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Blogging 9/11 and Memory Discourse
by Maria Cristina Paganoni
There are 100,000 stories crisscrossing New York, Washington, and the world. (DeLillo 2001)
STUDY DESIGN
world, the 9/11 catastrophe provoked an “explosion of discourses” (Butt^ Perceived as a major trauma and a turning point in the history of the US and t et al. 2004:he
- that found an unprecedented sounding board in the blogosphere, a phenomenon well summarized by the assertion that, “when the world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, the web changed with it” (Andrews 2006). Ten years later we may ask ourselves in what relationship the continuous flow of comments, disclosures and news updates published on 9/11-related blogs stands to the making of the history of the event and what followed it, from the emergence of the ‘war-on-terror’ rhetoric (Spivak
- to “the violent end to Osama bin today” (Frank 2011). -Laden’s violent life […] bracketing 9/11 and
sense what h^ The 9/11 catastrophe turned blogs into a memorial practice, celebrating in aas been defined as the emergence of cultural memory as a social phenomenon (Assmann 1992/1997), forcing us “to reconsider the relationship between historical imagination and the new memorial consciousness” (Klein 2000: 129). Not only is the number of blogs dealing with 9/11 impressive, but also the
different perspectives through which the collective tragedy is remembered and brought to bear on the present. Ranging from the victims site and memorial archives 1 to forums reinvestigating the attack and discussi to debunkers of conspiracy theories, (^2) this polyphony of voices constitutes an everng the war on terror, from proponents expanding and hardly systematic network of discourses well emblematized by the following description retrievable on the British 9/11 Truth Campaign portal.
This forum currently hosted by discussion forums and other online media related to political, economic, social or www.911forum.org.uk aims to provide access to military events aris forum is to provideing from the so a safe, respectful,-called ‘War on Terror’. The purpose of this positive space for discussion and information sharing. The forum is intended for the use of people who accept the need for a reinvestigation of 9/11 and the war on terror. Those who believe no new investigation is required should only post in the critics corner. The forum administrators are committed to a non-violent transformation of the world based on truth, justice, peace and unity. The forum is independen any individual organisation, philosophy or worldview. It finds common cause witht and not affiliated to the truth, social justice, green and peace movements ( the Quest for Truth). 9/11, The Bigger Picture &
past, the 9/11 terrorist attacks have become a point of departure to conduct an^ What the above quotation illustrates is that, rather than being confined to the analysis of the present through the contribution of multiple voices that find in the Internet a space to aggregate new discourse communities. D recollections and comments rather than narrowing upon an authoritative version ofilating into fragmented the facts (Papi 1999; Klein 2000; Stamelman 2003), the logic of memory, which is “always transitory, notoriously unreliable, and haunted by forgetting, in short human and social” (Huyssen 2000: 38), follows different criteria from history writing. One of them is the possibility of sharing on the Internet and in real time thoughts and feelings produced and experienced by a large audience that co-constructs a much more comprehensive collective recital: “I share my story on this 9th anniversary not because it’s unique but because it’s but one of millions and millions of similar narratives of the day” (Levy 2010).
range of material, from video compilations to audio diaries.^1 Funded by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the^ 911 Digital Archive^ has collected a vast (^2) The charge of conspiracy theories is that the September 11 attacks were either permitted to proceed even though known about in advance, or were a false flag operation orchestrated by an organization with elements inside the United States government. Among believers in conspiracy, there is abroad, who promote the belief that the US government was to some degree involved in orchestrating the 9/11 Truth Movement, “the umbrella term for a coalition of individuals, based both in the US and the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 in order to justify a subsequen the Iraq War and curtailing of civil liberties in the US” (Jones 2010: 360). t course of action including
911Blogger 9/11 CitizensWatch (conspiracy theory) (conspiracy theory) 911forum.org.uk 911TruthNews (American 9/11 Truth Movement) (British 9/11 Truth Campaign) 911Truth.org George Washington’s Blog (American 9/11 Truth Movement) (citizen journalism) N2Growth Blog (corporate communication) PBS.org (Public Broadcasting Station)
