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The Mediatization of Memory: Media and the End of Collective Memory

Chapter One: Media, Memory, and the Connective Turn

The New Memory Ecology

‗Each new medium imprints its own special flavor to the memories of that epoch‘

(Geoffrey C. Bowker, 2005: 26).

Memory has long been battered by media metaphors. From Plato‘s ‗wax tablet‘ (although

he later rejected this same model) and other versions of memory as writing, through

photography, flashbulb, and the physicality and fixity of film and magnetic tape, to the

mobility and instantaneity of ‗flash memory‘. Media and their associated technologies

have exacerbated the dichotomous notion of memory as either immovable and inerasable

or as something that ultimately slips through the cognitive and material processes of

capture, storage and retrieval, in other words, forgetting. The mediatized paradox of

memory as either fluid or fixed is one that has also riven the study of memory more

generally. For instance, Ann Rigney challenges what she terms the ‗original plenitude

and subsequent loss‘ model of memory, which involves conceptualising memory as, ‗on

the one hand in terms of an original ‗storehouse‘ and, on the other hand, as something

that is always imperfect and diminishing, a matter of chronic frustration because always

falling short of total recall‘ (2005: 12). Our understanding of memory is thus constrained

by a discourse of the improbability and impossibility of remembering. Douwe Draaisma

(2000: 230) for example, states: ‗One metaphor turns our recollections into fluttering

birds which we can only catch at the risk of grabbing the wrong one, the next one reduces

memories to static and latent traces‘. Indeed, the media metaphor of the moment: ‗the

digital‘ pushes the paradox further with its simultaneous apparent effects of permanence

and erasure. The promise and prospects of the digital era, the conversion of all-things-

past into bits, and at the same time the incoming present digitally captured, stored and

disseminated digitally, appear to fundamentally transform the latitude of memory.

Digitization has made more of the past available and sharable than ever before, yet at the

same time more malleable, transformable, and open to intended and unintended

disconnection and deletion. The metaphor of the network is readily applicable to a

‗connective memory‘.

Yet, the metaphors and associated concepts of media/memory, are more

significant than their everyday instantiation belie. For, as Draaisma argues: ‗With each

new metaphor we place a different filter in front of our perception of memory‘ (ibid.)

This insight enables us to inverse the question of the invention, application, and

interrogation of an array of new (and old) public and academic taxonomies and

typologies of memory as responses to the emergent contemporary ‗memory boom‘

(Andreas Huyssen, 2003). Notably, to ask instead, what impact do our metaphors and

concepts, old and new, have on our understanding of memory today? This is a critical yet

underexamined question for memory studies.

Despite the trends in new media and new metaphors and their shaping of an

understanding of memory, and an extensive conceptual and theoretical revolution with

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the comprehensive splintering of ‗memory‘ into an array of metaphors, forms and

taxonomiesiover the past thirty years, the modus operandi of memory studies (and a good

number of other disciplines encountering and examining memory) remains ‗collective

memory‘. Even despite the discomfort claimed by some as they continue nonetheless to

employ the term as pivotal to their analysis, collective memory dominates. Notably this is

as a concept, metaphor and form, in the study of memory that goes beyond (but also

includes) that of the individual, as well as imposing a significant presence in the lexicon

of debates about societal orientations to the past more broadly conceived. For instance, a

cursory Google search as at least one albeit crude measure of current usage of ‗collective

memory‘ yields 692,000 results (against by way of comparison 349,000 results for

‗public memory‘ 106,000 for ‗social memory‘, and 77.200 for ‗individual memory‘ and I

return to address these distinctions in later chapters).

This book posits the end of collective memory in two ways, as both no longer a

useful concept in contributing to our understanding of memory in and of society today,

and as an adequate and even accurate description of a memory resonant with our current

mediated experience and uses of it. In this way, what follows is a critique that

interrogates what I am calling the ‗connective turn‘ in advanced Western societies (but

also and unevenly elsewhere across the globe). By this I mean the massively increased

abundance, ubiquity and accessibility of communication networks and nodes, and the

paradoxical effects of the fluidity and fixity of digital media content. In this way, I am

concerned with the simultaneous and paradigmatic shift in two ‗ecologies‘: media and

memory, and that we today live in a new memory ecology in which memory is

‗mediatized‘.

