engaging with these memories and understanding their significance, people can learn from the past and form a shared sense of responsibility for the future.
While Holocaust museums have embraced social media to connect with online audiences and provide educational materials, the specifics of their use are not well understood. A Delphi study involving 22 experts developed a framework for examining Holocaust-related social media content. This framework, the result of a three-round iterative process, includes three main areas: Historical content of the Holocaust, Contemporary issues related to the Holocaust, and Museum activities and communication. The hierarchical system of categories can help users explore the vast range of online materials and help educators identify effective strategies for using social media content in Holocaust education.
Background
Holocaust memory and learning processes have become increasingly mediatised as a result of rapid technological advances. There is, however, little information available regarding how people learn about this topic informally through social media.
Objectives
This paper explores how adult learners develop their learning ecologies by using social media to learn about the Holocaust informally.
Methods
The study uses a learning ecology perspective to analyse the interests, expectations and learning process of a group of adult learners (N = 276). An online survey tool was developed to collect information on the interests, expectations, and benefits of learning about Holocaust‐related topics among online users of four Italian Holocaust museums' social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube). Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to summarise the characteristics of the sample and to answer the research questions.
Results and Conclusions
The results show that most of the respondents are mostly women, with an average age of 50 and a higher level of education. In terms of interest and expectations, they are particularly interested in issues related to the intertwining of transnational and national memory. They also express a sense of civic responsibility with regard to the legacy of the Holocaust. Finally, components of the learning process show proactive behaviour and a preference for individual learning, while interaction with peers is considered less important.
Takeaways
There is an urgent need to understand how learners' preferences influence the development of learning ecologies and the types of content they are most likely to be exposed to as a result. It is also important for social media content providers to understand that learners are looking for quality resources and trustworthy content to further their education.
In less than a year, the trending short-video platform TikTok transformed from a primarily entertaining environment for lip-syncing, dancing, and other self-performances into an interest-based platform for sharing information about politics, sexuality, identity, history, and other topics. This development was accompanied by the rise of a format that we describe as “serious TikTok.” In such videos, users communicate socio-political affairs in engaging ways through digital storytelling while harnessing the platform’s features, aesthetics, and dialects, allowing them to playfully unpack complex topics, contextualize and provide information. Following a controversy about TikTok users who performed as fictional Holocaust victims in a #POVHolocaustChallenge in August 2020, as well as the increase in antisemitic harassment and hate speech on the platform, ways of seriously dealing with the complex history of the Holocaust on TikTok gained particular attention. In the following, we explore the specific modes individual and institutional TikTok creators use to address the history and memory of the Holocaust in their short video-memes and their ways of using TikTok’s memetic vernaculars to produce more stimulating historical storytelling formats.
Abuse, excuse, misrepresentation and manipulation of the history of the Holocaust can be found at all levels of society. This is far from a fringe phenomenon: examples may be found in governments that seek to minimize their historical responsibility, conspiracy theorists who accuse Jews of exaggerating their suffering for financial gain, and online users who make use of imagery and language associated with the Holocaust for political, ideological, or commercial purposes unrelated to its history. Regardless of its form, Holocaust distortion and its potential direct or indirect effects – antisemitism, Holocaust denial, conspiracy myths and extreme nationalism – have an international dimension and relevance, and require an international response. As for social media, while their rise has enabled individuals and groups to connect on a global level and to have instant access to information and knowledge, they have also allowed spread and dissemination of hateful content, including antisemitism and Holocaust denial and distortion at an unprecedented rate.
This report aims to provide Holocaust museums and memorials with a set of guidelines and recommendations to counter the phenomenon of Holocaust distortion on social media channels. As these institutions are increasingly important bulwarks against Holocaust distortion, they have manifold opportunities for safeguarding the historical record and need help to face the challenges posed by those who distort the truth. In this light, the report highlights several actions that Holocaust memorials and museums can take to help reduce the impact of different forms of Holocaust distortion on social media.
Unlike Holocaust denial – the attempt to erase the Holocaust from history – Holocaust distortion excuses, minimizes, or misrepresents the Holocaust in a variety of ways and through various media which are not always readily identifiable. While there is broad agreement that Holocaust denial is fuelled by antisemitism, Holocaust distortion is either considered a form of secondary antisemitism or manipulation of Holocaust history and its memory for various purposes. Although irresponsible and abusive history may affect any historical event, today the number of mutations and distortions of Holocaust history are growing and are progressively assuming diverse rampant forms. As there are no single, general measures against all forms of distortion, several specific actions will have to be implemented depending on the geographical or social context.
