Digital Holocaust memory on social media: how Italian Holocaust museums and memorials use digital ecosystems for educational and remembrance practice
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Abstract
This study takes a social-technical systems approach to investigate how national and transnational memory of the Holocaust are intertwined on the social media profiles of a set of Italian museums and memorials. We examine how Italy’s four most important Holocaust museums and memorials use social media as ecosystems to provide historical content and engage their audiences in digital remembrance about the Holocaust on four social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Results show that posts on Facebook led to a higher volume of interactivity and positive responses than posts on the other platforms, while user activity in terms of creating new posts remains low on all four platforms. The four institutions tend to address a national audience and interweave transnational Holocaust memorial themes with distinctively national ones. Although the examined social media profiles demonstrate that museums and memorials are reliable sources of historical and trustworthy information through which they shape memory ecologies, their use reflects a conservational attitude, with a preference for a target audience over the age of 25, expressed both in the choice of platforms adopted and in the mostly one-way communication approach employed. The paper outlines implications for further social media practice in Digital Holocaust Memory.
Topics
Holocaust Education Holocaust Memorials Holocaust Commemoration Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial Social Media
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Geographic Coverage
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Volume/Issue
28(10)
Page Number / Article Number
1152-1179
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Link to article (paywalled), Digital Holocaust memory on social media: how Italian Holocaust museums and memorials use digital ecosystems for educational and remembrance practice
Bibliographic Information
Digital Holocaust memory on social media: how Italian Holocaust museums and memorials use digital ecosystems for educational and remembrance practice. 2022: 1152-1179. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/13527258.2022.2131879
