While corporations governmental groups and public relations firms debated thebest way to memorialize the event of 911 sites of commemoration could be seenacross... » 

While corporations governmental groups and public relations firms debated thebest way to memorialize the event of 911 sites of commemoration could be seenacross the country and especially on the Internet. Greg Ulmer suggests thatthis reality points us to a new sense of monumentality one that iscollaborative in nature rather than iconic.From a doityourself Mount Rushmore to an automated tribute to the devastatingannual toll of traffic deaths in the United States Electronic Monumentsdescribes commemoration as a fundamental experience joining individual andcollective identity and adapting both to the emerging apparatus ofelectracy or digital literacy. Concerns about the destruction of civic lifecaused by the society of the spectacle are refocused on the question of how acollectivity remembers who or what it is.Ulmer proposes that the Internet makes it possible for monumentality to becomea primary site of selfknowledge one that supports a new politics ethics anddimension of education. The Internet thus holds the promise of bringingcitizens back into the political equation as witnesses and monitors.Gregory L. Ulmer is professor of English and media studies at the University ofFlorida Gainesville. «