Traumatology

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Trauma Online: Public Exposure of Personal Grief and Suffering

Paul Arthur Traumatology 2009 15: 65 DOI: 10.1177/1534765609350781 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tmt.sagepub.com/content/15/4/65

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Trauma Online: Public Exposure of Personal Grief and Suffering

Paul Arthur1

Traumatology 15(4) 6575 The Author(s) 2009 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1534765609350781 http://tmt.sagepub.com

Abstract This article considers how traditional physical memorials to war and other catastrophic events differ from online memorials in the Web 2.0 environment and it asks what the benefits and drawbacks of each may be. There has always been an awkward fit between the public statements embodied in monuments to those who died in war and the personal stories told by individuals who returned. This disjuncture serves to demonstrate that the two ways of remembering traumatic eventsthe collective and the individualhave traditionally been poles apart and often contradictory. Gradually, over the past two decades, with the increasing influence of critical theories that have questioned national and other dominating discoursesand also with growing interest within the field of clinical psychology in what is now labeled posttraumatic stress disorderthere has been an increasing interest in the vast underlayer of personal stories that national narratives have shut out or silenced. What can new interactive digital modes for representing cataclysmic events offer to both witnesses and the users who access the Web sites? Online environments provide public spaces for expressing, sharing, and working through experiences of trauma and crisis. New communities are created and new kinds of records and histories are produced. But what are the effects of making private trauma so public? What can online commemoration achieve? What kinds of communities are created and how are these different from physical communities? This article addresses these and other related questions with reference to recent examples. Keywords online communities, commemoration, memorialization, collective memory, Holocaust, genocide, Web 2.0, social networking A certain ambiguity is attached to the expression a duty to remember . . . First of all, those who are subjected to this duty are obviously those who have not been direct witnesses or victims of the events of which one intends to preserve the memory. It is very clear that those who survived the Holocaust or the horror of the camps do not need to be reminded of their duty to remember. On the contrary, perhaps their duty has been to survive the memory, to escape, as far as they are concerned, from the everlasting presence of an incommunicable experience. Marc Aug, Oblivion (1994, p. 88) History gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering . . . embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003, p. 103) War memorials are the most familiar and visible means of acknowledging and respecting the trauma of large-scale, violent conflict. In practically every town in Australia, however small, monuments to war are found. These are haunting, poignant reminders of the brutality of war and the fragility of life. And yet, their reassuring solidity and prominence shields us from the reality of lost lives and suffering by casting war in terms of abstract and stylized notions of heroism, loyalty, sacrifice, and glory. Although it is usual for the names of the dead to be listed on these monuments, their individual suffering is blended, ritualized, and distanced in a symbolic and generalized tribute. It is not surprising then that there has always been an awkward fit between the public statements embodied in these monuments to the dead and the personal stories told by individuals who returned. By gathering the stories into a single integrated expression of national pride, each monument is as much an agent of collective forgetting as it is of memorialization (Edkins, 2003, p. viii). But those who returned cannot forget.1 Indeed, is often said that for them, forgetting would be a betrayal or, as Lawrence Langer (1997) puts it, forgetting would be the ultimate desecration (p. 55). Personal accounts point to such intensities of pain

Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Corresponding Author: Paul Arthur, History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia Email:paul.arthur@anu.edu.au

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66 and horror, and so great a diversity in peoples responses to the atrocities of large-scale conflict, that it easy to see why they can destabilize the official narratives that collective national representations are built on. These personal narratives serve to demonstrate that these two ways of remembering traumatic eventsthe collective and the individualhave traditionally been poles apart and often contradictory. Gilmore (2001) reflects on this by asking, How can the experience of a survivor of trauma stand for many? How can one tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, when facts, truth, and memory combine in the representation of trauma to undermine rather than strengthen representativeness? [italics added] (p. 19) At least part of the answer lies in the difference of purpose and genre of each mode of remembering: In this case, one is a national narrative with the primary aim of mythologizing and nation building by generating and consolidating a unified public vision of events and people, whereas the other is the fragmentary, individualized, and messy form of autobiography.2 One is big, solid, and fixed; the other is small-scale, unstable, and unpredictable. One, like a national anthem, has the ability to trigger an instant communal response; the other can delve into the unique specificity of a single life, a single moment; it can shock and startle; it can challenge and shatter the unity of stable world views; it can unleash the full range of emotions through memory and testimony; and, for victims of trauma in war or other catastrophes, this genre is often recognized as being beyond expression, beyond the limits of language. Testimony is never adequate, Elie Weise asserts, it can never bridge the gap between language and experience; and, in the context of written testimony, Kali Tal (1996) explains, The combination of the drive to testify and the impossibility of recreating the event for the reader is one of the defining characteristics of trauma literature (p. 121).3 If the experience of trauma is indeed ultimately beyond language, a central question that needs to frame this discussion of online representations of trauma is, What can the new interactive digital modes for representing cataclysmic events offer to both the witnesses and the users who access the sites? In the past, the national narrative has undoubtedly been more influential than personal testimony in shaping national awareness of major historical events of this kind. Although, as Edkins (2003) points out, the two are not as separate and distinct as they may appear: Memories alter with the years, in parallel with changing forms of public commemoration (p. 28). At the heart of the national narrative in Australia is the potent and enduring story of the Australian and New Zealand soldiersthe Anzacswho fought at Gallipoli in World War I.4 Now almost sacred in its significance, the mythologized Anzac story clearly demonstrates how deeply people value the sense of community that collectively remembering

