The topics of this week was too diverse to come up with a general theme, but fortunately, we have invited a librarian from UBC’s library to give us a small lecture on our proposal article and thanks for that I get a jumpstart of my article as well as came up with something intriguing on this blog.

Last week I started reading Timothy Recuber’s article: The Prosumption of Commemoration: Disasters, Digital Memory Banks, and Online Collective Memory. This article mainly examines how the online commemoration mentally contribute to people who have suffer from the two disasters: 9/11 and the hurricane Katrina, the interdependence between online archive and the commemoration of disaster as well as how internet has created the construction of collective memory of tragedy or natural disaster. Timothy Recuber gathered information from many Internet forums of both 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and he discovered that when people gather their ideas together and discuss that issues, the online commemoration would become therapeutic and healing. Moreover, the therapeutic commemoration somehow promotes the ramification of collective memory in some physical landscape. As matter of fact, not everything on this article is necessarily related to my proposal article, so I have just selected some valuable ideas.

My topic of my proposal article will be mainly examining that is it really possible that the collective memory and commemoration is therapeutic all the time?  It is undeniable that social network allows users to engage in various social cause including the commemoration of tragedy and disaster and Timothy has discovered that users are all seeking ”SELF-HELP” so that they can transform the traumatic emotions to something positive. Does online commemoration really help people in that way? The concept of collective makes me to connect it to something I have learnt in my psychology class. There is a term called: Group Polarization, which indicates that while people are discussing their opinion on something and they are listening to others, their own point of view becomes more extreme, because the discussion reveals points that was previously considered. Literally, this term is usually used in measuring how valid the experiment is. In the case like timothy’s article, is it really possible that all the collective memory and commemoration is positive in term of group polarization?  Are those discussions going to remind the people who have suffered from the disaster?  Are those online commemorations really acting as a remedy or those users are just having an illusion that they were healed?