“Just for Fun?”: Contestation, Entertainment, and Digital Communities of Memory in Post-Socialist Romania

This presentation will examine the increasing emergence of virtual communities of memory that have relied on the Internet to share personal recollections of socialist childhood over the past decade in Romania. Typically dismissed as “socialist nostalgics,” these communities challenge the hegemonic memory discourse popularized in print and broadcast media and entrenched in the 1990s. If the dominant discourse about the past holds that the communist regime’s totalitarian grip on Romanian society engendered social and individual pathologies, digital communities of memory make room for the expression of positive associations with the communist past. My analysis will explore how and why social media are appropriated as venues for the expression of alternative narratives of the communist past, contributing to the literature on the popular appropriation, fragmentation, and commodification of social memory in Eastern Europe. It will address the constraints and possibilities that emerge out of participation in potentially more democratic, but also heavily scripted, anonymized, and commodified virtual spaces such as blogs, websites, and Facebook groups.