This article analyses the virtual memorialisation of British fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will study online obituaries published on two websites – BBC news and The Lasting Tribute. These sources are compared as examples of media-driven and community-driven memorialisation. This comparison enables us to study links between the mainstream media and the functioning of digital network communities, between public and private discourses of war memorialisation. The purpose of analysis is twofold: first, the article examines how virtual memorials represent fatalities, and, second, it discusses the political implications of virtual memorialisation. The article posits that although virtual memorials introduce professionalised and personalised accounts of the deaths of service personnel, they also enable a nationalistic discourse of war commemoration, and shape the politics of mourning in modern Britain.
BartonW (2010) ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’: Sherlock Holmes and the Wootton Bassett jihad. In: KeebleRLMairJ (eds) Afghanistan, War and the Media: Deadlines and Frontlines. Suffolk: Arima Publishing, pp.117–125.
3.
BellD (2006) Introduction. In: BellD (ed.) Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–32.
4.
BerlantL (2001) The subject of true feeling: pain, privacy, and politics. In: SaratAKearnsTR (eds) Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, pp.49–84.
5.
BilligM (1995) Banal Nationalism. London: SAGE.
6.
BolterJDGrusinR (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
7.
BourdieuP (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.
8.
ButlerJ (2003) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.
9.
CapdevilaLVoldmanD (2006) War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War (trans. VeasleyR). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
10.
CookGWalterT (2005) Rewritten rites: language and social relations in traditional and contemporary funerals. Discourse Society16: 365–391.
11.
DanilovaN (2012) Contemporary trends in war commemoration: The UK and Russia. Unpublished manuscript of the PhD Thesis in Politics, University of Nottingham, Nottingham.
12.
De VriesBRutherfordJ (2004) Memorialising loved ones on the World Wide Web. Omega49(1): 5–26.
EdmundsT (2012) British civil-military relations and the problem of risk. International Affairs88(2): 265–282.
15.
ErllARigneyA (2009) Cultural memory and its dynamics. In: ErllARigneyA (eds) Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH &Co., pp. 1–10.
16.
FootKWarnickBSchneiderS (2005) Web-based memorializing after September 11: toward a conceptual framework. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication11(1). Available at: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/foot.html (accessed 16 June 2012).
17.
ForsterA (2012) The Military Covenant and British civil-military relations: letting the genie out of the bottle. Armed Forces & Society38(2): 273–290.
18.
FowlerB (2005) Collective memory and forgetting: components for a study of obituaries. Theory, Culture & Society22(6): 53–72.
19.
GeserH (1998) ‘Yours Virtually Forever’: death memorials and remembrance sites in the WWW. In: Sociology in Switzerland: towards Cyborsociety and Virtual Social Relations. Available at: http://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/38519 (accessed 8 December 2014).
20.
GrantS-M (2005) Raising the dead: war, memory and American national identity. Nations and Nationalism11: 509–529.
21.
GregoryA (1994) The Silence of Memory. Armistice Day 1919-1946. Oxford/Providence: Berg.
22.
GriderN (2007) ‘Faces of the Fallen’ and the dematerialization of US war memorials. Visual Communication6: 265–279.
23.
HessA (2007) In digital remembrance: vernacular memory and the rhetorical construction of web memorials. Media Culture & Society29(5): 812–830.
24.
HigateP (2012) Representation of the British Soldier: ‘Mr Lazy’ Pyjamas and ‘Sobranie Cocktail Cigarettes’. On the front line in Helmand with Lewis and his men. School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. Working Paper 03-12. Available at: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/spais/research/workingpapers/wpspaisfiles/higate-03-12.pdf (accessed 20 January 2013).
25.
HoskinsA (2009) Digital network memory. In: ErllARigneyA (eds) Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 91–108.
26.
HumeJ (2000) Obituaries in American Culture. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
27.
KingA (2010) The Afghan War and ‘postmodern’ memory: commemoration and the dead of Helmand. British Journal of Sociology61(1): 1–25.
28.
KnudsenBStageC (2012) Online war memorials: YouTube as a democratic space of commemoration exemplified through video tributes to fallen Danish soldiers. Memory Studies6(4): 418–436.
29.
MosseG (1990) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
30.
National Memorial Arboretum (2009) The National Memorial Arboretum: A Guidebook (2009) London: RBL Press.
31.
NeigerMMeyersOZandbergE (2011) On media memory: editors’ introduction. In: NeigerMMeyersOZandbergE (eds) On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–26.
32.
RobertsP (2004) The living and the dead: community in the virtual cemetery. Omega49(1): 57–76.
33.
RobertsP (2006) From MySpace to our space: the functions of web memorials in bereavement. The Forum: Association for Death Education and Counseling32(4): 1–4.
SimpsonD (2006) 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
36.
SkeyM (2009) The national in everyday life: a critical engagement with Michael Billig’s thesis of Banal Nationalism. Sociological Review57(2): 331–346.
37.
SturkenM (2007) Tourists of History. Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
38.
UlmerG (2005) Electronic Monuments. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
39.
WalkerJ (2007) Narratives in the database: memorializing September 11th online. Computers and Composition24: 121–153.
40.
WalterT (1999) Bereavement: The Culture of Death. Buckingham: Open University Press.
41.
WinterJ (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
42.
WoodwardRWinterTJenkingsKN (2009) Heroic anxieties: the figure of the British soldier in contemporary print media. Journal of War and Culture Studies2(2): 211–223.
43.
ZehfussM (2009) Hierarchies of grief and the possibility of war: remembering UK fatalities in Iraq. Millennium: Journal of International Studies38(2): 1–22.
