Digitalized Martyrs: Online Commemoration of the "Imposed War"

The introduction of the internet and proliferation of new media technologies have significantly affected commemorative practices by which nations remember, memorialize, and attempt to resolve memories of struggle, resistance, violence and war, and make the past meaningful in our present age. Similar to traditional memorial sites—namely street names, museums and monuments, which construct narratives of the past—websites of commemoration facilitate what the French historian Pierre Nora has called lieux of memoire, literally comprising “(web)sites of memory", or in short web-memorials. Although web-memorials, in general, lack the architectural impression of public monuments and statues situated in central public places and discharged from the sacredness attached to them, internet websites are more invariant and less static than other mnemonic devices. They present a fusion of various elements and contents (sound-image-text) in different contexts, resulting in de-temporalization and de-territorialization of places, times, and events, as they can be accessed at all times and from everywhere. Web-memorials also facilitate new strategies and techniques of remembering via different modes of connectivity. They are embedded and distributed through socio-technical practices, thus epitomizing a reconfiguration of human capacity to remember, for example, through applications of event reminders and ready-made condolence messages.

Within this theoretical framework, the paper explores the commemoration project of Iran's war martyrs by focusing on web-memorials and popular mnemonic schemes by which their remembrance is virally disseminated online. Web-memorials refer to a collection of websites dedicated to the memory of individuals, groups, events, or dates associated with Iran's martyrs of war that are endorsed by cultural authorities and state agencies, such as The Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs and The Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution. Identifying points of intersection between communication platforms (web-memorials), communication phenomena (narratives and representations), and collective memory makers, the paper will offer an updated account on martyrs' commemoration in post-war Iran and contribute new insights on its digitization.