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Rusalka has responded to Dean’s lecture on memory and social media by exploring its use with regard to her own community topic, Marysville. Rusalka’s community doco is quite a personal one, because she was in Marysville during the fires. However, she’s not a Marysville resident, so she’s also an outsider. Thus she has a very complex relationship to her subject.

She also has a complex relationship to media about Marysville and the fires:

I watched a 4CORNERS documentary on the ABC last week, the link is on my Blog’s front page under links. In the documentary made by a professional team the work included social media files in this case footage filmed by someone on the Marysville oval on February the 7th 2009 using a low resolution digital tool a phone camera I suspect and in this hand held footage, I saw myself – that is my car on the oval and I saw myself drive off when we were told to evacuate. I for some reason don’t want to look more closely at the footage and see if I can follow my movements. Seeing the car was confronting enough at this point.

Seeing my Red Volvo – Ketchup was a sad and confronting thing and seeing myself in this way has directly affected my memory of that day. It was fortuitous that Dean Keep gave us a presentation on the digitization of memory. As last week I was confronted by that very digitization of my memory. A personal document generated by someone unknown to me on the oval was broadcast on National television and as as such I saw myself and my actions on my own television in my living room but in someone else’s story. This was very different from the memories in my mind. And for the first time I saw what the Oval and Marysville was like 15 minutes after I saw the fire jump the Mountains and head towards us.

We live in such a mediated society; everyone is a celebrity; street crimes are often recorded on cctv. And here is Rusalka, seeing herself and her car on the Marysville oval. It’s like a vortex of media and media relationships… and the publication of memory?