Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape

This is a comprehensive study of Holocaust memory in the digital age of social media. Focusing on the five most popular digital platforms in use today: Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, it examines how social technology affects the way history is made and circulated online.

Social media has become a place where memories of the Holocaust take shape through user-driven content shared in elaborately interconnected communication networks. Alongside curated exhibits, documentaries and scholarly research, smartphone photos, short videos and online texts act as windows into the popular consciousness. They document how everyday people make sense of the crime of genocide, presenting unique challenges to historians. Does participatory media create a different understanding of genocide than more traditional forms of writing? How does expertise manifest in the digital public sphere? Do YouTube tourist videos and concentration camp selfies undermine the seriousness of the Holocaust and Holocaust Studies by extension? Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape provides valuable answers to these questions and much more.

The book comes with a range of helpful images and it also analyzes the way vernacular memory around the Holocaust and postwar reckoning and reconciliation is mobilized as well as contested in the digital sphere. It is an important volume for all scholars and students of the Holocaust, its history and memory.

Jennifer V. Evans is Associate Professor of History at Carleton University, Canada. She is the author of Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (2011) and the co-editor, along with Matt Cook, of Queer Cities, Queer Cultures (2014).

Erica Fagen is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.

Meghan Lundrigan is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Carleton University, Canada.