So, a supremely significant and consequential shift for memory (individual,

social, and cultural) is embedded in the move from the broadcast to the post-broadcast

age. None of the ‗what‘, ‗how‘, ‗why‘ and ‗when‘ of remembering and forgetting, are

untouched by the advent of digital media. The ‗mediatization of memory‘ is premised

upon our being at that very juncture of transition of a connective turn promoting an

emergent tension between a perspective overwhelming informed by the theories, models

and methods of an era of unambiguously ‗mass‘ media (including the idea of ‗media

events‘) a corollary of which is the re-establishment of the notion of collective memory,

and a diverse if somewhat fragmented scholarship that adopts a more radical position.

The latter necessitates a critical reevaluation of the legacy of mass communication/media

studies, and proposes a more dynamic and diffused model of ‗the mediation of

everything‘ (Livingstone, 2009). Today, this challenge extends to addressing the impact

of the fluidization of digitized content, the revelation of a ‗long tail‘ (Anderson, 2007) of

the past, the new modes of participation in semi-public memory through the increasingly

affordable and available tools of digital recording and dissemination, as well as the ‗inter-

medial‘ and trans-medial‘ (Erll, 2008) dynamics of old and new media, and the related

rise of a ‗convergence‘ culture (Jenkins, 2006). This book maps a holistic and what I will

shortly outline as an ‗epidemiological‘ approach to the study of contemporary mediatized

memory through a critique of the paradigm of media/memory studies and the challenges

posed to this paradigm by the connective turn. Put differently, the mediatization of

remembering and forgetting shape and occur within a new memory ecology.

Firstly, a brief note on this word ecology. I employ this term as indicative of both

an environment that is undergoing dynamic change and which is comprised of a number

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of reflexive relationships between its key components. For instance, Martijn de de Waal

(2007: 22) argues: ‗Whereas a landscape is a metaphor that conjures up a static image,

ecology does justice to the notion of a system that is in a state of flux‘. In this way, a

holistic (some would call ‗systems‘ approach) is required to enable claims to be made

about the sum of the parts. For instance, despite the recent rapid change in our media

ecology, this term has a much longer history and is most associated with an early chapter

in the work of Neil Postman (1970). Even then, Postman acknowledges that he was not

inventing it, but rather giving it a name, and he goes on to name a number of ‗media

ecologists‘ living and dead at the time (including Geoge Orwell, Harold Innis and

Marshall McLuhan, for example). Postman writes: ‗media ecology looks into the matter

of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and

value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival.

The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact

on people‘ (1970: 161).

Following this, one can see that the connection between ecologies is not arbitary,

but in fact essential. It is not just that the transformations in media shape remembering

and forgetting, in that there is a co-evolution of media and memory, but also that the need

for a conceptual shift to an ecological perspective to address such transformations is

emergent in both media and memory studies. For instance, as Sonia Livingstone (2009)

argues: ‗we have moved from a social analysis in which the mass media comprise one

among many influential but independent institutions whose relations with the media can

be usefully analyzed, to a social analysis in which everything is mediated, the

consequence being that all influential institutions in society have themselves been

transformed, reconstituted, by contemporary processes of mediation‘. Contemporary

memory in the Western developed world at least is unavoidably mediated, and I will

argue, ‗mediatized‘. By this I mean that it is not merely that the transformations in and of

media are drivers of what many suggest is a current ‗memory boom‘ (Andreas Huyssen,

2005), but that there is a need for a reassessment of the nature and the very value of

remembering subject to the technologies of and the discourses disseminated by media.