feedback from a variety of news sites representing both mainstream and citizen^ The selection also includes a few online comment articles enriched with user journalism ( American Thinker, eastwikkers, The Express Tribune, guardian.co.uk, The- Latest.com news – being, time.com characterized), all three textual typologies by interactivity. – Finally, blogs, forum messages and online the awareness of major phenomen parallel investigation of other texts besides posts, messages and the online press, sucha of interdiscursivity in the field of cultural production has led to the as De Lillo’s essay “In the Ruins of the Future” (2001), the 9/11 Commission Report (2004) an Remembrance”, on the basis of the meaningful analogies they show in terms ofd Obama’s 2010 commemoration of the day as “a National Day of Service and thematic content but also of similar recurrent rhetorical features. These materials, heterogeneous as they are and collected over a deliberately ample timeframe, have been selected to provide a representative picture of how the post memory. The database ranges over a time span that-9/11 discourse continues to reverberate at different levels of the collective goes from 2001 to the present, with special attention devoted to the most recent comments on the occasion of the ninth anniversary of the catastrophe, the controversies concerning the building of a mosque on Ground Zero and responses to bin Laden’s death. Besides, as a frequent accusation in the 9/11 coverage is that of intentional omission of information on the part of both the US government and the mainstream media, the textual selection aims to represent other voices to include diverse political attitude insights coming from the grassroots level, as peculiar s, ideological stances andof civic journalism. The assumption underlying such a heterogeneous collection of texts and divergent views is that, rather than being taken as objective historical accounts, should be regarded as a veritable “counternarrative, shaped in part by rumour, fantasy responses to 9/ and mystical reverberation are constantly modified and overwritten (Soncini n.d.).” (Silverstone 2007: 66), through which symbolic resources While the methodology espoused to describe linguistic evidence (from lexis to grammar and sentence structure) is primarily that of Discourse Analysis, further insights are mutuated from the literature on blogs (Miller and Shepherd 2004; Herring et al. 2005; Miller and Shepherd 2009) and a number of memory studies that
investigate the construction of narratives in the face of traumatic events (Huyssen 2000; Klein 2003; Leudar and Nekvapil 2011).
TEXT ANALYSIS
different sources often remote in time, memory “projects an immediacy we feel has^ While historiography builds an interpretation of the past^ by critically scrutinizing been lost from history” (Klein 2003: 129), being more of an antonym than a synonym of history. This sense of immediacy certainly applies to 9/11 memorialization practices, as a considerable part of blog posts is phrased as eyewitness testimonies or, at least, mentions involvement in the attacks in the form of direct experience. The peculiarity of this kind of participation framework, however, lies in the fact that, for the majority of participants, the experience of the event appeared to have been highly mediated (Hoskins 2006), since the act of seeing took place not by actual eyewitnessing but through repeated exposure to TV coverage and its framing of visual discourse (Chouliaraki 2004). 9/11 was watched by a “global public” (Fairclough 2006: 111), while the Internet was flooded with requests for information, exchanges of communication, uploaded videos and repeated hits, almost to the point of collapse,
- day started out like any other. We lived in Hanau, Germany at the time, on an army I was in the 4th grade, yet I remember that day like it was yesterday. The base, my father is in the army. […] Our neighbour from upstairs came bursting through our door screaming “turn it on turn it on!!” I remember my mom jumping up, clearly worried that our neighbour was going mental. But our neighbour grabbed the remote control off the table and turned on CNN. It was showing the towers falling ( PBS.org, n.d.).
- hitting the WTC. My thoughts raced. Some people from a neighboring business had I was driving to my office when I heard a sketchy report of a “small plane” set up a TV, and we all watched as the horror unfolded ( N2Growth Blog, 11.9.2010).
- around the world ran split When my husband was-screen video. They showed the buildings still burning killed on the morning of 9/11, television stations juxtaposed against young Arabs celebrating in the streets. That disturbing vision left me incredulous; it was forever emblazoned on my psyche ( 911TruthNews, 2.5.2011).
intertwined, as typical of blogs, well illustrate how “to be traumatized is to be^ The above quotations, in which the private and the collective dimensions are
- 10.9.2010). That image remains etched in my mind and heart ( N2Growth Blog,
- ( N2Growth Blog 9/11 has, 12.9.2010). become a day that is etched in our collective memories
- the consciousness of our na The passage of timetion (Obama’s address, 11.9.2010). will never diminish the pain and loss forever seared in In the database here examined two recurrent topics have been found to receive special emphasis. The first is the exceptional character of the tragedy, a limit event after which things will never be the same again for the United States and the world (Fairclough 2006: 114). Marking “Time Zero” (Bousquet 2006: 739), i.e. a traumatic ‘before’ and an ‘after’ in the flow of memories and the history of the nation, 9/11 has disrupted master narratives, emerging as a turning point in the individual and national consciousness, respectively indexed by the use of use of first-person plural personal pronouns and adjectives would also seem to I, my and we and our. The inclusive indicate the rise of “forms of community (however fragile o processes of identification” (Luckhurst 2003: 35) in discourse that over time have alsor contested) through been translated into social praxis, as in the case of the 9/11 Truth Movement.
