Walking together? The mediatised performative commemoration of 7/7’s tenth anniversary

Abstract

This article investigates the #WalkTogether initiative which commemorated the 10th anniversary of the 7 July 2005 London bombings by encouraging people to individually re-enact and share on social media the moment when following the bombings, in the absence of a functioning public transport network, Londoners walked to and from work together. It asks what forms of togetherness did the initiative promote and what was the role of professional journalists and news organisations in facilitating this togetherness? To answer these questions, the article conceives of togetherness as hybrid and unfolding within broader media and memory ecologies. This encourages the use of innovative combinations of methods and the introduction of the concepts of ‘mediatised performative commemoration’ and ‘digital gestural remains’. In turn, this allows a number of specific enquiries into the characteristics of #WalkTogether’s commemoration, communities, remembrance and reporting a decade after 7/7 took place and a discussion of the extent to which the initiative resulted in forms of clicktivism and commemorative silos.