Rather than stating that digital media (the internet or mobile phones, for example) imprint

their ‗own social flavor to the memories‘ of this epoch, as Bowker (above) may suggest,

it is the ubiquity of media that is distinctive to the now. Whereas, what we might in

media terms call the ‗broadcast-era‘ is premised on a scarcity model of media content, the

connective turn (the post-broadcast era) has ushered in abundance. In this way, the

fluidization of digitized content its availability, portability, accessibility, transferability

and potential for limitless ‗remediation‘ (Bolter and Grusin, 1999) opens up conflicting

and simultaneous horizons that are rapidly being assembled, torn up and reassembled in

more self-conscious and reflexive ways by individuals, groups, nations, politicians, news

organizations, terrorists etc. At the same time, the potential malleability of digital content

can be contrasted with its accumulative impact, that is to say the relative ease through

which both the unintentional and the intentional recording of events by the ubiquitous

electronic/digital media (CCTV, mobile phone cameras, etc.) contribute to new archives

of possible permanence that could translate into new forms and conditions for future

remembering. Simply, the very basis of future memory has been transformed.

These transformations operate not only at the levels of the individual and the social,

but the connective turn also bridges and even fuses domains of memory sometimes seen

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as separate and distinct in that their study has often reflected and even reinforced their

separation. So, whereas many explorations of the mediatized social and cultural

dynamics, mechanisms and institutions of our shifting relationships with all-things-past

are blinkered to the fact that remembering is as much shaped by psychological factors,

such as cognition, it is crucial to treat memory as forged through the connectivity across

and between these realms. In this way the connective turn demands an ecological, or

rather, a trans-ecological or what some commentators refer to as an ‗epidemiological‘

approach. It does so, because comprehension of the new memory ecology must include

the mind and body, as well as media. These elements do not exist as fixed relations to one

another but rather dynamically and reflexively, in that there can be said to be a co-

evolution between memory and technology. The individual and the social, the private and

the public, the singular and the collective – all embedded in the rubric of memory studies

– are increasingly permeable dimensions under such conditions.

So, drawing upon the work of Dan Sperber: ‗An epidemiology of representations

would establish a relationship of mutual relevance between the cognitive and the social

sciences… This relationship would in no way be one of reduction of the social to the

psychological. Socio-cultural phenomena are, on this approach, ecological patterns of

psychological phenomena. Sociological facts are defined in terms of psychological facts,

but do not reduce to them‘ (1996: 31). Sperber defines epidemiology as ‗the study of the

distribution of certain items or conditions in the population.ii‘ William Hirst and David

Manier (2008) for example, consider: ‗Contrary to those who locate collective memories

in the world, scholars who embrace an epidemiological or systems approach recognise

that the spread of a memory is also constrained by universal, biological mechanisms, as

well as social resources and practices‘ (2008: 188). To this end, my account of

mediatized memory in the new memory ecology involves the illumination of concepts,

mechanisms or domains of memory that have comparable purchase across and in-

between the natural and social sciences, in other words the start of a tentative mapping of

an epidemiological study of memory.

Although an ambitious aim, this is premised upon a convergent agenda in media

and memory studies, namely that recognition of the new ubiquity of media and the new

ubiquity of memory requires reassessment of the very parameters of the debate. Indeed,

the very terms that I have so far already scattered too liberally: individual, social,

collective, which define and inhibit the conceptual, methodological, and empirical tools

and parameters of inquiry, need unmooring. Why not just ‗memory‘?

In this chapter I firstly, develop a rationale for a model of the mediatization of

memory through outlining the two conceptual hangovers of media/memory studies of

‗collective memory‘ and ‗mass media‘, secondly, identify the problems in dealing with

paradigmatic change of the connective turn, and thirdly, begin to probe and to shape an

epidemiology of a new memory ecology through introducing the conceptual vehicle of

‗schema‘ both inhabiting and bridging the memory domains already referred to. Briefly,

the term schema has its origins in psychology and is sometimes credited to the work of

Frederic Bartlett (1932), but it has also been employed by sociologists and others over the

years and has been applied to an explanation of the internal logics (operations) of the

mass media (Niklas Luhmann, 2000). Schema is defined here as a kind of framework and

standard, which the unit of memory (mind, group, society etc.) forms from past

experiences and by which new experiences are expected, measured and also reflexively

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shaped.

The currency of ‘collective memory’ A central claim of this book is that at the same time that academic and public discourses

on mass media/communications have defined an enduring twentieth-century legacy of

thinking on media, they have also shaped and perpetuated ideas about the relationship

between media and memory. I develop this framework below, but even aside from the

connective turn that requires a rethinking or even ditching of the ideas of ‗mass media‘

and ‗collective memory‘, the term collective memory was already in trouble. And I now

turn to give an overview of the discourses to this end.

