Remembrance practices in the 21st century

Abstract

Individuals and groups construct identity through storytelling. Sometimes individuals use these to remember past events and group narratives to foster a sense of belonging. The individual and group interact and build relationships through shared memory. The present paper examines the mediatic representations of individual perceptions of the Holocaust in @eva.stories that evoke, revive, and revitalize Holocaust collective memory. Based on Multimodal Discourse Analysis, we analyzed and organized the findings according to the following communication categories: content, mode, and medium. Using Instagram to enliven Eva’s storytelling creates a unique duality between the audience and the implicit story content‎. Consequently, multimodal storytelling via Instagram bridges the historical past to the present generation. We conclude that the collective memory’s retelling and preservation constantly change due to cultural and political contexts. Consequently, as today’s online environments are a crucial sphere of discourse, online spaces play a role in creating, maintaining, and spreading collective memories.