"Leave a message of hope or tribute": digital memorializing as public deliberation.

• Author: Hartelius, E. Johanna
• Position: Report

The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation is the nonprofit organization established to operate "ground zero" in Lower Manhattan. In collaboration with the Lower Manhattan Development Company, it broke ground for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum (NSMM) in March 2006. The memorial, Reflecting Absence, is designed by Michael Arad and Peter Walker. At the moment of writing, design plans include two illuminated pools in the original Twin Tower footprints, flanked on each side by 30-foot waterfalls and surrounded by oak trees. Around the pools will be parapets inscribed with the names of the victims of the 1993 and 2001 terrorist attacks. An eight-acre landscaped plaza will feature more than 400 sweetgum and swamp white oak trees selected for their multicolor foliage. The Port Authority contractors anticipate opening the plaza on September 11, 2011, and the completed memorial by midyear 2013.

As these physical markers become part of the new urban landscape, the NSMM is a digital as well as a geographical site. It is available to the public not only in New York City, but also at www.national911memorial.org. In this virtual locale, the homepage is visually dominated by a large image of the construction project. The image changes as visitors select to view "Pre 9/11," "Now," or "Future." The "Pre 9/11" setting is a panoramic of the intact lower Manhattan skyline, and includes rollover-to-expand textboxes, stating that the original World Trade Center was 110 stories, employed over fifty-thousand people, and welcomed an additional forty-thousand visitors daily. The "Now" mode shows "ground zero" in disarray-cranes, trucks, and men in hardhats work diligently-clearly making progress toward restoration and recovery. The "Future" image offers a simulated impression of the memorial and surrounding buildings. The NSMM website also provides a detailed analysis of the 9/11 tragedies, resources for educators, information about upcoming commemorative events, a virtual art exhibit, an online museum shop, and links to Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The site also contains several interactive features. As one might expect, the site positions monetary donations as a primary means of showing support. For twenty-five dollars, donors receive a National September 11 Memorial Builder Certificate and lapel pin. For a thousand dollars, visitors "sponsor one of the granite pavers that will create elegant walkways leading to the memorial." (1) Beyond these modes of participation, the site also encourages the public to "get involved" by "leaving a message of tribute or hope" and by "sharing [their] story." Invitational graphics display a US map dotted in specific locations by names and towns--Douglas Vogel from Wilson, WY; Dana Kroll from New York, NY; Joseph Fanning from Fort Lauderdale, FL; and so on. "Bubbles" pop out of the map identifying individuals who have already left a message. The image of the US map conveys geographical scope, national community, and individual acknowledgment. Such sentiments are reinforced by the heading "World of Support."

It is becoming increasingly common for memorials and museums to have a web presence, serving a variety of functions from instruction to promotion. These sites typically provide historical data, such as a detailed account of the event to which the museum or memorial pays tribute. They often include a timeline and a photo gallery, an account of when and how the memorial was built, the designer's intent, a message from a founder or director, a newsletter link, a list of appearances in the media, and instructions for how to donate funds. As Kirsten Foot, Barbara Warnick, and Steven Schneider (2006) explain, web-based memorializing is an "emerging set of social practices mediated by computer networks, through which digital objects, structures, and spaces of commemoration are produced" (p. 73). Many memorial sites contain an interactive forum, a way for visitors to participate in online remembrance. Structurally these forums are comparable to community blogs--diachronic accumulations of visitors' personal narratives. The forums collect the public's historical interpretations, funneling them into the memorial's or museum's overall message. Unlike the traditional brick-and-mortar archive, virtual archives host an ongoing public dialogue about memory (Haskins, 2007; Ibrahim, 2008).

