“Leave a Message of Hope or Tribute”: Digital Memorializing as Public Deliberation

Abstract

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum is at once a physical site in Lower Manhattan and a digital space for public deliberation and memorializing. I examine the construction of public memory on memorial websites in order to explicate the impact on deliberation of a paradigmatic shift toward publicity. First, I locate memory and online authorship as distinct, but confluent, processes in the context of a productive dialectic. Both are constituted by, on one hand, the assertion of personal experience through singular authorship, and, on the other, the subversion or subordination of individuality to collective experience and production. Online memorializing reflects a culture in which meaningful experiences are found in public. Fashioning ourselves as publicly knowable subjects, we authenticate our experiences. Moreover, in publicizing our memories in virtual forums, we use them as resources for rhetorical invention in the practice of online deliberation.

Key Words:

• memory
• digital literacy
• poetics
• publicity
• trauma