Red, White Indifferent
Negotiating Remembrance in Canada
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The role of social media during the process of negotiation is still being realized; does it spread awareness in new and innovative ways or does it allow people to be too passive about remembrance? Does a like, retweet or favourite actually achieve anything?
You can follow Veterans Affairs Canada on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Flickr, and their Facebook page "Canada Remembers" has over 700,000 likes. Canadian Forces has a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Pinterest. Social media campaigns are popping up to encourage people to remember and support our Forces. Online, remembrance is being renegotiated through a social media lens.
Every year, Twitter calls for two minutes of "tweet silence" at 11am on Remembrance Day, popularizing the hashtag #weremember. It is now used for everything from personal remembrance and remembering events (as seen below), to remembering the date a popular movie came out. Veterans Affairs Canada even created a mobile app where people could "win cool prizes" if they remember. Should people need an incentive to honour veterans or is this trivializing remembrance?
Social media is also changing how future generations will remember modern wars. For the World Wars, we have countless letters that were mailed back and forth to give us an indication of what life was like both on the battlefield and at the home front. "You don't print out a collect tons and tons of emails over the years, so these kinds of thoughts can be lost forever," said David Olivier, a history professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. We are losing tangible, primary sources that have helped us to paint a picture of what war is really like for individuals, can a person truly sum up their experience in 140 characters?
However, while these accounts are being lost, pictures and videos are being shared in unprecedented ways, giving the public an often unfiltered look at what's happening on the ground. We may be losing written experiences, and moving instead to more visual storytelling.
Social media is also allowing people all over Canada to come together in online communities to engage in discussion, debate and mutual support. Perhaps the efficacy of social media as a tool for remembrance depends on who is using it; it can be an effective tool if used properly, but shouldn't be a person's only way of remembering.
Popular Social Media Campaigns
@wearethedead is a Twitter page launched by the Ottawa Citizen in 2010. Every hour, they tweet out the name of one fallen Canadian Forces member, and they need 10 more years of hourly tweets to name every person who died in service.
The Twiribbon Campaign has prompted almost 1,000 Canadians to add a black ribbon for mourning and over 20,000 Canadians to add a poppy for remembrance to their Facebook or Twitter profile photo. This has become the largest virtual gathering of poppies ever.
There have also been various popular memes that have circulated across social media platforms, such as "If WWI was a bar fight." Do these modern adaptations make a joke of war or do they help a younger generation to understand it in new ways?
Mobile apps are another way that the government, Veterans Affairs and grassroots organizations are encouraging the public to remember. For example, "The Fallen" maps where over 118,000 Canadian Forces have been buried to contextualize and honour their sacrifices. Apps like this one are "a new way to remember for a new generation."
Remembrance Day 2013 fell on a workday, and many Canadians were not able to attend official ceremonies. While their workplace may observe a moment of silence or watch pieces of ceremonies on the news, it probably does not have the same impact. Last year, for the first time, technology was able to solve this problem; the Canadian War Museum did a live webcast of the ceremony in Ottawa at the War Memorial. Said to be one of the most emotional ceremonies in the country, Canadians were now able to participate from their computer or mobile device from anywhere in the world.