The Prosumption of Commemoration

Disasters, Digital Memory Banks, and Online Collective Memory

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3758929
AutoresTimothy Recuber (Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2012
Volumen56
Número4
Páginas531-549
Fecha de publicación2012-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAmerican Behavioral Scientist (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0002-7642 • E-ISSN: 1552-3381
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0002764211429364
OpenAlexW1996510941
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas22
Referencias citadas37

The Internet has created innumerable possibilities for the construction of memorials devoted to tragic or catastrophic events and the exercise of collective memory. Two recent American disasters, the September 11, 2001 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, have been widely commemorated and memorialized online. This article examines the nature of online disaster commemoration through an analysis of the messages and stories submitted to two digital archives devoted to these disasters: the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. By viewing these online archives as sites of prosumption, inasmuch as the sites' users both produce and consume its content, the article is able to tease out connections to other prosumer-oriented trends surrounding commemoration and collective memory in the physical landscape. These trends include the increasing popularity of spontaneous shrines and the growing acceptance of therapeutic monuments. These two forms of prosumption also manifest themselves online in the digital memory banks studied here, in that they allow a wide variety of different users to contribute to the commemoration of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina in ways that often seek to enact a kind of therapeutic self-help and emotional catharsis. However, an analysis of the messages and stories left at these archives also points to some of the political limitations of such therapeutic forms of prosumption

Art · Catharsis · Collective memory · Geography · Hurricane katrina · Literature · Media studies · Natural disaster · Political science · Politics · Popularity · Prosumer · Sociality · Sociology · The Internet · Variety (cybernetics) · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Engineering · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Rhetoric and Communication Studies