- powerful nostalgia for the way of life The events of September 11, 2001 evoke painful memories, tinged wit before it happened ( 911CitizensWatchh a, 22.2.2006).
- reflected on just how much As the fifth anniversary of September 11 draws to a close, millions have that day forever changed our country ( eastwikkers, 12.9.2006).
- Muslims and the rest of the world went from a somewhat stable coexistence, to the 9/11, the day the world stood still, was the day everything changed, when current war-like state (Rashid, The Express Tribune Blogs, 14.11.2010).
- and ushering in a decade of heightened security and increasing Islamophobia It’s a date that changed the world, prompting the ongoing war on terror around the world ( time.com, 7.12.2010).
feeling atta^ Interwoven with the first one, the second dominant topic describes the shock atcked, mixed with fear, vulnerability and patriotism, a shock increased by the shattering of “the already precarious distinction between domestic space within a sovereign state, and more global space” (Hyndman 2003: 1).
- my family or me again... we thought After that moment... my life was los we were under attackt… nothing would ever be the same for ( PBS.org, n.d.).
- south tower. The force of the blast knocked a couple of people standing wit It was then when the second plane flew over us and slammed into theh to the ground. 26.10.2006). That’s when we all realized we were under attack ( 911forum.org,
- was attacked It’s been nine years since that horrific day on September 11, when ( American Thinker, 11.9.2010). America
was steeped in the vocabulary of the new and unprecedented” (2009: 55), while a^ A. Kelly claims that “short-term post-9/11 discourse across the political spectrum recent analysis of Bush’s and Blair’s speeches immediately following the attacks has noticed that for both politicians history seems to begin with 9/11 in a more or less explicit obliteration of historical connections (Leudar and Nekvapil 2011). What is remarkable of the blogosphere is that this same exceptionalist rhetoric reverberates across the comments of ordinary people, as they also “do history in everyday activities” (Leudar and Nekvapil 2011: 68). Besides, despite the unique character of 9/11 that would seem to defy historical analogues, the attacks engender associations with prior catastrophic events in the national past, such as aggression that resulted in a declaration of war and over time has become a Pearl Harbor,^4 another act of recognizable media template (Hoskins 2006: 455), while “Ground Zero”, i.e. the target point over which a bomb is exploded, is also remindful of Hiros (Stamelman 2003: 13), though the fact that in that case the United States was thehima and Nagasaki aggressor remains obliterated as repressed memory. However, even though things may be ‘past’, the constant ongoing discussion around stories brings them back into the present, as Hoskins makes clear: “it is to the present rather than to the past that memory is oriented” (2006: 464). People do not just talk and write their activities, by creating settings infused about the past. They also bring the past into with history for those activities. In this respect, they are concurrently users and producers of histories. As history users, they relate contemporary activities to historical narratives available to a community and through doing this provide the activiti meanings (Leudar and Nekvapil 2011: 68). es with history-contingent
TIME’s special report on the top ten unforgettable days narrates: “^4 “This is the^ Pearl Harbor^ of terrorism” writes Walid Phares (On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, the^ American Thinker, 11/9/2008), while U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor suffered a surprise attack. The next day, the U.S. declared war on Japan, formally entering World War II. Marking the anniversary of the attack, TIME takes a look at dates stuck in the consciousness of world history” ( time.com, 7/12/2010).
meaningfully labeled as “official lies” and plotting whose aim is to ‘manufacture’ the enemy “for worldwide military (example 20) and associated with hidden plans hegemony” (example 21).
- sobering, horrific, yet vital realization w It is time that the entire progressive movement come to the moste can imagine. It starts with the realization that fashion the truth of the attacks of 9/11 is yet untold and unreported in any coherent. The movement must come to terms with the obvious fact that simple logic defies the official story We can continue to struggle in fragments while avoiding the larger implications. inherent in the notion that 9/11 was a self manufactured enemy to blame it on ( 9/11 CitizensWatch-inflicted terrorist attack with a, 19.1.2005).