Collective memory weighs disproportionately heavy on and in the emergent field of

memory studies. It is established as the defining unit of memory across the social

sciences and humanities, and its universality extends through public, political and cultural

discourses on all things past. Ironically, even psychologists who see memory as a

fundamental condition of consciousness and who have constructed a variety of complex

models of individual memory (Parkin. 1993: 3-25), have recently begun to engage with

the term and its body of work in more engaging ways (for example, see the 2008 special

issue of the psychology journal Memory on ‗Collective Memory‘). The irony is double

here, for as I set out in my introduction above, there is an increasing discomfort claimed

by some of the leading theorists of collective memory, even as they continue nonetheless

to employ the term as pivotal to their work. For instance, one of the leading

contemporary sociologists of memory Jeffrey K. Olick (2008: 152) states: ‗I agree with

the charge that collective memory over-totalizes a variety of retrospective products,

practices, and processes. Nevertheless… Because of its general sensitizing powers, I use

―collective memory‖ as the guiding concept for my own work‘. So, as Bill Niven

observes: ‗while authors distance themselves from the term ‗collective memory‘, they

still appear to operate within its parameters‘ (2008: 428). Furthermore, Olick suggests

that the term‘s popularity is somewhat paradoxical ‗because of its very breadth and

imprecision‘ (ibid.) In this regard, I am an advocate of merely using the term ‗memory‘

as it does not privilege either the individual or the group, notably the basis for an axis that

has not served memory studies well. Even the more contextual (and of variable use)

concepts and taxonomies of memory that emphasise its dynamics (including its

‗mediation‘ (cf. JoseVan Dijk, 2007) nonetheless are too often forged with a mythical

‗collective‘ lurking in their analysis.

Elsewhere, collective memory is much more explicitly contested and rejected and

seen as a term appropriately applied to the relative stability of memory in pre-modern

societies but as inadequate in capturing the flux and pace of memory-change in some late

modern societies. For example, Aleida Assman advocates a ‗transnational framework‘ of

European memory as a means of disentangling the collective memories that she sees as

threatening European integration and instead ‗facing up to‘ and turning them into ‗shared

memories‘ (2007: 37). However, Peter Novick takes issue with Assman‘s use of the term

collective memory in a response to her GHI Lecture: ‗Europe: A Community of

Memory? iii

‘ Novick (2007: 28) argues that Assman mis-attributes the power and

longevity of collective memories (their ‗eternal truth‘ and ‗identity‘) characteristic of pre-

modern societies to memory in the contemporary era. Instead, he claims that in using

‗collective memory‘ we need to acknowledge that it is an ‗organic metaphor‘ that make

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the analogy between individual and community memory (2007: 27). He continues: ‗The

organic metaphor seems to me to work best when we are speaking of an organic

(traditional, stable, homogeneous) community, one in which consciousness, like social

reality, changes slowly… The life expectancy of memories in contemporary society

seems greatly diminished. With the circumstances of our lives changing as rapidly as they

do, it is the very rare memory that can resonate with an unchanging ―essential‖ condition‘

(2007: 27-28).

Thus, for Novick, collective memory is a homogenizing phenomenon that requires

a certain stasis to bond effectively and its formation would thus be improbable amidst the

highly mobile and relatively transitory communities of modern life. I will return to

examine the latter contemporary point shortly, but first it is useful to explore the origins

of the idea of collective memory as founded upon the notion of the stability of the

simultaneity or co-presence of the group.

For a genealogy of the term collective memory most cite Maurice Halbwachs

(1925) seen as the founding father of the sociology of memory, who afforded the power

of memory to the living group. Halbwachs was a student of Emile Durkheim who argued

that individual consciousness was lacking when not part of the social force gathered in

and of the present moment: ‗Without symbols, social sentiments could only have a

precarious existence. Though very strong as long as men are together and influence each

other reciprocally, they exist only in the form of recollections after the assembly has

ended, and when left to themselves, these become feebler and feebler, for since the group

is no longer present and active, individual temperaments easily regain the upper hand‘

(1915: 231). Thus, the strength of the group bonding of Durkheim‘s ‗assembled‘, co-

present collective conscience, diminishes in time with separation, with diffusion, I would

add.

