Real time memories of a revolution: the '18 Days in Egypt' interactive platform as instant archive

摘要

As Manuel Castells observes, fifteen years into the communication revolution, the web has already started to produce new attitudes and behaviours which can find a correspondence in real life. The future implications of this new conceptual landscape are obviously quite unpredictable, but we might not be fully aware of how this new constellation is already influencing the way we interpret our own past, the way we are constructing our relationship to our present time, the way we read into our own history and in to our time perception. The main question of this essay is, in fact, whether this new universe we are surrounded by in our everyday life is influencing the narratives of the present time as well as the way in which we archive, organise, store, and explore information about our own current time. Non-professional documentary-making practices performed by individual users (prosumers), combined with massive messaging distribution strategies moving through social networks' highways are creating a hybrid narrative landscape, where real spaces and communication channels are proceeding in parallel, creating new forms of interaction between documentation, archiving and history narration practices. Though the analysis of the '18 Day in Egypt' interactive documentary platform, I will discuss how this new form of creation, production and dissemnation of information opens the way to a new problematisation of the concept of audience. It opens the discussion related to the roles of 'prosumers' in the circulation of information within a specific narrative ecosystems, where contents fruition is experienced in the context of a pervasive universe in which creation and experience are part of a self-contained media world. Moreover, this configuration expands itself to the investigation of the ways of the spreadability of the message in activists contexts. In the light of a new relationship between witnessing, recording, narrating and participating to collective historical storytelling events- and its actual translation into non-linear narrative features – a new model of messaging strategies is finding its way. .