- September 11th, 2001 in a way that inspires the people to overcome TO EXPOSE the official lies and cover-up surrounding the events of denial and understand covert policy the truth apparatus must have orchestrated or participated in the execution; namely, that elements within the US government and of the n.d.). attacks for these to have happened in the way that they did ( 911Truth.org,
- Principals in US foreign policy under the current Bush administration (including The Need for a “New Pearl Harbor” Cheney, developing Rumsfeld, long-running plans for worldwide military hegemony Wolfowitz, Perle and others) have been instrumental, including an in invasion of the Middle East, dating back to the Ford, Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. They reiterated these plans in the late 1990s as members of the “Project the purpose of “regime change”. After 9/11, they lost no time in their attempt to for a New American Century,” and stated a clear intent to invade Iraq for tie Iraq to the attacks ( 911Truth.org, 16.5.2006).
or, rather, of “the many pasts” (Wodak and Richardson 2009: 231)^ From the above comments we can see that the constant reinvention of the past^6 with the purpose of challenging official explanations tends to be the dominant characteristic of those blogs that do not focus exclusively on the memory of the terrorist attacks, but take 9/11 as a key moment to interrogate the present and problematize mainstream versions of facts.
- movements and location of Osama bin Laden in the wake of his k A great deal of controversy has arisen about what was known about theilling by US Special
(^6) “The many pasts, we claim, can never be entirely silenced; specific aspects, forgotten details, new information and new insights due to re/discovered information and historical sources debates” (Wodak and Richardson 2009: 231). trigger new
Forces on May 2 in Abbottabad, Pakistan. agencies knew or didn’t know about al-Qaeda activities go back some years Questions about what intelligence ( 911Blogger, 23.5.2011)
the frequent use of questions to contest a univocal interpretation of events and, at the^ In this type of argumentation two rhetorical strategies can be identified. One is same discourse community and ideally the nation itself in this proces time, advance speculative hypotheses dialectically, (^) s ofengaging self-scrutiny. the entire
- living (^) in If bin Laden and his followers were merely a limited number of fanaticsAfghan caves, as we were assured at the time, why did the Bush administration inevitable? Could not relentlessly a concerted intelligence, law advance the meme that-enforcement, and diplomatic a decades-long war was campaign, embracing all sovereign countries, have effectively shut down “al Qaeda” within a reasonable period of time – say, within the period it took to fight World War II 22.2.2006). between Pearl Harbor and the Japanese surrender? ( 9/11 CitizensWatch,
- Iraq war, the war on terror, spying and the loss of liberties, and the other problems? How did we get here? How did we get into the economic downturn, the ( George Washington’s Blog, 7.5.2006).
moral urgency to come to terms with the truth,^ A second linguistic strategy is the use of deontic constructions to emphasize the
- 9/11 Inquiry Must Be Re-Opened ( The-Latest.com, 15.5.2006). ( American Thinker^ 26.^ Some myths will, 11.8.2008).^ have to^ be broken, and many realities^ must^ be unearthed lose that fact (^ 27.^ What happened on 9/11 happened to all Americans. People American Thinker, 11.9.2010).^ should not
the event tend to be imp^ In terms of textual organization, while those blog posts written immediately afterressionistic and fragmentary owing to their attempt to convey a sense of immediate proximity and their inclusion of multiple eye accounts, post-9/11 blog posts are longer, better articulated and address a number of-witness political issues temporally subsequent to the catastrophe, but felt as related to it, from Afghanistan and Iraq to US national security issues and foreign policy in the aftermath of the catastrophe.
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Maria Cristi Translation at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Milan. Her researchna Paganoni, PhD, is a tenured researcher in English Language and interests embrace discourse analysis and social semiotics, with a current primary focus on digital communication in a globalized world. Her recent publications include the following articles and book chapters: “Tsunami and Money: Humanitarian Aid in Media Coverage of the Asian Catastrophe” (2008), “‘The Opinion and the Counter Opinion’: News Framing and Double Voicing on Al Jazeera English” (2009), “Fiction and Cyberspace: Reading Dickens in the Information Age” (2010) and “From Hyde Park to the Planetary Garden: Rhetorics of Development at the London 1851 and Milan 2015 World Exhibitions” (2010). At prese city branding, which stems from her fascination with urban visions, representationalnt she is working on a publication on web-based strategies and the role of major promotional events such as international exhibitions in the cultural economy of the global city.
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