Traumatology 15(4) such a story gives them. On the anniversary of the catastrophic Gallipoli battle each year there is an Anzac Day national holiday, and Australians in ever-increasing numbers attend Anzac dawn services to honor the dead of World War Iand later warsconducted at war memorials across the nation. In contemporary Australia, these memorials have become focal points for the workings of the imagination more than memory, standing as symbols of events that occurred in far distant places, long ago. They do not mark sites of battle, nor burial places, and yet they continue to inspire and bring together generations of citizens, most of whom have had no direct experience of war.5 Why is this so? Part of the answer is that war memorials have great unifying power, even when they are at their most general and representative, because they are so well integrated into the established narrative of national identity and pride.6 They generate a sense of community and belonging. But it is also, paradoxically, because such monuments, operating at the opposite end of the memorialization spectrum from personal testimony, appear to offer an open space for the imagination, where anyone can inscribe his or her own thoughts, reveries and sadnesses.7 In other words, the very fact that they are empty, can make them powerful catalysts for personal as well as communal reflection. As Benedict Anderson (1991) explains, using the example of the tombs of Unknown Soldiers: No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than the cenotaphs and tombs of the Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has not true precedent in earlier times . . . . Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. (p. 9) Not all war memorials, however, follow the traditional pattern that I have described. Gradually, over the past two decades, with the increasing influence of critical theories that have questioned national and other dominating discourses of identity, and the grand narratives of historyand also with growing interest within the field of clinical psychology in what is now labeled posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)there has been an increasing interest the vast underlayer of personal stories that these powerful narratives have shut out or silenced. The discourse of memorialization is no exception. Following the example of the Holocaust Museum at Auschwitz,8 other museums and memorials around the world have sought to personalize the act of remembering and honoring the victims of war and other disasters in ways that attempt to engage visitors in the specific events and experiences of named individuals, rather than simply displaying the symbolic and generalized patterns of suffering and trauma.9

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Arthur The Australian War Memorial in Canberra is one such site. The most visited war memorial in the country, it is also one of worlds leading museums.10 The exhibitions and displays are planned and curated with great care and sensitivity. As is fitting for a national memorial, there is a strong nationalistic theme. However, this memorial departs from the standard pattern in that personal stories are well represented and there is no effort to try to hide, smooth over, or explain away, the conflict between collective and personal views of war. The inclusion of these personal perspectives alongside national themes is a response to the growing worldwide desire to hear the stories of ordinary people in history (see Arthur, 2008). This approach offers an alternative to the straightforwardly nationalistic collective memory symbolized by most war memorials around Australia. At the Australian War Memorial, the two modes of remembering are interwoven, with individual stories demanding empathy and emotional engagement, though still firmly under the broad banner of national pride and a powerful national mythology. A similar conjunction of the heroic myth with the very different reality of personal experience was evident recently in the national daily newspapers feature articles celebrating Anzac Day. It was reported that Paul Everett, a retuned paratrooper who served in Dili, East Timor, received a standing ovation in federal parliament earlier this year when it was announced that he was being honored by having his photograph on the front cover of the official 2009 national Anzac Day poster. When interviewed, however, these were among his comments: I just feel not right, my head wont stop . . . When a car backfires I dont hit the deck like you see in the movies, but it scares the hell out of me and I almost start crying. I find myself crying a lot . . . Youre just wired. You dont switch off. (Perpitch, 2009, p. 7) Typically, war memorials do not require that the personal traumas that have unfolded in other arenas of imaginative expression be confronted. They exist to serve the broader national interest. In the aftermath of each World War they served to play an important role in creating a coherent, public story so as to preserve social cohesion, justify the loss of life, bring comfort to the living, and create an environment where those directly affected by war could rebuild their lives and keep on living. And the enduring story told by the memorials, like the nation itself, is, to use Benedict Andersons term, an invention.11 The online environment of the World Wide Web has recently created a vast new arena for remembering and reimagining, so much so that the old dichotomy between public and private remembering no longer holds, and has to be rethought. This virtual world is a place where quite suddenly there have appeared multiple sites of commemoration. Some of these are small-scale family sites, created to honor

67 family members who have died and to share their stories.12 Those that are the focus of this article, however, are the larger institutionally supported sites that are that record disaster, conflict, and trauma. In contrast to national memorials of war, with their physical surety and agreed social rituals, online commemoration happens in a distributed virtual space with few signposts, ceremonies or conventions. Just before Anzac Day this year, an interactive Anzac Web site was launched by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Using photographs and global positioning system (GPS) maps as its access points for users, the site allows people to virtually enter and move through the landscapes of Gallipoli, in Turkey, where the Anzac legend was born. There, re-enactments of battles can be experienced, with a degree of realism never before possible. Also new is the capacity to follow the stories of individual surviving soldiers online and to live through their experiences, sometimes in face to face archival interviews, sometimes with voiceovers delivering readings from letters and diaries. Although it is strongly framed by the national mythology, this commemorative Web site builds on the innovative approach of the Australian War Memorial by accommodating a wide range of individual voices and stories. It has multiple layers and pathways that invite the user to navigate the site with a great deal of choice and freedom. Because the site deals with events that occurred close to a century ago, the memories in the personal testimonies, not surprisingly, are smoothed over by long and habitual retelling. Nevertheless, it is wonderful for the first time to be able to hear, from a personal computer, the voices of some of the survivor soldiers and, especially, to hear the voices of the enemy Turks. As the site develops further in future years, and accumulates more testimony, it will be interesting to see to what extent the heroic national story is challenged by competing stories and voices breaking in from below. This site demonstrates the online environments most obvious assetthe capacity to present various and often conflicting stories in the same space, at the same time, using multiple genres and media, and in an integrated nonhierarchical format which the user can navigate in privacy and in their own time. Web 2.0 provides an ideal environment for productive polyphony or, to use related Bakhtinian terms, for dialogism and multivoicedness (heteroglossia) to be activated in ways that are either not possible or much more difficult to achieve in the physical spaces of museums and memorials (see Bakhtin, 1981). And it is this ability to easily accommodate varied and discordant voices and positions, and to be endlessly open to addition and revision, which makes online memorialization potentially a very powerful form for encouraging, collecting, and preserving testimony, retaining all its uniqueness, so that it is not lost to history. But there are also benefits, as yet unexplored and unproven because these developments are so recent, that I believe the Web 2.0 environment can offer more directly to those who provide the testimony. In the following sections, in the context of discussing the

