This paper analyzes the ways in which specific appropriation of new media, the Internet particularly, can allow us to observe new conjunctural articulations of democracy. I want to argue that emerging practices of memory through new technology of communication, illustrate the ‘shift’ of modernity, particularly vis-à-vis certain monopoly of knowledge and cultural expressions; if, in part, we admit that ‘modernity’ is a centre through which certain histories are selected and given greater value, and other kind of histories parked in the margins. In addition, if we locate modernity within all colonial and imperial processes that led to the politics of emancipation, by any means necessary.

Some of the questions I want to pose are: (1) what can we learn about colonial/imperial history from viewing the emerging independent archive made by Indigenous people and other structural, ‘unstructural’ forms of online archives? (2) Do the narrative articulations in these independent media reflect a rethinking, remapping, and/or deconstruction of the history of peoples in the ‘margins’ of normative function, i.e., multiculturalism, citizenship? (3) Do the narratives in these independent media represent specific social realities and reveal a similar terrain of inquiry, and if so, how? (4) Finally, how can we encode and even decode the knowledge/experience in these independent practices of memory. For example, how can we fully ‘make sense’ of the cultural knowledge and experience in these new practices of memory, especially, if we consider that they emerge in counteraction to our established discourses of trustworthiness and liability that try to circumscribe them as being archaic, experimental and/or exotic?

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