Cultural analyst Gregory Ulmer (2005) theorizes the reorganization of civic life generated by the emergence of "electracy," analogously defined in relation to the digital image apparatus as literacy is to alphabetic print (pp. xii, 34). According to Ulmer, electracy is "as different from literacy ultimately as literacy is different from orality--different not only technologically but also institutionally and behaviorally" (p. xxv). Extending his argument to the formation of individual and collective memory, Ulmer notes:

The hypothesis of electronic monumentality is that commemoration is a fundamental experience joining individual and collective identity, which must be adapted in any case to the emerging apparatus of electracy. All the concerns about the decline of the public sphere or the destruction of civic life caused by the society of the spectacle (which is how electracy is conceived from the point of view of literacy), are focused by the question of commemoration: how a collectivity remembers who or what it is. (p. xxi)

Ulmer formulates an account of electronic memorializing as a negotiation of national identity in a hybrid medium, a "composite of text and image, it combines features of the topical essay and the vernacular shrines that in recent years have become a common folk response to the disasters that befall a community" (p. xiv). By attending to Ulmer's characterization of memorializing, we discover a point of access for studying the virtual civic sphere and the deliberative practices constituted therein (p. xvii).

In this essay, I examine the construction of public memory on memorial websites in order to explicate their impact on deliberation and 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. My ambition is to identify the significance for public argumentation of the practice of virtual memorializing, a phenomenon in which the conditions for constructing memory and the conditions for online authorship coincide. Analyzing the NSMM's interactive forum, I focus especially on the site's structural aspects, the folding of particular experiences into a universal narrative, the use of ordinariness as an argumentative trope, and several other stylistic features. Finally, I conclude by suggesting that scholars, media critics, and others consider connections between the interactivity of online dialogue and vernacular historiography.

Online memorializing, I contend, reflects a culture in which meaningful experiences increasingly are found in public. In this paradigmatic shift toward publicity, "on the Web, there is interpenetration of practices often associated with public memorializing offline (e.g., focusing commemoration on heroism) with practices associated with private or vernacular memorializing offline (e.g., focusing commemoration on specific lives)" (Foot, Warnick, & Schneider, 2006, p. 92). In fashioning ourselves as publicly knowable subjects, we recognize experiences as real and worthy of note. Authentication of private memories demands a public, in this case a virtual, scene. Moreover, in publicizing our memories on the World Wide Web, we use them as resources for rhetorical invention in the practice of online deliberation. They become material for public argument. Thus memory work becomes a mode of mediated deliberation in the virtual public sphere. This cultural reorganization stipulates that secrets--information veiled in privacy--be publicly revealed. Jodi Dean (2002, 2005) provides a helpful theoretical framework here.

Dean (2002) posits the tension between publicity and secrecy, what she calls the "dynamic of concealment and disclosure," as the condition for modern liberal democracy (p. 16). In the constantly ongoing process of revealing "secret" political and/or personal content, publicity, she argues, organizes democratic politics and infotainment symbolism (p. 15). Dean (2005) portrays democracy as, by definition, a deliberative practice of publicizing and publicness. As a constitutive myth in the national imaginary, it relies on such ideals as public debate, public opinion, a (rational) public sphere, rule by the public, access and inclusion (p. 52). Dean (2002) claims:

Not only does this ideal posit "the public" as democracy's site and subject, but its emphasis on reflective deliberation relies on a prior account of encryption and revelation: the production of some contents as secrets and their subsequent exposure to the public operate prior to democratic deliberation. (p. 81)

New information technologies remove constraints on interactivity and interconnectedness, allowing more people than ever to make their opinions known in the virtual sphere (Dean, 2005, p. 53). Charles Taylor (2004) explains how citizens of this "direct-access society" imagine themselves constantly and directly mediated, influencing the cultural and political machinations of the democracy they inhabit (pp. 158-159).

The phenomenon of online memorializing, particularly in a format as fundamentally personal as a blog, is part of the publicity that Dean theorizes. It is a product of a culture that desires publicness, and seeks validation of its private experiences in public. As Dean (2002) explains, "we believe publicity is a sign of something more, something real--the belief of others, an amorphous...