The chapter introduces the robust #JewishTikTok community members ("JewToks") in the United States and unpacks their creative attempt to communicate, educate and combat antisemitism on TikTok while facing two significant threats to their visual volume: (1) TikTok’s "dark" side that pushes users to memeify antisemitism (e.g., altering, repacking, or remixing) utilizing the platform’s trends and aesthetics; (2) TikTok’s algorithmic repression, in which the platform’s moderation system tends to moderate and block JewToks’ responses to antisemitic content. Based on interviews with creators and a close multimodal analysis of their strategies, we trace this vicious cycle of human and algorithmic hate while examining creators' innovative ways to employ TikTok’s various technological affordances to evade algorithmic oppression. Creators creatively harness the platform's memetic vernacular of humor, dance, and satire as dialogic modes for community building, destigmatizing Jewish culture, combating antisemitism, and translating Jewish concepts into memes while using a plethora of features and aesthetics (e.g., POV, green screen, lip-syncing, respond-to-comments).
There is a rich body of literature examining the contribution of Holocaust museums to the Holocaust memorial culture by focusing on their educative, awareness-raising, and memorializing functions. In this context, ample attention has been devoted to these museums’ exhibitions, educatory activities, reenactment practices, digital strategies, as well as their historical and architectural narratives. This article brings a novel perspective to the literature by giving an account of how Holocaust museums act as a medium through which individuals contribute to the Holocaust memorial culture from a Constructivist perspective. It argues that Holocaust museums do not treat individuals as passive recipients of the Holocaust memorial culture, but actors who could exercise agential capacities in relation to the Holocaust memorial culture. This argument is illustrated by case studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Berlin Jewish Museum, and the Anne Frank House. It is shown that these museums offer platforms through which individuals actively contribute to the Holocaust memorial culture by encouraging them to conduct and share their Holocaust-related research, donating Holocaust-related objects, and engaging in social activities to diffuse related norms and messages.
Digital technologies and social media platforms have been used in museum communication for over a decade now, and Holocaust museums have increasingly adopted them in their modes of commemoration and provision of educational content. Nevertheless, very limited research has been conducted into the potential of social media as new memory ecologies. In this exploratory study, we conceive social media platforms as socio-technical-ecological systems whereby users develop and engage with memory practices of the Holocaust. We adopt a networked socio-ecological approach to analyse how a sample of Holocaust museums (N = 69) develop practices of digital Holocaust memory in social media. The institutions are analysed in terms of “size” (small, medium, or large), how they differ in their attitudes towards these practices, and to what extent they circulate Holocaust memory on social media. The study adopts multiple quantitative approaches and combines the results of a survey with a set of social media metrics analysing how museums engage on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube in terms of generated content, interactivity, popularity, and type of content. Results show that museums have an overall positive attitude towards social media although some concerns were expressed, mostly by smaller institutions; they tend to use mostly Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and to share educational content and information about the museum's activities. However, despite a tendency to aggregate a large number of fans and followers, especially in the case of larger institutions, interaction with users remains limited. Prospects for more interactive participation and its implications are also discussed.
Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as digital and social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. From interdisciplinary perspectives across digital culture, art, and technology, we investigate these challenges magnified by advances in digital and computational media and culture, looking particularly at recent and relevant reports on changes in the ways museums interact with the public. We focus on human digital behavior, experience, and interaction in museums in the context of art, artists, and human engagement with art, using the observational perspectives of the authors as a basis for discussion. Our research shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation, about which this paper presents a landscape view of its characteristics and challenges. Our evidence shows that museums will need to be more prepared than ever to adapt to unabated technological advances set in the midst of cultural and social revolution, now intrinsic to the digital landscape in which museums are inevitably connected and participating across the global digital ecosystem where they inevitably find themselves entrenched, underscoring the central importance of an inclusive integrative museum model between physical and digital reality.
This editorial introduces this special edition of Holocaust Studies, which reflects on how bringing concerns central to the fields of Digital Media, Communication and Cultural Studies to bear on Holocaust Studies raises significant questions that could help inform memory and educational initiatives for the future. The editorial contextualizes the increasing visibility of denial and distortion online within algorithmic, participatory, and gaming cultures, that have the potential to benefit memory activism as much as they draw attention to dangerous alternative rhetoric. Nevertheless, it also highlights a need to think more carefully about the complicity of educators, curators, and researchers in unethical digital practices. Before introducing the contributions to this special edition of Holocaust Studies, it then briefly reflects on some of the trends that Holocaust organizations adopted during the Covid-19 Pandemic. This special edition, perhaps, offers more questions than answers, but establishing the right questions is an important step towards expanding the disciplinary boundaries of ‘Holocaust Studies’, so that it is befitting of the digital age.
“This collection is a timely and highly anticipated intervention into research on the new affordances provided by digital technologies in the context of Holocaust commemoration and education. By addressing all aspects of the digital it offers a much needed and carefully curated dialogue not only between different disciplines but also between academics, heritage practitioners and educational professionals.”
- Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine, Reader in Memory, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London
This book explores the diverse range of practical and theoretical challenges and possibilities that digital technologies and platforms pose for Holocaust memory, education and research. From social media to virtual reality, 360-degree imaging to machine learning, there can be no doubt that digital media penetrate practice in these fields. As the Holocaust moves beyond living memory towards solely mediated memory, it is imperative that we pay critical attention to the way digital technologies are shaping public memory and education and research. Bringing together the voices of heritage and educational professionals, and academics from the arts and humanities and the social sciences, this interdisciplinary collection explores the practicalities of creating digital Holocaust projects, the educational value of such initiatives, and considers the extent to which digital technologies change the way we remember, learn about and research the Holocaust, thinking through issues such as ethics, embodiment, agency, community, and immersion. At its core, this volume interrogates the extent to which digital interventions in these fields mark an epochal shift in Holocaust memory, education and research, or whether they continue to be shaped by long-standing debates and guidelines developed in the broadcast era.
Victoria Grace Walden is a senior lecturer in media at the University of Sussex, Editor-in-Chief of the academic platform Digital Holocaust Memory and authored Cinematic Intermedialities and Contemporary Holocaust Memory (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). She previously worked as a freelance educator with the Holocaust Educational Trust and as digital coordinator for the IHRA.
This paper explores the impact of COVID-19 on a planned physical exhibition – Prize Books and Politics: Rethinking Working-Class Life in Edwardian Britain – and the experience of transforming it into a digital exhibition through the platform of Instagram. Using feedback from visitors in the form of likes, comments and surveys, I reflect on the exhibition in terms of its scope, content, visitor experience and overall success. I also outline the various potentials, constraints and opportunities of Instagram as an exhibition space and put forward recommendations on how it can be used to best advantage not as a replacement for physical exhibitions, but rather as a complement that can attract new audiences, capture real-time feedback and, thus, add multiple voices and stories to museum objects.
This study examines the discourse emerging from cultural heritage content shared online during the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to understand the different affective and cognitive dynamics that are associated with the online sharing of cultural heritage in difficult times. To do so, we analyzed two Instagram hashtags – #ShareOurHeritage and #ShareCulture – that are promoted by UNESCO on a global scale. We applied a comprehensive quantitative method for qualitative data analysis. This method relied on Latent Dirichlet Allocation for topic modeling to generate automated induction of semantic topics and understand the underlying cognitive and affective dimensions of Instagram posts under each topic. Social values — including safety, inclusion, participation, and resilience — positive emotional language, and diverse cultural expressions were the most shared by the investigated hashtag community during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, results showed that users approach the virtual space as a substitute for the loss of their physical place through terms like home, virtual, online, travel tomorrow, and museums from home. Results are discussed in the context of the global digital divide, the social value of heritage to hashtag communities, and the use of Instagram as a longitudinal record of how cultural heritage values change across time.
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In this report, we present the findings of a Delphi Study aimed at validating a framework which has been designed to analyse Holocaust-related content published on the social media profiles of Holocaust museums. The study may also be considered as a pedagogical tool for teachers to provide orientation for conducting their own analysis or research and find best practices to navigate the various materials available on social media for studying and teaching about the Holocaust.
The framework serves the purpose of providing guidance on how to classify information pertaining to three major domains: Historical content of the Holocaust, Contemporary issues related to the Holocaust, and Museum activities and communication. Each domain comprises a set of macro and micro categories, for each of which a definition and examples have been given. Depending on the nature of the posts, some categories may be selected, and others ignored.
Key Findings
• This Delphi study involved a comprehensive panel of 22 international experts who, in a three round process, reached consensus on a framework composed of a set of macro and micro categories organised into three domains that are suitable for capturing the various topics addressed by Holocaust museums in their social media profiles in the field of Digital Holocaust Memory.
• The framework was extensively revised from Round 1 to Round 2, while Round 3 served the purpose of refining some micro categories and their definitions.
• The final framework comprises three domains and is constituted by 18 macro categories and 68 micro categories.
• Periodisation of historical content, agency and stages of the Holocaust remain open issues as there is still much debate among historians about these notions.
The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a process of digital acceleration and has likely changed the attitudes of local public managers toward information and communication technology (ICT). While this attitude change has been reasonably argued, it has not been systematically measured. This study narrows this gap by measuring the attitudes of public managers before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, this study finds that the pandemic has led public managers to be more confident in the capacity of ICT to help cities achieve their economic, social, and environmental goals and respond to challenges. Both explicit and implicit measures confirmed attitude changes. The explicit measures also indicated that the change in public managers’ attitude toward ICT was similar to their change in attitude toward scientific progress and greater than their change in attitude toward other issues that have played a major role during the pandemic, namely, climate change, citizen participation, and privacy.
