What Should Be Remembered?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the disputes around Ushahidi’s role in humanitarian efforts and came round to thinking that we may be looking in the wrong place to discover the work that tools like Ushahidi’s Crowdmap are doing in the world. Whereas humanitarian organisations are asking (good) questions about whether Ushahidi’s tools help or hinder their efforts, another way to look at it might be to look from the perspective of the people making the maps and reports themselves. What work is Ushahidi doing for them? How do they see Ushahidi’s effectiveness? What social role does reporting play and how could we begin to measure effectiveness?

This morning I read a wonderful article by Tamar Ashuri from Ben-Gurion University for an upcoming edition of the journal New Media and Society entitled ‘(Web)sites of memory and the rise of moral mnemonic agents‘. Ashuri looked at how two websites set up by Israelis – one to monitor human rights of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints; the other to collect testimonies of Israeli soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories – act as agents of collective memory. Ashuri argues that digital networked technologies is challenging the mechanisms that society employs to deny memories of immoral acts and how the online archives created by moral witnesses become a space of living memory and a sphere of moral engagement.