Joyce van de Bildt's chapter, "The Uses of Facebook for Examining Collective Memory: The Emergence of Nasser Facebook Pages in Egypt," is featured in the recently published Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, edited by Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen.
From the introduction, written by the editors:
"In 'The Uses of Facebook for Examining Collective Memory: The Emergence of Nasser Facebook Pages in Egypt,' Joyce van de Bildt adds a transmedial twist to the transcultural and transnational nature of transgenerational memory underlined by Erll. Anticipating the focus on digital and social media in (especially) the third section of this book, the chapter demonstrates how Facebook pages function as a platform on which people express their different views of a shared past, evoking competition, comparison, and conversation. As a case study, the chapter explores the emergence of Facebook pages dedicated to Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser. The pages’ historical themes stand for larger, more complex interpretations of the Egyptian national past, which are closely related to current social and political agendas. Since the Nasser forums are predominantly founded by a younger generation of Egyptians whose members have not experienced his period of rule, van de Bildt argues that these “historical” Facebook pages should be examined as forms of transgenerational memory and as instances of nostalgia. The chapter explicitly raises disciplinary questions, considering, like Jessica K. Young’s chapter in this collection, whether social media are appropriate tools for examining cultural memory practices and how they can be complemented by other medial and disciplinary approaches to vernacular, as opposed to official, memory."
Citation information:
Joyce van de Bildt, "The Uses of Facebook for Examining Collective Memory: The Emergence of Nasser Facebook Pages in Egypt," in Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen, "Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017),