'Faces of the Fallen' and the Dematerialization of US War Memorials
http://vcj.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/6/3/265
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  peer-reviewed

Grider, Nicholas
Visual Communication
2007

Abstract:

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 led 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.