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68 nature of testimony and presenting examples of online commemoration, I will suggest what some of these benefitsand hazardsmight be.

Traumatology 15(4) p. 17). It is also well known that it is therapeutically beneficial to express and share personal accounts, not only one to one, but in groups and in the public domain. All psychotherapy, write Klein and Schermer (2000), revolve around a patients narrative, the telling of his or her story (p. 19). A number of recent studies of approaches to the understanding and treatment of various forms of PTSD have focused on group therapy rather than individual treatment because of the therapeutic value they see in the sharing of stories among groups of people who have been affected by traumatic experiences, especially similar experiences.13 In their book, Group Psychotherapy for Psychological Trauma, Klein and Schermer (2000) make the claim that From a therapeutic standpoint, small and large groups (including social systems) constitute the most effective settings for containing and reversing the effects of trauma (p. 265). They also note the burgeoning development all around the world of groups focused on victims of specific trauma (p. 4). Similarly, Young and Blake (1999) assert that Group therapy is regarded by many as the treatment of choice for trauma survivors.14 Among the many examples of group settings is John P. Wilsons account of the talking circles used by Sioux traditional healers for this purpose: While there are a host of insights I could share about this ritual, he writes, among the most central and poignant is that persons suffering from psychic trauma could break through their isolation, detachment, avoidance, defensiveness and embrace others without fear of shame, guilt or rejection (Drozdek & Wilson, 2007, p. 97). Such groups provide a safe environment for the stories of trauma to be told, however imperfectly, and thus, contained. As Leigh Gilmore (2001) notes, Survivors of trauma are urged to testify repeatedly to their trauma in an effort to create the language that will manifest and contain trauma (p. 7). It is part of a quest for meaning (Drozdek & Wilson, 2007, p. 367). Those who have suffered intense trauma report that the unspeakable becomes speakable when it is communicated and shared, and that through this process it also becomes more meaningful and more bearable. It begins to allow the traumatic memories and feelings to be integrated into the persons present life.15 This is perhaps the greatest benefit that comes from giving any sort of testimony. It is part of working through a traumatic eventtelling it as you saw it, or telling it in a way that you can bear to see it, within a community of receptive listeners (see Bowles & Mehraby, 2007, p. 313). There is broad agreement in recent literature promoting group treatment of trauma that through this process of telling and sharing trauma creates a unifying force to bring people together in the wake of a disaster (Drozdek & Wilson, 2007, p. 336). How can the online environment respond to these insights on the benefits of sharing testimony in groups? Although the examples in psychology texts focus on clinical settings for trauma treatment, I believe that there are some features of the group approach that are highly relevant to online settings. Most important, as the examples of postdisaster Web sites

Testimony
Yet we must not forget that everything starts, not from the archives, but from testimony, and that, whatever may be our lack of confidence in the principle in such testimony, we have nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves that something did happen in the past, which someone attests to have witnessed in person, and that the principal, and at times our only, recourse, when we lack other types of documentation, remains the confrontation among testimonies. (Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 2004, p. 147) In recent years, many museums and memorials have been established around the world for remembering cataclysmic events. These are places where visual records and objects can be displayed, and the stories of witnesses and survivors can be told and shared with the public. Edkins (2003) describes some of the most famous of these in her chapter Concentration Camp Memorials and Museums: Dachau and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (Edkins, 2003, pp. 111-174). At the heart of each of her examples is the desire of survivors to tell the world of the horror of the experiences suffered in the hope that, as a result of their testimony, similar events will be prevented from occurring again. Their stories are also told in order to honor and remember the dead. As Sontag (2003) says, Memory is, achingly, the only contact we have with the dead (p. 103). Much has been written on the problematic nature of testimony. Edkins (2003) suggests that in the very process of rewriting trauma into state narratives of commemoration to form part of the official record, trauma is actually concealed. Further, she argues, The proliferation of museums and memorials . . . also seems to promote forgetting or to commercialise and hence trivialise remembering (pp. xv, 126). More fundamentally, trauma testimony is trapped within the intractable paradox of expressing in narrative something that is beyond meaning and reason. As Kali Tal (1996) explains, Neither are the survivors able to escape this trap, for the very telling of the tale implies a narrative structure that is counter to the traumatic experience it attempts to represent (p. 50). And yet there is a compulsion among trauma survivors to tell the tale, and there is wide agreement that the telling is an essential part of any healing process (Edkins, 2003, p. 2). As Boris Drozdek explains in Voices of Trauma: Treating Survivors Across Cultures, Feeling relieved after verbally expressing the distress due to traumatic experiences seems to be a universal phenomenon (Drozdek & Wilson, 2007,

