Mediatization of War: Durée, Memory, Trauma

Abstract

The aim of this study is to conceptualize the processes of the mediatization of war in the context of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine through cultural-philosophical reflections on digital media representations of traumatic testimonies within collective memory. The methodological strategy of the analysis is an interdisciplinary approach within the conceptual frameworks of Media Studies, Memory Studies, and War Studies, at the intersection of several fields of the humanities: the philosophy of time, studies of digital memory and forgetting, research on collective trauma, and the ethics of media representation of wartime events. The key results of the study that constitute its scientific novelty are as follows. We reveal the role of media as “deforming lenses” in the process of shaping the collective media memory of a war unfolding “live on air” and leaving digital media testimonies in real time, namely: 1) the research identifies the specific features of the mediatization of the full-scale Russian–Ukrainian war (nonlinearity, multiplicity, fragmentation, personalization, fractality, and hypertextuality); 2) a definition of the concept of “war-traumatized media memory” is proposed on the basis of the concepts of “media memory” developed by Andrew Hoskins and “collective trauma” articulated by Jeffrey C. Alexander; 3) the study demonstrates that an analytical framework for understanding the mnemonic dimension of an unfinished war can be found in the Bergsonian concept of the “flow” of subjective time (durée), on the basis of which the concept of contemporal media memory is introduced into scholarly discourse; 4) based on an examination of the algorithms and formats of media platforms, we outline the features of the transition of living memories into the digital space in the process of the mediatization of war as a crossing of the boundary between individual and collective memory. The main conclusion of the study substantiates one of the most important future functions of mediatized memory of the full-scale Russian–Ukrainian war: to serve as a safeguard against the repetition of the past.