General information
Code: TAP N6-0302
Period: 1.8.2023 - 31.7.2025
Project leader at FDV: izr.prof.dr. Natalija Majsova
Research activity: Humanities
Abstract
The global mass spread of personal devices (personal computers, recorders, and consoles) and the advent of the internet ignited utopian ideas about a creative, connected, and democratic future in the late 1970s and especially 1980s-1990s.
These early digital age technologies that have contributed to a slow but profound transformation of people's everyday lives and horizons of expectation are now disappearing. At the same time, they have been increasingly present in cultural memory since the popular-cultural technostalgic boom (a recent increased interest in the aesthetics, history, and affordances of hardware and software from the 1970s-1990s) around 2010. TECHNOPST researches the cultural and collective memory of the early digital age (late 1970s-2000) as a transcultural and transmedial mode of remembrance and commemoration. TECHNOPST is designed to analyse how transcultural memory of the early digital age is structured in terms of transmedia world-like experiences, offering a way of thinking about how technology-related memory generates themes, settings, narratives, temporalities, value systems, tropes, and practices that are equally important for our relationship to the past and scenarios of possible futures.
TECHNOPST seeks to provide a pioneering review of scientific approaches to studying the relationship between technological transformations and cultural memories. It also zooms in on empirical case studies from the South-Eastern European space (Ljubljana, Rijeka, Belgrade), where the global technostalgic boom has coincided with revivals of socialist-utopian ideas and nationalist reappropriations, and contrasts these case studies with another one, focussed on Berlin. TECHNOPST innovates methodologically, combining cultural and media memory studies, ethnography, and media archeology.
TECHNOPST is designed to map out the technological texture of transcultural memory worlds across three regimes: popular-cultural production (O1); communities of practice (O2); archives and media (O3). TECHNOPST’s ambition is to analytically refine concepts such as technostalgia, technooptimism, technopessimism, and technotopism. The concepts, methods, and tools produced within TECHNOPST will significantly contribute to the development of approaches to studying how gradual (slow) tranformations are inscribed into cultural and collective memory by producing the basis for an interdisciplinary analytical framework for collective and cultural memory research in the current context where the analogue and digital spheres are difficult to separate.
The framework - which will need to be consolidated through further research - will account for memories’ capacity for transmedia world-building, providing insights that will fill recognized gaps in knowledge and approaches, informing and assisting scholars in disciplines engaging with technology in relation to memory, gender, activism, digital literacy, and decoloniality.
The phases of the project and their realization
- Months 1-12 (Year 1, Q 1-4):
Q1: Consolidation of research network, identification of available materials at 4 selected sites.
Q2: Compilation of a Literature Review Article. Selection of specific object- and practice- related research questions.
Q3-Q4: Data Collection (Fieldwork) Activities: Archival research; Participant Observation and Interviews.
- Months 13-24 (Year 2, Q5-8)
Q5: Data Processing (Analysis - Phase 1) and Communication of Preliminary Results (Science Communication and Networking Event Organization).
Q6-7: Data Analysis - Phase 2 (Preparation of min. 4 analytical original scientific articles). Additional Data Collection (Interviews, visits to archives).
Q8: Self-Evaluation, new project proposal preparation.
Research Organisation
https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/20507
Researchers
https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/20507
Citations for bibliographic records
https://cris.cobiss.net/ecris/si/en/project/20507
Key words
collective memory, communities of practice, cultural studies, digitalization, history of technologies, media archaeology, memory politics, popular culture
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