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Arthur that follow will show, Web-based interaction can and does enable communities to form and so provides group support to individuals.16 Furthermore, as has already been said, there is no doubt that the online environment allows unprecedented scope for a diversity of stories to be told about the same events, regardless of how dispersed, geographically, the contributors might be. The stories can be contradictory, conflicting, confronting, and emotionally charged and, in some kinds of sites, the cyber group can share experiences and gain support from each other at their own pace and in their own way. Although at this early stage in the history of such sites there is unlikely to be much evidence of how beneficial this might be, there are certainly aspects of the online environment that seem to lend themselves to building the kinds of support structures that groups provide in clinical therapy settings. It is also recognized, however, that interaction online can present problems. These include problems of access and technological proficiency for participants and users; the cold impersonality of the screen compared to the experience of telling and listening face to face; the dangers of wide distribution of words and images provided at a moment of vulnerability and later regretted; and also, as with any private material that is opened up to a wide audience, risks of receiving deliberately false testimony or of eliciting hostile and hurtful responses to authentic testimony in what some have called memory wars (Edkins, 2003, p. 135). But apart from the first two, these are the same hazards that are faced by clinical group therapy. The online environment does not offer new solutions for people affected by trauma. However, if we accept the widely held view that survivor testimony is first of all a search for relief then it does seem to have the potential to provide new supportive environments that may be helpful (Tal, 1996, p. 133). There is no known remedy for the after effects of trauma. Whatever the setting, the challenge of helping trauma victims is recognized, by psychologists, as a very difficult one. As Drozdek and Wilson (2007) admit at the end of their book on trauma treatment, There exist empirical and clinical voids in the knowledge base as to what treatments work best for what kinds of people and under what set of circumstances (p. 375). Although revealing ones stories of trauma in the safety of a defined group is widely agreed to be beneficial, what if the stories are opened up, via the World Wide Web, to the general public, as they are in museums? Many trauma victims want their story to be told to the world (Edkins, 2003, p. 2). But there may well be pitfalls that come with mass public exposure. The long-term repercussions of this sort of exposure are as yet little understood, especially in the online environment. For example, there are challenges that result from the fragility of online information and the nebulous nature of online communities. In the virtual world, communities can form and disform, leaving few traces. Because participants can be anonymous or assume false identities, there is the danger of skeptical or malicious responses that could do serious damage.

69 Even more disturbingly, in making public the intensely private experience of trauma, there is a danger of overexposure and exploitation, and of turning trauma into entertainment.17 If the online environment can potentially provide a framework and community for testimony, can it also provide anything new in terms of a supportive medium for the expression of testimony? Returning to the idea that traumatic memories are unrepresentable and beyond language, is there anything that the online environment can offer to break through this impasse? (Gilmore, 2001, p. 7).18 There is wide agreement that the problem of unrepresentability should not deter people from trying to tell their stories of trauma, taking whatever opportunities might emerge, because the act of providing testimony is crucially important to healing, in spite of its known inadequacy in terms of recalling and retelling events.19 How can online modes support this quest? Although we are witnessing a very early stage in the development of online memorialization and testimony, I believe that the Web site examples discussed in this paper will show that the online environment does offer something different and promising that can more closely reflect the fragmented, shattered, volatile, and often incoherent, experience of trauma and the attempts to describe it. It offers a nonlinear, distributed format which can contain narrative but is not itself narrative. It can also contain thingsphotographs, mementoes, letters, video clips, maps, simulationsand also, crucially, human voices offering testimony. And online sites can link up with other sites, so inviting interaction with like-minded people. Although all of these depend, of course, on having access to and being able to use appropriate digital technologies, they certainly open up the possibility of new dimensions that have not been hitherto available to historians and to survivors of disasters. In doing so they offer greater control20and to conceal and disclose at ones own discretion, and at ones own pace, and, most important, to leave the pieces of the story scattered and unresolved.21 If telling ones story is a key part of the process of coping with trauma, then a first step in re-piecing a shattered self may well be to simply display the fragments for others to see and, perhaps, have empathy withpieces of written testimony among them (Tal, 1996, p. 138). I write, explains Adrienne Rich, in another context, for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well (Tal, 1996, p. 138). In clinical settings, too, according to Drozdek and Wilson (2007), the professional therapist work[s] on the integration of fragmented traumatic experiences (p. 12) and this is done by turning them into stories.22 As Kali Tal (1996) explains, literature of trauma is written from the need to tell and retell the story of the traumatic experience, to make it real. Such writing serves both as validation and cathartic vehicle for the traumatized writer (p. 137). Cathy Caruths (1996) definition of trauma highlights the long-term effects of traumatic experiences: trauma describes

