The concept of national
memory can be interpreted in two ways, either as “memory about a nation” (or “a
nation as a kind of memory”) or as “a nation that remembers” (or “a nation’s memory”).
With a reference to nation which could be understood as country, native land,
nation, and state, the national memory also unfolds as memory of China in
geopolitical sense, memory of the native land
in cultural and psychological sense, memory of nation in ethnographic sense, and
memory of the state in political sense. The signification of the national
memory changes in different contexts. There are two ways in which national
memory is formed, the “top-down” approach and that of the “bottom- up.” The
former is marked by the compulsory “embedding” of memory and the latter by the
poetic “conscious remembering.” In the digital age, memory research focuses on
the relationship between memory and forgetting, as well as the issues of
privacy, cyber violence and justice. The crisis of the national memory is
mainly manifested in “the ways in which memory is chosen” and “the
transformation of the public space.” The internet has subverted the ecology of
memory originally driven by the state and society (or the folk), and created
more possibilities for memory including national memory. Such subversion is
embodied in the subject of memory (“the multitude”), the object of memory
(“information”), the method of remembering (“electronic reading” and “cultural
habits”), and the representation of memory (“the memory of multitude”).