Worldwide, pubic memory initiatives are attempting to memorialize the current COVID-19 crisis whilst it is still ongoing. The Picturing Lockdown collection is one such initiative, led by Historic England (HE), the UK’s statutory adviser on historic environment. Calling out to the public to submit photographed experiences of lockdown to both its website and via social media, HE recruited the public to partake in a national memory-making endeavor. To examine memorialization practices of the present, this research asks: in an era of social media, how is an archive of an ongoing crisis represented? Using a qualitative method for visual and textual analysis, this research compares the official HE Picturing Lockdown archive collection and #PicturingLockdown on Instagram. Analysis reveals tensions in three spheres: the institutional, the temporal, and the spatial. Demonstrating the dynamism and “presentism” introduced by social media, this research illustrates how traditional practices of commemoration are shifting.
The purpose of this study was to explore what types of digital content cultural institutions implemented during COVID-19 temporary closures and their effects on social media engagement. Existing research identified the role of digital content and social media in cultural institutions, but only in times of normal operations. This study adds to the existing literature by exploring the types of digital content implemented, impacts on social media engagement, measures of social media engagement, and future implications in regard to COVID-19 temporary closures. This study recruited 66 cultural institutions from across the United States to take part in in-depth semi-structured phone interviews to fulfill the research goals. Museums, zoos, aquariums, performing arts organizations, heritage foundations, and historical societies were represented. A qualitative approach was adopted, and content analysis on the interview transcripts indicated that cultural institutions implemented digital content to build communities through live and serialized content, partnerships, fundraising, increased transparency, and increased accessibility during temporary closures. Using primarily Instagram and Facebook with their digital content, cultural institutions increased social media engagement during this time. Although there was no consensus on best practices in measuring social media engagement, many institutions highlighted tracking active engagement such as likes, comments, and shares. As a result of the success of the digital content, cultural institutions planned continued digital content campaigns such as videos, blogs, partnerships, and paid educational content in times of normal operations.
Improving heritage educommunication on the web 2.0 is key to reaching certain sustainable development goals focused on educational quality and citizen participation. Although numerous partial studies have already been conducted, to date neither assessment tools nor detailed studies are available regarding the quality of educommunicative initiatives. Spain and Italy’s archaeological heritage museums have a consolidated track record on Twitter, which has been bolstered by museum closures due to COVID-19 and has resulted in a significant change to their educommunicative policies. The present article aims to analyze educommunicative actions undertaken on Twitter at Italian archaeological museums, compare their strategies with a previous study on Spanish institutions, and analyze to what degree the sustainability of heritage, citizen participation, learning opportunities, and universal access are being promoted. This mixed method analysis was carried out through the implementation of a web 2.0 heritage educommunication analysis tool focused on three key factors: educational procedure, R-elational interactions, and the prevailing learning paradigm, as well as a content analysis of the variables that comprise them. The key findings suggest that neither country is close to achieving a quality educommunicative strategy. Italian archaeological heritage institutions use Twitter simply as an advertising platform. Despite being a social media platform, participative initiatives are scarcely promoted, although heritage sustainability is promoted through raising awareness of conservation and appreciation. Spanish institutions, however, demonstrated the opposite pattern of use.
With the passing of the last testimonies, Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust education progressively rely on digital technologies to engage people in immersive, simulative, and even counterfactual memories of the Holocaust. This preliminary study investigates how three prominent Holocaust museums use social media to enhance the general public’s knowledge and understanding of historical and remembrance events. A mixed-method approach based on a combination of social media analytics and latent semantic analysis was used to investigate the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube profiles of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Auschwitz–Birkenau Memorial and Museum. This social media analysis adopted a combination of metrics and was focused on how these social media profiles engage the public at both the page-content and relational levels, while their communication strategies were analysed in terms of generated content, interactivity, and popularity. Latent semantic analysis was used to analyse the most frequently used hashtags and words to investigate what topics and phrases appear most often in the content posted by the three museums. Overall, the results show that the three organisations are more active on Twitter than on Facebook and Instagram, with the Auschwitz–Birkenau Museum and Memorial occupying a prominent position in Twitter discourse while Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had stronger presences on YouTube. Although the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibits some interactivity with its Facebook fan community, there is a general tendency to use social media as a one-way broadcast mode of communication. Finally, the analysis of terms and hashtags revealed the centrality of “Auschwitz” as a broad topic of Holocaust discourse, overshadowing other topics, especially those related to recent events.
The severe restrictions on public life in many countries following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic specifically affected Holocaust memorials and museums in all parts of the world, especially in Europe and in Israel. These measures posed a significant challenge, because contemporary forms of Holocaust commemoration are particularly based on the personal experience of presence at museums and historical sites. In contrast to the experience of distancing in face of the COVID-19 pandemic, establishing the presence of the past is thus a crucial element of contemporary Holocaust commemoration. This article explores the relationship between presence and absence, proximity and distance, guided commemoration and online engagement by critically analyzing digital activities of Holocaust memorials and museums in response to the pandemic. It argues that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Holocaust memorials began experimenting with the potential of social media for Holocaust memory. These experiments finally accepted the ongoing generational change and reacted to significant previous shifts in media consumption that were already affecting Holocaust commemoration.