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70 an overwhelming experience of sudden, catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena (p. 11).23 This can be a selfenclosed, endless torment leading to a lifelong replaying of the same drama, a rupturing experience that repeats and does not let one go. This was the experience of my Ukrainian grandfather, Petro Olijnyk, who died in Adelaide at the age of 94 several years ago. My grandfather and his family survived Stalins enforced starvation of rural Ukraine, German invasion, and Nazi labor and prison camps in occupied Poland and Germany, before ultimately migrating, as refugees, to settle in Australia. He told his harrowing stories over and over again to anyone who would listen. One deeply traumatic event for him was the killing of his father in a village on the outskirts of Rublivka soon after the Bolshevik revolution. This is a fragment from the story he told to my mother on July 4, 1995 and recorded in her notebook: The decision was made to remove people who were wealthy before they could protest against the revolution. The CHEKA (NKVD) arrested 11 people from the Rublivka regionout of 20,000. Prydoon identified my father as a counter-revolutionary. They came armed, on horseback, called him out into the street, tied his hands and made him walk behind the horses, 2 or 3 horses. It was already snowing. They tied his hands behind his back and took him. I ran behind him crying Dyida, Dyida, where are you going? I was barefoot in the snow, running. Others were following too. Neighbours told me not to run after him and pulled me back. As my grandfather told the stories he would draw thingsmaps of the village streets, pictures of the distribution of rooms in houses, the cattle carriages in which he and his family were transported to Nazi camps. For him, online capturing of some of his many stories and sketches would have been of enormous benefit, not only to help ease the pain of his memories but also to give him the secure knowledge that they would have a place in the historical record; they would not disappear without trace. The Web sites that are emerging in Australia now to collect such stories are too late for my grandfather, but we have many of his stories, translated or transcribed from Ukrainian by my motherin notebooks hidden away in bottom drawers. We even have a few old tape recordings, which in the past would all probably eventually have been thrown away, but now are very likely to find an online home. Testimony is particularly powerful in the public sphere when it is given in formal settings, such as the many Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that have been established around the world in recent years. Some take the position that trauma does not even exist until it can be articulated and

Traumatology 15(4) heard by a sympathetic listener (Gilmore, 2001, p. 6). Perhaps, then, trauma can only speak through testimony. Flashbacks, nightmares, emotional flooding are in this way replaced by a conscious language that can be repeated through structured settings (Gilmore, 2001, p. 7). In Australia, the pivotal recent example is the process that led to the publication of the Bringing Them Home report (1997), which followed the investigation of the history of forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. Witnessing Stolen Generation testimony has been seminal to subsequent research and writing in Australia (Douglas & Whitlock, 2008, p. 5). For the first time, this report made public the voices of the people who had either been taken away or directly affected by the controversial policy. One by one they came in to tell their harrowing stories to the commissioners. They sniffed us out like bush dogs, said one witness (p. 210) and, They took us round to room and shaved our hair off . . . They gave you your clothes and stamped a number on them . . . They never called you by your name; they called you by your number. That number was stamped on everything . . . It was like a prison. (p. 57).24 Many were told that their parents were dead, or worthless, as in this womans testimony, to prevent them from trying to return: When I first met my motherwhen I was 14she wasnt what they said she was. They made her sound like she was stupid, you know, they made her sound so bad. And when I saw her she was so beautiful. Mum said, My babys been crying and she walked into the room and she stood there and I walked into myI walked into my mother and we hugged and this hot, hot rush just from the tip of my toes up to my head filled every part of my bodyso hot. That was my first feeling of love and it only could come from my mum. I was so happy and that was the last time I got to see her. When my mum passed away I went to her funeral which is stupid because Im allowed to go to see her at her funeral but I couldnt have that when she requested me. They wouldnt let me have her.25 At the end of the report the commissioner, Sir Ronald Wilson, wrote of the enormously cathartic effect for the witnesses of simply telling the stories and having them formally heard: At times, it was as though they were reliving the experiences of which they spoke. In an effort to be faithful to the courage and dignity of those who came forward to tell the stories, we have, in writing the Report, retained as far as possible the actual words as we heard them. It seemed to us the least that we could do. There

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Arthur is a further comment I should like to make about the telling and listening to these stories. The Commission became convinced that the process of storytelling was itself the beginning of a healing process. We have therefore recommended that those remaining stories that we were unable to hear because of lack of time and resources should continue to be told to an appropriate authority. In this way, one aspect of the healing process could continue. (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997, p. xiv)

71 The Web site actually stopped accepting direct public contributions in 2004 but the library keeps receiving material and adds it to an even larger, offline version of the collection. As the managers of this project explain, Our goal is to create a permanent record of the events of September 11, 2001. In the process, we hope to foster some positive legacies of those terrible events by allowing people to tell their stories, making those stories available to a wide audience, providing historical context for understanding those events and their consequences, and helping historians and archivists improve their practices based on the lessons we learn from this project.27 The September 11 Digital Archive also aggregates and preserves various community projects as special collections. These include the National Museum of American Historys exhibition September 11: Bearing Witness to History, as well as a Sonic Memorial project,28 and related photography and local history initiatives. One can see everywhere, and at all times, the basic instinct to tell stories as an individual and collective human strategy for recovery and survival. For Aug (2004), to abandon storytelling may be to abandon memory altogether: . . . as soon as we distance ourselves from the tale, as soon as we give up turning what we call remembrances into a story, we distance ourselves from memory too perhaps (p. 23). In this context, storytelling in the online environment opens up new opportunities, for people who would otherwise have been isolated in their grief, to share their memories and emotions with a community of willing listeners, whose lives were suddenly changed by the events of that same moment in history. Storytelling, as a private and public act of remembering and comprehending, and as a means to create a community who shared the experience of trauma on the same day and in the same place, in most cases without knowing each other prior to that time, is central to this archive. This is not about piecing together what actually happened. The whole world saw on their television screens how the buildings collapsed and were shattered into fragments. The stories indeed are themselves fragments that, when assembled, form a collected communal memory of the event, one that gathers and flows under and around and through the famous photographic and video images that have somehow become solid and clear in visual memory across the world. Precisely how the accounts of September 11, 2001 and similar archives actually represent communities when the only evidence of these communities is in the online records they create, is a current concern of archivists (Bastian, 2008). Apart from storytelling in the narrative sense, online commemoration can enable a kind of rebuilding and reconstruction of community through user contributed photographs, objects, and other digitized ephemera. In the case of the Hurricane

