Onlife remembrance: the case of the 1993 Sivas Massacre

The increasing entanglement of online and offline memory environments has transformed the ways in which the past is remembered, remediated, and represented in our hyper-connected era. Various existing approaches, however, continue to treat online and offline dimensions of memory as distinct, overlooking their entanglement in contemporary remembrance practices. This article addresses this conceptual and methodological gap by critically engaging with the limitations of such approaches and theorizing onlife remembrance as an analytical framework for rethinking the multifaceted acts and experiences of remembrance of the historical past that emerge through the intra-actions of online and offline contexts within the interconnected nodes of the global infosphere. To demonstrate the explanatory potential of this framework in practice, the article offers a detailed case analysis of onlife remembrance of the 1993 Sivas/Madımak Massacre in Turkey, examining users’ mnemonic engagements with audiovisual remediations of the massacre on YouTube alongside user interactions within the 3D immersive environment of the Virtual Madımak Massacre Museum.