This afterword addresses the complex temporal and global dynamics of the coronavirus pandemic. After considering some of the new social rhythms that have emerged in the wake of Covid-19 around the world, it turns to the role of collective memory before, during and after corona. The aim is to provide a basic grid for how the Covid-19 pandemic could be addressed using memory studies expertise and concepts such as premediation, memorability, memory (ab)use, national memory, colonial memory, racial stereotypes, the digital archive, generational memory, or Anthropocene time.
This study examines the relations between memory, social media experience, and testimony in the Eva Stories Instagram project. By conducting a combined visual and multimodal analysis of the stories, as well as a close analysis of the relations between social media experience and testimony, we claim that Eva Stories establishes a new responsive space for remembering the Holocaust. This space enables users to inscribe themselves into mediated Holocaust memory and to become media witnesses through the co-creation of socially mediated experiences. The self-inscription of the user is made possible by three interrelated modes of media witnessing, which continuously evoke user engagement. These new modes, we argue, indicate a new kind of agency in relation to media witnessing: the ability to testify on one’s own present social media engagement with mediated memory, and become a witness to it.
As the impact of COVID-19 emerged in early 2020 and physical movement was restricted as a public health measure, digital media consumption behaviour changed dramatically. The accelerated move to online consumption increased the urgency for memory institutions such as museums to introduce new ways to digitally experience cultural collections. This research aimed to understand how memory institutions adapted during COVID-19 lockdowns by surveying the existing and novel digital resources that enabled access to cultural heritage organizations. The research was conducted during the UK lockdown period (April–July 2020) when we collected and analysed data from 83 heritage
institutions in the UK and in the USA regarding the number, type, format, intended audience and intended aims of digital engagement opportunities they offered. The analysis evidences how different types of memory institutions responded to social need during the lockdown by supporting online visitors with resources such as educational material, live events and creative activities, and highlights where museums have acted effectively and where changed approaches are indicated.
In her seminal work, ‘The era of the witness’, the French historian Annette Wieviorka has described the rise of the witness as key figure in the cultural memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War since the 1960s. This article elaborates on the concerns Wieviorka has expressed regarding what she referred to as the new technologies of dissemination, which have become ubiquitous by now: searchable online portals to video testimony collections. These testimony portals have two important characteristics: they ‘force’ users to choose from a large number of testimonies; and they reconfigure the relation between witness and audience. In effect, as will be argued with as will be argued with the notion tertiary witnessing, a different approach to testimonies has emerged, in which the user is central, not the witness. An online questionnaire and the web statistics of the online portal getuigenverhalen.nl (‘eyewitness stories’) provided data on the use of this portal and users’ perceptions of eyewitness accounts. These data not only offer detailed information on the important issues Wieviorka addressed. They also substantiate the notion that we have entered a new phase in public memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War: that of the ‘era of the user’.
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We assess the health and wellbeing of normal adults living and working after one month of confinement to contain the COVID-19 outbreak in China. On Feb 20–21, 2020, we surveyed 369 adults in 64 cities in China that varied in their rates of confirmed coronavirus cases on their health conditions, distress and life satisfaction. 27% of the participants worked at the office, 38% resorted to working from home, and 25% stopped working due to the outbreak. Those who stopped working reported worse mental and physical health conditions as well as distress. The severity of COVID-19 in an individual's home city predicts their life satisfaction, and this relationship is contingent upon individuals’ existing chronic health issues and their hours of exercise. Our evidence supports the need to pay attention to the health of people who were not affected by the virus epidemiologically, especially for people who stopped working during the outbreak. Our results highlight that physically active people might be more susceptible to wellbeing issues during the lockdown. Policymakers who are considering introducing restrictive measures to contain COVID-19 may benefit from understanding such health and wellbeing implications.
This special issue brings together reflections that mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolutions of 1989 and their consequences for understanding European and global society. What seemed for some at least the surprising and rapid collapse of Eastern European state socialism prompted rethinking in social theory about the potential for emancipatory politics and new modes of social and political organization. At the same time there was increased reflection on the nature of varieties of capitalism and the meaning of socialism beyond the failure of at least its etatist and autarkic mode. The five articles here and the editors’ introduction address themes such as utopian hopes, civil society, the transformation of Europe, the world beyond 1989, and new configurations power and conflict.
This article examines how war memory circulates, connects and collides on digital media platforms driven by digital publics that form around popular culture. Through a case study of vernacular memory discourses emerging around a game inspired by the Yugoslav war, the article investigates how the commenting practices of YouTube users provide insights into the feelings of belonging of conflict-affected subjects that go beyond ethnicity and exceed geographical boundaries. The comments of 331 videos were analysed, using an open source tool and sequential mixed-method content analysis. Media-based collectivities emerging on YouTube are influenced by the reactive and asynchronous dynamics of comments that stimulate the emergence of micro-narratives. Within this plurality of voices, connective moments focus on shared memories of trauma and displacement beyond ethnicity. However, clashing collective memories cause disputes that reify identification along ethnic lines. The article concludes that memory discourses emerging in the margins of YouTube represent the affective reactions of serendipitous encounters between users of audio-visual content.
