Recent developments like holograms, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) permit further changes in the very nature of memorialization, including simultaneously, and sometimes paradoxically, decentralizing and globalizing it.

Pre-digital practice mostly confined memorialization to a particular geographical space – often a monument, a museum or an archive. States produced and controlled these spaces, thus using them not only to pay respects to the heroes, victims and martyrs of its past, but also to craft narratives that supported their own claim to legitimacy.

Virtual memorialization loosens, if not shatters, such control – carrying the prospect of fundamentally changing how and where collective memory is formed and retransmitted. Digital technology allows those processes both to devolve to individuals beyond the reach of the state and communities that might transcend national boundaries.

The resultant local and transnational connections may sometimes reinforce state narratives, but in other instances may serve to contest them. Previously marginalized voices may find a broader audience, while historians and their audiences have the opportunity to use and appreciate new sources and perspectives about the past. Emergent virtual communities generate their own vocabularies as well as their own touchstones for pride, grievance and understanding.

The use of social media for the memorialization of mass atrocities illustrates the global dimensions of these new trends. In countries such as Myanmar, Facebook is synonymous with the internet itself. The platform permits sharing of photos, live streaming, pre-recorded videos, stories and the ability to interact within communities of interest by commenting and “liking” posts. Residing in “the cloud,” or, more concretely, a server farm in Oregon or Sweden, Facebook commemorative or memorial pages transcend physical space, permitting individuals to form and join communities of interest from anywhere in the world.

Digital forums of memorialization of wars, genocides and mass atrocities have the power to elevate new voices, allow geographically disparate communities to share experiences and learn about their shared past, and enable others to compose their own virtual memorials outside the official domain of the state. Nonstate narratives may even challenge state-driven stories, as in the cases of expatriate participants on platforms that memorialize the Igbo victims of the Biafran civil war or Armenians who demonstrate evidence of a genocidal campaign against their ancestors that today’s Turkish state maintains never happened.

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