+ Online Sacralization Danish memorial site Mindet.dk as a marked place for performing grief and inventing memories Places, People, Stories: the Mediated Places-session, Linnéuniversitetet, Kalmar September 30th 2011 Kjetil Sandvik, Associate professor, University of Copenhagen
The online memorial site Mindet.dk as marked place for performance of grief and construction of memories
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Online Sacralization Danish memorial site Mindet.dk as a marked place for
performing grief and inventing memories
Places, People, Stories: the Mediated Places-session, Linnéuniversitetet, Kalmar September 30th 2011
Kjetil Sandvik,
Associate professor, University of Copenhagen
+ Mindet.dk: an introduction
Mindet.dk is the only Danish online community for individual performances
of grief and mourning over the loss of loved ones (“in memory of those we
got, lost and loved”) and facilitates well-known and easy-applied media and
interactive materiality
Ca. 850 memories (individual memory profiles for dead loved ones)
Light a Candle (thousands)
26 different topic divided entries in the ”Forum”
Guestbook (one guestbook for each profile)
Links to different readings on and sites about death, grief and mourning
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For the ones we have got, loved, and lost
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”Death ends a life, not a relationship”
Deaths on Mindet.dk = Deaths leaving a “WHY?”
Stillborn children
Death of children and young ones
”Small feet leave indelible traces”
Mindet.dk fills a void for having marked or designated places for
morning and bereavement (after the funeral and beside the
graveyard): places for performing and displaying acts of mourning
in an explicit way which is taboo – at least in protestant countries:
a place where it is acceptable that it takes time to recover (or
never recover) from the loss (of a child)
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+ Places
The perception and interpretation of the
physical and material environment we find
ourselves in (Carsten Friberg)
Obviously the physicality and materiality is
of another order when we are looking at
mediated places
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+ Media creating places
Today’s new media are not just (re)shaping our sense of
place but actually producing new types of places and new
types of spatial experiences.
The media evolution in the new millennium has made it
increasingly clear that the borders between online and
offline places and activities are blurred and dissolved and
that physical and mediated places are becoming
intertwined.
It is the media that makes it possible to create Mindet.dk as a
specific social place with intimate relations between its
users and with a solid and narrow social framing: a
demarcation of an inside and an outside with specific and
place-defining social rules enforced inside.
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+ Materiality of a mediated place Marked entrances: individual links leading to segregated
‘rooms’ (the memory profiles) separated from the rest of the
site (and the web) Marked difference between and inside
and an outside
Personalized design: background texture, imagery and
colors, use of text, pictures, drawings and so on.
Personalized and ritualized actions (the process of mourning,
of remembering and (re)telling): texts and pictures ‘setting
the scene’ (texts, pictures about the death, the loss, the