Online Commemoration
The interconnected online environment of the World Wide Web is very well equipped to facilitate the process of telling, listening and sharing that is a basic element of healing, commemoration, and also of community building following crisis. Online communities take many different forms. Like their traditional counterparts, they can be of different sizes, exist for short or long periods, and shift or evolve as people come and go. Many of the contributors to commemorative Web sites are geographically distributed for the very same reasons that the sites are formed in the first placeas a result of the exile or physical displacement caused by war or natural disaster. However, these Web sites also invite contributions from the global public. Each of the examples discussed below assembles and displays testimony and memory in a different way. They do not create collective memory, although the resources may ultimately contribute to a long-term collective understanding through offering evidence of different versions of events. They are best thought of in terms of collected memory.26 There have been many public commemorative responses to the events of September 11, 2001, which shattered the hope of world peace at the opening of the new millennium. Miller and Tougauw (2002) start their book Extremities, published just after these events, by saying, This tragic overture to the twenty-first century has changed the context of this book, jarred our perspective. We are only beginning to take the measure of the new testimonies to loss, the new contexts of traumatic experience that this event has produced. (p. 20) The September 11 Digital Archive (http://911digital archive.org/) is a project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, with a range of partners that include Red Cross and Seagate. This archive collects and preserves the memories and documents of people directly or indirectly affected by the tragic events that took place on that day and in its aftermath. It is a publicly available, searchable archive that is now maintained by the U.S. Library of Congress as a growing historical record.

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72 Digital Memory Bank (http://www.hurricanearchive.org/), which is also a project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, users contribute all manner of digital assets as a record of the physical and human devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Like the September 11 Digital Archive, it is a large-scale collaborative effort. It is supported by the University of New Orleans, with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and funded primarily by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It also has more than 20 other cultural and community partners. In the Hurricane project, contributions are linked in physical relation with one another by being colocated using a Google Map interface. These tracesmemories, photographs, scraps of objects, and documentsare leftover items, a jumbled index of miscellany imbued with significance it would no doubt never have had before the disaster.29 One anonymous contributor, for example, has posted a scanned copy of a salvaged menu from Dempseys restaurant. The fact that it survived seems reason enough to celebrate its significance in this archive. In the same way that retrieved everyday items displayed in war museums seem to overflow with emotion, these virtual collections of significant objects seem to speak louder, and have more impact, than they possibly could have before. Whereas the September 11 Digital Archive could be said to allow some escape from the overpowering visual representations of the physical place to the place of memory, the Hurricane project seeks to recover a sense of the destroyed place from the broken and disconnected fragments left behind. This is because this place was their home and their neighborhood. In many ways, the archive itself resembles the mess of scraps and disconnected remnants that are left by a violent storm. The sharing of objects allows people to piece them together into a collection that becomes a focus for enshrining the physical location in the memory and enabling mourning to take place. In my third example, a different kind of online community is being formed through the newly launched World is Witness geoblog hosted by The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum program, Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiatives (http://blogs.ushmm.org/worldiswitness). This commemorative project, which documents and maps genocide and related crimes against humanity, has an explicit additional purpose: it provides an interactive forum for awareness building and activism. Using a Google Earth interfaceand including RSS feeds, Facebook links, and other Web 2.0 social bookmarking featuresthe site connects firsthand reports of contemporary human injustices to particular locations, along with historical references to sites of earlier documented atrocities. Like the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank project, it is an example of a place-based approach to digital history and documentation that is paving the way for a new model of electronic publication in the humanities. Its primary purpose is to facilitate an online forum, but it locates and positions the discussion, and hence focuses the attention of the blog community, on geographical

Traumatology 15(4) points of relevance. It is significantly different from the other two projects in that it opens up multiple sites of trauma and does not privilege some over others. Most important, it has the specific aim of preventing future neglect or injustice in the aftermath of disasters and even perhaps preventing future acts of mass violence through the horrors it puts on public display.30 Targeting global audiences, this project does not attempt to bring the multiple events together into a single whole but rather to expose the specific nature of each in order to bring world attention to a common thread of human suffering and also of injustice. The community it seeks to form is one of listening, caring, and potentially taking action.31 The three examples discussed here show efforts to rebuild, reconstruct, or create new communities out of witness accounts and collected memory in its many forms. The basic need to revisualize and reconstruct is a familiar response following war and other atrocities, whether it be through the repeating of stories, giving testimony, or other ways of reimagining the circumstances in which traumatic events occurred. When there are no remains of the physical environment that is the focus of extraordinarily painful memories, the responses can be especially extreme, as in the case of Sztajer, a Melbourne resident and one of the approximately 100 Jews to have survived the Treblinka Nazi extermination camp. He died in early 2008 at age 98. By the time Nazi mass extermination ended in April 1943, around 870,000 people had lost their lives, including Sztajers family. Treblinka was destroyed, and the remains later buried and planted over, in an act of erasure. This erasure of history had a profound effect on Sztajer, who, much later in life, laboriously reconstructed the camp as a scale model built from memory out of wood and plaster. It measures 3 square meters. The model is now a permanent exhibit at the Melbourne Holocaust Museum and for many years Sztajer offered public tours and interpretations of the model and of the camp. It may take years to work through such trauma and for many people it is a lifelong process. According to Sztajers wife of 35 years, there was not one day that he didnt speak about Treblinka (Kohn, 2008). Localized communities of memory can help to strengthen and even reform communities that have been physically scattered. But these are also new communities in the sense that they have been created through a shared experience of crisis. Although the common ground may be physical in the case of a community affected by events in one particular location, it is often the removal of/from the shared space that creates the conditions for the formation of this kind of new community. People are always brought together, in a sense, by shared identification with experiences of disaster and displacementeven if they never actually meet. We also have many more visible ways of responding, through museums, monuments, petitions, tribunals, crisis centers, support groups, trials, novels, biographies, documentary films, public acknowledgements and announcements, rituals, anniversaries, and through art and activism.