In historical memory education, digital technologies are gaining momentum and becoming influential in enhancing the general public's knowledge and understanding of historical events such as genocides and war atrocities. Holocaust remembrance centres and Holocaust museums have had a solid presence on the Internet for considerable time now, curating websites, mailing lists and other digital services. Social media are increasingly proving to be extremely valuable tools for allowing museums to engage with their public and for managing relations with past and future visitors. Indeed, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Instagram profiles have become significant components of the communication portfolios of various Holocaust organisations. Twitter mostly helps the public to keep up with the latest information and developments of the organisations concerned, while the Facebook pages of Holocaust victims and individual memorials are mainly set up for historical memorialisation. Despite growing use of these channels, very little research has been conducted to investigate the communication strategy of Holocaust organizations in social media, and a comprehensive overview of Holocaust memorial site presence on social media is still lacking. This study provides a preliminary analysis of Facebook pages and Twitter profiles of 23 memorials of former concentration camp located across Europe. The overarching aim is to investigate how these memorial organisations engage the public through social media, both at content page level and at relational level. The communication strategies of Facebook pages and Twitter profiles were analysed in terms of generated content, interactivity and popularity. A quantitative analysis was conducted by manual search and inspection of pages and profiles, combined with the application of social media data analysis platforms like LikeAlyzer, Fanpage Karma and Twitonomy. Results show that the majority (N=17) of the memorial organizations have a Facebook page, while only about a third (N=9) are active on Twitter. Moreover, great variance among the various social media services was observed, with many showing limited activity or low engagement levels. Indications for future research and limitations of the study are also reported.
By addressing the vernacular versus official memory dyad in collective memory studies, this article explores user comments on four Israeli news websites that covered the Iranian film A Separation's (Asghar Farhadi, 2011) Academy Award win for best foreign language film in 2012. Against the backdrop of Israeli-Iranian relations, this study focuses on the use of the Holocaust as an interpretive framework and new media users' construction of collective memory. Through qualitative analysis of user comments, I show how the memory of the Holocaust supports a circular narrative of Jewish history, intertwining past, present, and future events into a single metanarrative of persecution. The study also emphasizes how remembrance goes beyond intentionally commemorative practices, and questions the place of online platforms in enabling and constraining alternative and critical political discourses.
Building on Mouffe’s critique of cosmopolitanism, this article argues that a cosmopolitan mode of remembering, far from having superseded the antagonistic mode associated with ‘first modernity’ in the European context, has proved unable to prevent the rise of, and is being increasingly challenged by, new antagonistic collective memories constructed by populist neo-nationalist movements. This article outlines the main defining characteristics of a third ‘agonistic’ mode of remembering, which is both reflexive and dialogic, yet also relies upon politicized representations of past conflicts, acknowledging civic and political passions as well as individual and collective agency.
This chapter explores the implications of the selfie-perspective for Holocaust memory in the digital age. We analyse sequences from the Israeli documentary film, #Uploading_Holocaust (2016), which were taken during visits at memorial sites. We argue that such audio-visual self-representations communicate the complex relationship between individual subject positions, a presumably meaningful past, and contemporary modes of commemoration. We also claim that the creators of such videos often aim to inscribe themselves into memory culture, while at the same time struggling with the emotional complexity of their encounters with memorial sites. In doing so, they integrate the memory of past events into their present social media lives. We describe this interplay of mnemonic self-inscription and the integration of memories by means of digital technology, as i-Memory: a term that interlinks the subjective adaptation of digital commemorative practices with interactive modes of engagement with history, through memorial sites.
In 2009, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum took the experimental initiative of creating a Facebook page; since then, it has established accounts on other social media platforms, such as Instagram and Twitter, and is now followed by more than one million users across these networks. This chapter investigates the ways in which the Museum utilises social media, particularly with regard to its authority as an institution and site of Holocaust education and remembrance. On one hand, the Museum has fostered an online virtual community where Auschwitz victims are commemorated, the ethics of remembrance are discussed, and users’ feedback is sought and acknowledged. On the other hand, the institution uses social media to fact-check and criticise certain representations of Auschwitz, suggesting only those explicitly approved by the Museum are acceptable. This demonstrates a wider Museum dichotomy between retaining traditional, didactic practices and establishing contemporary, participatory ones.
