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`Faces of the Fallen' and the dematerialization of US war memorials

California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, USA, ngrider{at}alum.calarts.edu

The advent of internet technology has enabled the process of memorialization of those killed in US military conflicts to keep pace with the casualties themselves and, as such, has marked a shift in both the ideology of the war memorial as symbol and the ideology-driven media use of those symbols. This article argues that a process of increasing humanization and specificity enabled by the information architecture of the internet has lead to a form of `war memorial', exemplified by www.facesofthefallen.org, that emphasizes decontexualized human loss at the expense of a coherent representation of a military nature for the loss itself.

Key Words: Faces of the Fallen • internet memorials • monument • war memorials

Visual Communication, Vol. 6, No. 3, 265-279 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1470357207081000


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