Title:
Online Pasts: Image, Technology and Historical Culture in Contemporary Greece (1994-2005)
Abstract:
This is a book on contemporary Greek historical culture. It is based on research conducted on more than 2.500 personal homepages developed by Greeks during the period 1994-2005. The book deals with these particular webpages as markers of a critical
process, concerning ‘mutations’ in Greek historical consciousness. More specifically, Greek personal homepages are conceived as an empirical ground for exploring the overall ways Greek society confirmed, rearranged or even deconstructed
pre-existing historical narratives.
Focusing mainly on the visual structure of the personal homepages, the book examines how specific linear conceptualizations of historical time (continuity, progress and irreversibility) were transformed in order to be reproduced within the
This is a book on contemporary Greek historical culture. It is based on research conducted on more than 2.500 personal homepages developed by Greeks during the period 1994-2005. The book deals with these particular webpages as markers of a critical process, concerning ‘mutations’ in Greek historical consciousness. More specifically, Greek personal homepages are conceived as an empirical ground for exploring the overall ways Greek society confirmed, rearranged or even deconstructed pre-existing historical narratives.
Focusing mainly on the visual structure of the personal homepages, the book examines how specific linear conceptualizations of historical time (continuity, progress and irreversibility) were transformed in order to be reproduced within the asynchronous, non-linear networks of the 1990’s. It suggests that a significant part of this process of reformulating the sense of historical time is claimed by new narrative mechanisms (e.g. visual unfolding, ‘re-engraving of historical images’, snapshots, ‘image-text’, ‘image-movement’), which are characterized by their visual, fractural and mostly affective morphology.
