Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a fieldwork on Russian online communities of nostalgic soviet ex-citizens, my paper will question how users interact in specific ways with digital affordances to build a collective memorial device.

Paper long abstract:

My paper aims to explore how digital spaces enable participatory mnemonic practices. Drawing on a fieldwork on Russian online communities of nostalgic soviet ex-citizens, I will question how users interact in specific ways with digital affordances to build a collective memorial device. By looking at the detailed practices of online memory organization, I aim at understanding how digital artefacts, in both their textual and visual dimensions, come to be used as constitutive mediations in the activity of remembering. By translating fragments of a common past into a shared public material, nostalgic representations allow users to dive into soviet time and perform metaphorical continuity above irreversibility of the past time and place. They help soviet ex-citizens, whose homeland vanished from the map, to gather and to resist collectively to the feeling of loss. I will argue that such mediations are not merely cultural symbols, that subtend mnemonic fixation, but are also socially elaborated triggers for individual remembering. Moreover, I will show that the interplay between digital forms and memorial artefacts shapes the production of a commemorative place, structured by different levels of narration: on the timeline, a constructed flow of unintentional remembering; in the photo albums, a space of storage that classifies the traces of the past; and in the discussion forums, an arena for critical history interpretation or a medium for autobiographical narratives. Finally, my fieldwork illustrates how connective turn created new modes of commemoration and knowledge of the past for memory agents, both as groups and individuals.