Inspired by burgeoning scholarly interest in the role of digitalization in the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines how the COVID-19 pandemic is driving or constraining the digitalization of businesses around the globe. We contend that COVID‐19 is “the great accelerator” in fast-tracking the existing global trend towards embracing modern emerging technologies ushering in transformations in lifestyle, work patterns, and business strategies. Thus, COVID-19 has evolved to be a kind of “catalyst” for the adoption and increasing use of digitalization in work organization and the office, alongside presenting foreseen and unforeseen opportunities, challenges, and costs—leading to negative and positive feedback loops. In this article, we develop and advance a conceptual model by linking the different forces for and against digitalization in response to the pandemic. Our analysis indicates that adoption of emerging technologies may be hindered by vested external interests, nostalgia, and employer opportunism, as well as negative effects on employee well-being that undermine productivity, work–life balance, and future of work. Whilst digitalization may bring new opportunities, the process imparts risks that may be hard to mitigate or prepare for. Finally, we draw out the wider theoretical and practical implications of our analysis.
Drawing on the concept of an audience-oriented museum, this article presents research exploring how museums and audiences interactively seek and react to each other while developing a dialog using social media (SM) features. The empirical research was based on the content analysis of messages posted on SM profiles of museums located in Małopolska (Southern Poland). The investigated sample considers 71 institutions running proprietary SM sites (of a total 119 museums in the region), whose activity was observed during a two-month period. The findings identify differences in the use of interactive components. Observed discrepancies relate to distinct framings, contexts, and cohesiveness of implemented actions. The content analysis highlights the importance of context-bound interactions between museums and audiences that affect the overall communication process. Museums should engage audiences not only to join but also to frame the interaction through SM.
Significance
COVID-19 has affected daily life in unprecedented ways. Drawing on a longitudinal dataset of college students before and during the pandemic, we document dramatic changes in physical activity, sleep, time use, and mental health. We show that biometric and time-use data are critical for understanding the mental health impacts of COVID-19, as the pandemic has tightened the link between lifestyle behaviors and depression. Our findings also suggest a puzzle: Disruptions to physical activity and mental health are strongly associated, but restoration of physical activity through a short-term intervention does not help improve mental health. These results highlight the large impact of COVID-19 on both lifestyle and well-being and offer directions for interventions aimed at restoring mental health.
This study investigates the reaction of Italian state museums to the closure of their physical sites caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, taking the perspective of their online activity on social media. The study explores the type and amount of content published by museums on their social media webpages, as well as the level of online engagement that is generated by their activity. Empirically, this study investigated the 100 largest Italian state museums, showing that, during the weeks of lockdown, their cultural initiatives did not come to a stop but, on the contrary, there has been a sharp rise in online cultural material and initiatives taking place through social media, with museums doubling their online activity. This online evidence has stimulated further reflections on the future direction of digitally enabled approaches to culture and its enjoyment.
All forms of collective memory embody attempts at meaning-making - efforts to integrate experience and provide a coherent foundation for individual and collective identities. However, different modes of collective memory have different meaning-making potentials. In this article, I will assess three modes of remembering, namely folk, commemorative and mediatised memory, from the perspective of how they generate integrative meaning. Each of these modes of remembrance will be examined through the prism of a case study examining the nature of the memories associated with a specific lieux de memoire. I will suggest that over time, memory becomes progressively ‘unanchored’ from localised contexts due to its increasing technological and institutional mediation and that this has important implications for the depth and kind of meaning it provides.
We have left the twentieth century, but this century of violence and extremes has not left us: Its shadow has become longer and blacker. Seventy years after the end of the Second World War, the memory of the Holocaust is less and less anchored in the lived experience of survivors and witnesses. Shadows of Trauma analyzes the transformation of the past from an individual experience to a collective construction, with special attention to the tensions that arise when personal experience collides with official commemoration. In addition to surveying memory's important terms and distinctions, Assmann traces the process that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall, of creating a new German memory of the Holocaust. Assmann revisits the pitfalls of "false memory" and lingering forms of denial and repression, as well as the new twenty-first-century discourses, such as that of German "victimhood," as well as the new memory sites for a future in which German memory will be increasingly oriented toward a European context. Combining theoretical analysis with historical case studies, the book revisits crucial debates and controversial issues out of which "memory culture" has emerged as a collective project and a work in progress.
This article deals with the rise of memorialization standards and policyoriented attempts to engage transitional societies to develop and adopt specific normative forms of remembrance. The transitional justice paradigm brought a tremendous change moving the paradigm from a “duty to remember” to policy-oriented “memorialization standards” that promote Western memorial models as a template for the representation of past tragedies or mass crimes. The article argues that the human rights regime mandates normative standards that de-historicize and de-contextualize local knowledge key, which not only disables different patterns of dealing with a traumatic past but also may strengthen societal divisions on the ground.
Museums have a remit to inspire visitors. However, inspiration is a complex, subjective construct and analyses of inspiration are often laborious. Increased use of social media by museums and visitors may provide new opportunities to collect evidence of inspiration more efficiently. This research investigates the feasibility of a system based on knowledge patterns from FrameNet – a lexicon structured around models of typical experiences – to extract expressions of inspiration from social media.