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Arthur Online communities, especially dedicated commemorative Web sites, perform many of these functions and some others that are unique to their distributed format. First, although they may, in their early stages, be thought of as providing a snapshot of initial impressions, as time goes by and the collections of impressions grow, they become a deeper account that has increasing value as an archive. Second, considered as a form of commemoration, online memorials differ from other sorts of more traditional memorials in that they are closer to listening tribunals than to carefully planned commemorative gestures. They can better reflect and facilitate a fundamental aspect of working through trauma because they invite and encourage people to share their memories and they provide a public forum for giving testimony and having it heard. A memorial Web site allows the stories to be told in ways determined by the storytellers. It provides multiple entry and exit points, styles of presentation, and levels of interaction and privacy; it allows participants to engage with and be affected by stories of others. If managed carefully, it can offer a safe haven rather than a shrine. Third, these Web sites reach out further, encouraging the input of people who are affected less directly. As the opening quotation points out, the duty to remember is arguably a duty for those least affected by war and other catastrophic events.

73 has traditionally ignored are now being heard and have a voice and place to speak. Never before has this sort of history making been possiblefor anyone who is within reach of a computer, anywhere. And yet, the very qualities and activities of online memory communities that make them helpful to people in the immediate aftermath of disastertheir capacity to form quickly, change their shape, expand or contract at will, accommodate incoherence and disorderare also the features that threaten their long-term existence. As these examples of digital projects show, the new capacity to share stories and images online has enabled a transformation of the arena of trauma commemoration. Unlike the traditional stone war memorials, built with their feet planted firmly on the ground, and designed to be looked at, the new online forms that are emerging are dynamic and interactive, and exist in a volatile space that is everywhere and yet nowhere. Serving purposes that go far beyond those of public memorialization, these highly interactive projects are forming new genres that are beginning to redefine not only the form and substance of sites of commemoration but also their priorities and purposes in the lives of those who have experienced or been touched by traumatic events. Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Conclusion
The online environment is making possible the cathartic sharing of information and experience among vastly greater numbers of people and across all boundariesof geographical location, nation, social status, ethnicity, age, and even time itself. Through the process of making the experience visible and accessible in the public domain, a measure of respect and pride can be restored, and the shame and humiliation that often accompanies suffering can start to be transformed and sometimes even transcended.32 We could call these communities that share their stories of trauma and disaster, communities of pain. But they are perhaps better thought of positively, in terms of commemoration, memorialization, and even celebration of community and collective identity in the face of extreme hardship and crisis. Furthermore, as is the hope in the case of the World is Witness geoblog, they may even play a role in preventing similar events in the future. In a very visible, palpable, experiential way, online commemoration makes possible the transformation of history that has long been talked about but could not be fully activated without the World Wide Webs new emphasis on user-generated content and sharing. That democratization, expansion, and inclusiveness, has enabled history itself to be reconceived as an inevitably shifting and moving entity, a dynamic set of perspectives of life and experiences with personal stories at the heart of it. This has allowed a great enrichment of the pool we call history. People whom history

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes
1. See Edkins (2003): Victory parades, remembrance ceremonies and war museums tell of glory, courage and sacrifice . . . But returning combatants tell a different tale. Survivors are subdued, even silent. Many witnessed the deaths of those around them. They cannot forget (p. 1). 2. This has been referred to as memory biography (see Edkins, 2003, p. 28). 3. See also Edkins (2003): There are no words for it. This is the dilemma survivors face (p. 8). 4. On April 25 every year, Australians recognize ANZAC Day. It commemorates the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. That date was officially named ANZAC Day in 1916. See http://www.cultureand reacreation.gov.au/articles/anzac/index.htm. 5. As an example of the Anzac myths continuing importance and popularity, The West Australian newspaper, on Anzac day 2009, featured a colour wrap-around Anzac magazine, with the words Lest We Forget as the heading for a full page picture of a typical war memorial with a soldier, a recent Victoria Cross recipient, standing in front of it. The inside headline was Nation Honours Those Who Fell Defending Our Freedom (2009, pp. 1-8).

