Mobile media, urban nostalgia and memory politics: media archaeological study of their mutual shaping in Narva, Estonia

ABSTRACT

Narva, Estonia’s easternmost city, was once famous for its baroque Old Town, but this was sadly destroyed during World War II. When Estonia regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the border town quickly became a site of complex memory politics, intensified by a widely felt loss of its former architectural and industrial status. This was particularly manifested in growing nostalgia for the Old Town and discourses on rebuilding it, despite the changed urban dynamics. Building on a media archaeological approach, this paper explores the role of nostalgia and local memory politics in conditioning the emergence of novel kinds of mediations of the ‘lost city’, especially in the form of specific mobile media and augmented reality (AR) applications aimed at mapping the whole of the city and allowing experiencing it first-hand. Second, the paper studies the roles these same forms and mediations play in further channelling the nostalgia and modes of reproducing Narva’s destroyed Old Town.

KEYWORDS:

• Nostalgia
• memory politics
• urban heritage
• mobile media
• media archaeology
• augmented reality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Link visited on 21.10.22, at 14.55. The statistical information is renewed every 10 minutes.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Estonian Research Council [PRG1641]

Notes on contributors

Maria Hansar

Maria Hansar is a PhD student in Tallinn Academy of Art. The focus of Maria’s research is the digital heritage, remediation and intersemiotic translation.

Indrek Ibrus

Indrek Ibrus is Professor of Media Innovation at Tallinn University’s (TLU) Baltic Film, Media and Arts School (BFM), Estonia. He curates also BFM’s doctoral programme. His research interests include media innovation, the evolution of the ubiquitous internet, emergence of contemporary metadata formats, broader evolution of modern creative industries, and the implications of cultural heritage digitisation. He has published on mobile media, media innovation/evolution, metadata evolution, transmedia and cross-media production. He is a co-editor (together with Carlos A. Scolari) of Crossmedia Innovations (Peter Lang, 2012), editor of Emergence of Cross-Innovation Systems (Emerald, 2019) and co-author (with John Hartley and Maarja Ojamaa) of On the Digital Semiosphere (Bloomsbury, 2020). He also co-edits two peer-reviewed journals: Baltic Screen Media Review and Cultural Science Journal.