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Screen Shot of the video opening in The Johnny Cash Project

Cyber memorials are interesting beasts.  A new, more publicly available way to mourn, they are often sites of controversy - raising questions about representation, curation and the appropriation of tragedy.  But what happens when a multimedia memorial invites visitors to actively participate in the creation and curation of the content? A hyper-mediated explosion of awesome (among other things).

Because the purpose of memorials is to represent and remember a person or event, they make arguments. Once there is representation, there is argument. It's also clear that memorials make arguments because people get very excited about how and where someone or something is represented. That’s why the rebuilding of the Twin Towers site is still being discussed. This sort of passionate argument about memorials is also seen in University of Texas at Austin's statue situation.