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6. See Jowett and ODonnell (1999) for insights into the nature and roles of various forms of wartime propaganda in the maintenance of national identity. For example, National celebrations, with their overt patriotism and regional chauvinism, can usually be classified as white propaganda (p. 12); and It is often strange to look back with nostalgia on historical artifacts of propaganda, such as wartime posters, leaflets, and especially motion pictures made during the conflict, for they dramatically reveal how context-bound certain types of propaganda can be . . . The reason for the unwillingness to let go of these potent propaganda images is that they have become part of the official history of nations. (pp. 206, 207) 7. See Edkins (2003, pp. 67, 79). 8. See Sontag (2003), where she refers to this kind of memorial as the memory museum (p. 77). 9. In the field of clinical of psychology, it is widely accepted that trauma does not follow a pattern and that individuals experience trauma in their own unique ways that depend on specific events and contexts as well as on personal, cultural, and historical factors. See, for example, Drozdek AND Wilson (2007, pp. 8, 9). 10. See http://www.awm.gov.au/. 11. See Anderson (1991): In the preceding chapters I have tried to delineate the process by which the nation came to be imagined, and once imagined, modeled, adapted and transformed. Such an analysis has been concerned primarily with social change and different forms of consciousness. But it is doubtful whether either social change or transformed consciousness, in themselves, do much to explain the attachment that peoples feel for the inventions of their imaginationsor . . . why people are ready to die for these inventions. (p. 141) See also Edkins (2003): Narrative, in Hayden Whites account, is related to the imaginary, or at least to a notion of the imaginary wholeness: the value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary. (p. 88) 12. See, for example, http://memorialwebsites.legacy.com/; http:// childsuicide.homestead.com/MemorialSites.html; and http:// psychcentral.com/resources/Grief_and_Loss/Memorial_Sites/. These private sites raise many of the same issues as those relating to larger and more public traumatic events. 13. See, for example, Young and Blake (1999) and Wilson and Thomas (2004). 14. Young and Blake (1999, p. 1). 15. Young and Blake (1999, pp. 1, 7).

Traumatology 15(4)
16. Edkins (2003) refers to Foucaults phrase the solidarity of the shaken (p. 5). 17. See Sontag (2003): Ever since [the Vietnam War], battles and massacres, filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic small-screen entertainment (pp. 18-19). 18. See also Kleinman, Das, and Lock (1997, p. viii) on the preoccupation with the incommunicability of pain. 19. See Tal (1996), on the gap between language and experience: Could the wall be scaled? . . . I knew the answer to be NO, and yet I also knew that No had to become Yes (p. 2). 20. Tal (1996) recognizes the importance of survivors having some control over their stories: survivors can sometimes band together as a community and retain a measure of control over the representation of their experience (p. 7). 21. See Edkins (2003), referring to Auschwitz and Majdanek: Heaps of scattered artefacts belie the interconnectedness of lives that made these victims a people. The sum of these dismembered fragments can never approach the whole of what was lost (p. 150). 22. See Kleinman, Das, and Lock (1997): I believe that all attempts to investigate the effects of atrocity on a group or community must begin with the narratives of individual victims (p. 55); You begin with the hope of creating order out of chaos, finding patterns in the survival narrative (p. 63). See also, Klein and Schermer (2000): There is strong evidence that verbalising the trauma . . . [is] not only helpful in the short run, but may prevent or aid in the treatment of complex disorders such as major depression (p. 19). 23. See also Klein and Schermer (2000, pp. 4-5) on definitions of trauma. 24. Bird (1997, pp. 210, 57). 25. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1997, Part 3, chap. 10). Confidential evidence 139, Victoria: removed 1967; witnesss mother died 2 years after their first and only meeting. 26. The concept of collective memory is associated with the work of philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs but has been developed by many others, including James E. Young, who has used the term collected memory to indicate the fragmentary nature of memory. 27. http://911digitalarchive.org/about/index.php. 28. http://www.sonicmemorial.org/. 29. See Edkins (2003, p. 79) for the example of the Vietnam wall where personal objects are left by those who come to remember the dead. 30. See Sontag (2003, pp. 11-12) for a discussion on public exposure of horrific images of war to try to prevent war in the future. 31. A different kind of activist site is GetUp (http://www.getup. org.au). Highly proactive and political, this Australian grassroots organization claims responsibility for changing the Australian Howard governments direction on a number of key issues in recent years.

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32. See Edkins (2003, pp. 4, 179) on the feelings of shame experienced by survivors; also see Watts and Horne (1994, pp. 10, 128, 133, 148).

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Retrieved June 11, 2009, from http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_ Justice/bth_report/report/index.html Jowett, G., & ODonnell, V. (1999). Propaganda and persuasion (3rd ed.). London: Sage. Klein, R. H., & Schermer, V. L. (Eds.). (2000). Group psychology for psychological trauma. New York: Guilford Press. Kleinman, A., Das, V., & Lock, M. (Eds.). (1997). Social suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kohn, P. (2008, February 28). Community mourns Holocaust Museum icon. Australian Jewish News. Retrieved September 14, 2008, from http://www.ajn.com.au/news/news .asp?pgID=5043 Langer, L. L. (1997). The alarmed vision: Social suffering and Holocaust atrocity. In A. Kleinman, V. Das, & M. Lock (Eds.), Social suffering (pp. 47-66). Berkeley: University of California Press. Miller, N. K., & Tougaw, J. (Eds.). (2002). Extremities: Trauma, testimony and community. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Nation Honours Those Who Fell Defending Our Freedom. (2009, April 25). The West Australian, pp. 1-8. Perpitch, N. (2009, April 25-26). The Weekend Australian, p. 7. Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, history, forgetting (K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the pain of others. London: Penguin. Tal, K. (1996). Worlds of hurt: Reading the literatures of trauma. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Watts, R., & Horne, D. J. d. (1994). Coping with trauma. Brisbane: Australian Academic Press. Wilson, J. P., & Thomas, R. B. (2004). Empathy in the treatment of trauma and PTSD. New York: Routledge/Brunner. Young, B. H., & Blake, D. D. (1999). Group treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder. Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel.

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Bio
Paul Arthur studied at The University of Western Australia and was a research fellow at Murdoch University and Curtin University before taking up a position in the History program at The Australian National University. He has held visiting fellowships at leading international research centres in Europe, North America and Australia, and has published widely on the history of technology, media, travel and empire.

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