The study balanced interpretation of inspiration by museum staff and computational processing of Twitter data. This balance was achieved by using prototype tools to change a museum’s Information Systems in ways that both enabled the potential of new, social-media-based information sources to be assessed, and which caused the museum staff to reflect upon the nature of inspiration and its role in the relationships between the museum and its visitors. The prototype tools collected and helped analyse Twitter data related to two events. Working with museum experts, the value of finding expressions of inspiration in Tweets was explored and an evaluation using annotated content achieved an F-measure of 0.46, indicating that social media may have some potential as a source of valuable information for museums, though this depends heavily upon how annotation exercises are conducted. These findings are discussed along with the wider implications of the role of social media in museums.
This article is a personal reflection on the report produced by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust? It reviews the report’s findings and reflects upon the gap between scholarly debates and public knowledge. It then attempts to account for this gap, especially in the light of the rhetoric surrounding Holocaust education and commemoration in the UK and the “need to remember.” Ultimately it argues that the ignorance and misunderstanding highlighted in the report have come about as a consequence of, rather than in spite of, the dominant culture of Holocaust remembrance in the United Kingdom.
In contrast to twentieth-century Holocaust Denial, the most recent assault on the narrative of the genocide of European Jewry has emanated from a sophisticated revisionist model known as Double Genocide, codified in the 2008 Prague Declaration. Positing ‘equality' of Nazi and Soviet crimes, the paradigm’s corollaries sometimes include attempts to rehabilitate perpetrators and discredit survivors. Emanating from pro-Western governments and elites in Eastern Europe in countries with records of high collaboration, the movement has reached out widely to the Holocaust Studies establishment as well as Jewish institutions. It occasionally enjoys the political support of major Western countries in the context of East-West politics, or in the case of Israel, attempts to garner (eastern) European Union support. The empirical effects to date have included demonstrable impact on museums, memorials and exhibits in Eastern Europe and beyond.
Holocaust memorials and museums face a difficult task as their staffs strive to commemorate and document horror. On the one hand, the events museums represent are beyond most people’s experiences. At the same time they are often portrayed by theologians, artists, and philosophers in ways that are already known by the public. Museum administrators and curators have the challenging role of finding a creative way to present Holocaust exhibits to avoid clichéd or dehumanizing portrayals of victims and their suffering.In Holocaust Memory Reframed, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines representations in three museums: Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She describes a variety of visually striking media, including architecture, photography exhibits, artifact displays, and video installations in order to explain the aesthetic techniques that the museums employ. As she interprets the exhibits, Hansen-Glucklich clarifies how museums communicate Holocaust narratives within the historical and cultural contexts specific to Germany, Israel, and the United States. In Yad Vashem, architect Moshe Safdie developed a narrative suited for Israel, rooted in a redemptive, Zionist story of homecoming to a place of mythic geography and renewal, in contrast to death and suffering in exile. In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind’s architecture, broken lines, and voids emphasize absence. Here exhibits communicate a conflicted ideology, torn between the loss of a Jewish past and the country’s current multicultural ethos. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents yet another lens, conveying through its exhibits a sense of sacrifice that is part of the civil values of American democracy, and trying to overcome geographic and temporal distance. One well-know example, the pile of thousands of shoes plundered from concentration camp victims encourages the visitor to bridge the gap between viewer and victim. Hansen-Glucklich explores how each museum’s concept of the sacred shapes the design and choreography of visitors’ experiences within museum spaces. These spaces are sites of pilgrimage that can in turn lead to rites of passage.
An examination of the role of history and memory is vital in order to better understand why the grand design of a United Europe-with a common foreign policy and market yet enough diversity to allow for cultural and social differences-was overwhelmingly turned down by its citizens. The authors argue that this rejection of the European constitution was to a certain extent a challenge to the current historical grounding used for further integration and further demonstrates the lack of understanding by European bureaucrats of the historical complexity and divisiveness of Europe's past. A critical European history is therefore urgently needed to confront and re-imagine Europe, not as a harmonious continent but as the outcome of violent and bloody conflicts, both within Europe as well as with its Others. As the authors show, these dark shadows of Europe's past must be integrated, and the fact that memories of Europe are contested must be accepted if any new attempts at a United Europe are to be successful.
The article scrutinizes the structural conditions under which the European Commission works to implement the political aim of constructing a pan-European path to commemorating the mass crimes of the twentieth century. The pivotal obstacle to attaining a common European way of remembering the ‘negative history’ of the continent (or to at least opening up room for discussion about it) lies in the debate between those who stress the singularity of the Holocaust and those who demand that the atrocities of both the National Socialist and the Communist regimes should equally be recognized. Bearing this in mind, the article analyses how the Commission makes use of existing networks of experts in research, memorialization and education and how the specific interrelatedness of these networks affects the Europeanization effort. In particular, it examines the role of networking conferences, highlights two exemplary fields of antecedent interrelations between the memory actors who were convened by the Commission and points to the implications of the fact that the networks and actors involved do not necessarily share a pan-European agenda.