Tweeting from the past: Commemorating the Anzac Centenary @ABCNews1915

Abstract

This article argues that the digital world has introduced new complexities to state commemoration of the past and public engagement with those efforts. It focuses on how national narratives are transmitted by and through particular digital lieux de mémoire; on how the archival trace of the past is presented as lively and emergent, even when the people it represents are long dead; and the implications for the temporalities of national history and memory of new digital forms of state commemoration. To make these arguments, it draws on the April 2015 ‘live tweeting’ by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation of the Anzac landing on the Gallipoli peninsula. It will use material from Twitter handle @ABCNews1915 to trace some of the links between state commemoration and the digital world, a relationship that has become more urgent in light of the increasing use of social media to articulate state-sponsored history and to communicate between states and individuals.