Identities – a historical look at online memory and identity issues

Abstract

Since the 1990s, profound changes linked to the globalization of both eco-nomic activities and information, as well as increased individual mobility have givenrise to questions about national identities. This has occurred to such an extent that na-tional“identity crises”have emerged, which collectively have become an importantpolitical issue. The Internet has become an active tool in these debates, contributing toincreasing the circulationof knowledge, while at the same time disseminating new in-terpretations of past events on which the construction of collective and individual iden-tities is based. Thus, since the 1990s, online content related to the past has become anewly documented subject matter for a cultural history of memory based on web sour-ces with regard to identity creation. In this article, the web will be perceived as an ob-ject of study, used to analyze what relationship the past has to the construction ofidentities. By considering the web and its archives as a deposit for born-digital sourcesfor the history of the 1990s to the present day, this chapter proposes to present somehistoriographical research fields concerning identity creation. We will thus examine towhat extent the web and its archives constitute the sources that can open up avenuesof research concerning the history of identity creation.