Narratives in the database: Memorializing September 11th online

This article focuses on the collective/public aspects of the mourning process in online environments. It explores how the World Wide Web shapes the production of both memorial “spaces” and the process of mourning by allowing both producers and reader/users to renegotiate the public and private functions of mourning through alterations in the ways texts are produced but even more importantly through the connection and juxtapositions of textual elements, rhetorical goals, and varying audiences. Initially, most discussions of memorial activities are focused on the issue of exigency—the need of an individual or group to somehow communicate grief and to remember the dead. However, the specific affordances of online space may require an altered focus—one in which acts of pure grief are mingled with a range of other impulses. This article uses the specific example of the World Trade Center attack and the memorial spaces that have evolved since the event to consider how the process of memorialization online might be used to understand issues of space, time, memory, and the continuity of human relationships.