3.17. Digital Heritage and Memorialisation

This paper investigates how digital platforms participate in the production, circulation, and stabilization of collective memory into heritage. It takes the Fête des Vignerons (a centuries-old festival inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list) as a case study. The 2019 edition was extensively mediated on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and the participatory archive notreHistoire.ch. For the first time, these platforms became active in the circulation of memories of the event, generating a vast digital corpus that reconfigures the politics of remembrance and patrimonialization. Through a combined qualitative and quantitative analysis of posts, comments, and digital traces, the study identifies several distributed memory regimes in which institutional, individual, and algorithmic actors intersect. These regimes reveal how online heritage-making unfolds as a plural yet uneven process shaped by participation, visibility, and infrastructural fragility. Drawing on theoretical insights from Halbwachs, Hoskins, van Dijck, Vinck, Musiani & Schafer, and other scholars, the paper argues that the shift from digital memory to digital heritage is neither neutral nor fully democratic: it depends on selective algorithms, proprietary infrastructures, and unequal access to cultural visibility. While digital platforms open spaces for more inclusive forms of cultural participation, they also reproduce different forms of attention and technological dependency. The Fête des Vignerons vividly illustrates this dynamic: users collectively document, comment, and preserve the event online, yet their contributions remain vulnerable to obsolescence and erasure. By connecting empirical observations with debates on participatory heritage and on memory as a sociotechnical phenomenon, this paper shows that democratization in the digital heritage sphere lies not only in who can remember, but in who controls the means of remembering. The case of the Fête des Vignerons thus invites us to rethink digital heritage as a distributed and precarious commons, produced at the crossroads of civic engagement, algorithmic governance, and cultural continuity.

The paper investigates a decade of tweets related to Holocaust Remembrance Day, analyzing how digital affordances facilitate the formation of digital collective memories. By employing a mixed-method approach, the study examines the evolving discourse, user engagement, and the role of platform affordance in shaping collective memories on Twitter. Drawing on various works of Halbwach, Hoskins, Adriaansen and others, this paper explores how the digital spaces enable the aggregation and circulation of diverse commemorative practices, transforming ephemeral social media interactions into enduring expressions of remembrance. The study ask: "how does collective remembering adapts to the 'open', 'short', and 'networked' nature of social media?" to describe the processes through which the (thick) act of remembering interacts with a (lean) modern communication affordance to produce a digital remembering culture marked by changing prominence of sub-themes, semantic drifts in their meanings, and evolving participation. Digital remembering is shown to be different from the traditional form of collective remembering, starkly characterised by its contextual and participative dynamism, that draws relevance from both, contemporary and past events.

This paper focuses on the cultural memory of the ‘Crisis Generation’ in Greece (coming of age during the sovereign debt crisis of 2009) as expressed in the social media landscape. It argues that the democratization of the digital archive has altered the sharing and storing of cultural memories as well as the production of aesthetics of “Greekness” for this group. This has been increasingly taking place through social media accounts that share memories of the Greek past, constituting archival bodies. Interlacing insights from cultural studies, history, digital media and memory studies, this research conceptualizes social media platforms as collective storehouses of images that democratize and problematize the production of national aesthetics. Through close analysis as well as historical and theoretical contextualization, it traces a “chain reaction” between historical background, memorial structures, digital storehouse and finally cultural aesthetics. It asks: how do social media store, transform and reinforce cultural memory for the ‘Greek Crisis Generation’ producing emergent national aesthetics? The study aims in demonstrating the significance of social media content as a source for capturing national, cultural memories and aesthetics. In the case of the ‘Greek Crisis Generation’ three main aesthetics emerge online: (1) nostalgia for 1990s and 2000s popular culture (2) romanticization of the decadent city (3) a return to past traditions affectively linked with the grandparent generation. This paper provides a valuable case study for how the democratization of the archive online interlinks with the reconfiguration of cultural memory for those coming of age during political, economic and cultural crisis.