2015/05/27 by Mārtiņš Kaprāns · 1 citation
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration #Social Media and Politics #Philippine History and Culture #Latvian #Hegemony #Agency (philosophy) #Meaning (existential) #Politics #Media studies #Communism #Sociality #Sociology #Encyclopedia #The Internet #History #Political science #Law #Social science #Epistemology #World Wide Web #Computer science
paper · doi:10.1177/1750698015587151
openalex publication_date 2015/05/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
In 2008, Edvīns Šnore, the Latvian film director, released a shocking and provocative documentary, “The Soviet Story,” which explored some terrible episodes from the Soviet past as well as the collaboration between the Soviet and Nazi regimes. Scholars have argued that The Soviet Story is an effective Latvian response to Russian propaganda, but it also exemplifies the broader problems of post-communist memory politics. This article takes a step further in the discussion of The Soviet Story. It focuses on the idea of how memory work triggered by the documentary got started on social networking sites. In particular, the article deals with the video-sharing website YouTube and the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia, both of which are crucial meaning-making sites with respect to history. The article demonstrates transnational memory work in YouTube and Wikipedia as a multidirectional enterprise that both reinforces and emancipates existing hegemonic representations of controversial past.