Ellen Rutten (University of Bergen)
The reader of Russian and Ukrainian social media finds herself embedded in a world of digital wars, where alternative histories thrive and multifarious memories compete for position. Members of the blog community Russia_Ukraine quarrel over the roles of the two countries in World War II. Chatters on the memory site Born in the USSR debate the role of memory in determining the geographical bounds of national sovereignty. Participants of the social-network group Russia-Ukraine-Belarus discuss Soviet repressions in Ukraine, while groups registered on the ‘Ukrainian Facebook’ www.connect.ua fight to rehabilitate public memory of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
The member populations of these memory-related online fora are large but unknown. Discussion entries follow one another with intervals of mere minutes or seconds, and their authors post messages from all over the globe. With its speed, accessibility, and accommodation of anonymity, the Internet is radically changing the way memory travels between generations and communities. These new online vectors of memory are the focus of Web Wars, a Bergen-based research project on digital memory. The project is part of Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Russia, Poland & Ukraine, a transinstitutional project of the universities of Cambridge, Helsinki, Tartu, Groningen, and Bergen which scrutinizes Eastern Europe’s memory wars from varying angles.
I will discuss both the Memory at War and the Web Wars project. Apart from mapping the projects’ outlines and aims, I will touch upon a more practical question: how do you set up the type of trans-institutional research collective that the MAW team forms?
Project websites: www.memoryatwar.org, www.web-wars.org.