In fact, one of the conundrums of collective memory, or indeed any ‗memory‘

beyond that of the individual is threshold. How many constituents, for instance,

constitutes a group, the defining formation for Halbwach‘s collectivity? In this way it is

the quantitative – even though this is its defining premise – as well as the qualitative

vagueness of collective memory that has helped to establish it as an ill-defined yet

defining concept. As noted above, in terms of a historiography of memory, increasingly

authors fragment ‗collective memory‘ into an array of sub-divisions (political, cultural,

communicative, for example) whilst nonetheless operating under its shadow. The

burgeoning of classifications and concepts of memory have in some ways enriched

explanations of how and why individuals, groups, societies come to remember and forget.

At the same time these proliferating taxonomies whilst chasing the significant shifts in

the dynamics of modern memory nonetheless seem at best tentative and incremental

when measured against the transformations in our new media ecology. Indeed, their sine

qua - ‗collective memory‘ - obfuscates rather than enables such accounts to sufficiently

realise the radical transformations in memory that mark the 21st century, let alone

whether collective memory actually existed beyond the traditional societies upon which it

was developed. It may be that collective memory as such was never there to be found in

the first place.

One suspects that there is too much already invested in the term as a too-visible

anchor of the study of memory beyond the cognitive and the individual. Perhaps to

jettison the idea of collective memory altogether would enable at least the freshness of

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vision that is required to see the radical diffusion of memory of the late modern

mediatized world. In this way, I risk placing myself in the paradoxical position of

entangling with the notion of collective memory as a means to seek separation from it,

but perhaps at least recognition of the need for this end is sufficient for now.

Anyhow, in terms of the critical discourses on collective memory, that often

traverse along the twin axes of subjectivity and the social, and history and memory, the

complaints are easy to find, whereas the solutions seem less straightforward and

obtainable. Barry Schwartz (2008: 307) for example, summarizes: ‗The welter of

criticism, plainly, contains no concrete alternatives‘ and he goes onto say that: ‗The

confusion… refers to the analysis, not the reality, of collective memory‘. Is it though that

a ‗reality‘ of collective memory can actually be empirically distilled? It is difficult

enough to locate in one‘s own mind the influences and content of one‘s own pasts and

recall and articulate (remember) them in the present in a coherent and comprehensive

fashion. Moreover, to seek this and the collaborations or multiples of this required to

somehow reach a threshold for a ‗collective memory,‘ seems an even more improbable

task.

Where collective memory discourses have flourished and especially over the late

twentieth century is in relation to accounts of ‗mass‘ media, culture and communication,

and it is this legacy that I now turn to address.

Mass media and collective memory

There is a great deal of work that aligns the mass of collective memory with the

production, circulation and consumption of mass products, culture and media. For

instance: Peter N. Stearns (1994: 149) writes: ‗the essential expansion and multiplication

of modern memory as mass media fabricate and commercialize an ever-growing number

of collective memories turning the past into a commodity for mass consumption‘; George

Lipsitz (2001: viii) argues, ‗electronic mass media make collective memory a crucial

constituent of individual and group identity in the modern world‘; and Barbara Misztal

writes: ‗In today‘s society, collective memory is increasingly shaped by specialized

institutions: schools, courts, museums and the mass media‘ (2003: 19 and see also Sheila

Watson (ed) 2007: 388). And, drawing on McLuhan (1962) Misztal goes on to state:

‗Today, the most important role in the construction of collective memories is played by

the mass media‘ (2003: 21-2). Yet, the notion of an agreed or testable measure, or

threshold for collective memory, seems to evade many of the accounts which claim to

identify a mass mediated collective memory. In addition, the task seems even more

problematic in attempting to grasp the workings and implications of a notion of collective

memory especially outside of certain obvious forms of remembering and notably of

events whose impact is thought likely to affect a ‗sizable collective‘ and/or is deemed

significant by a society (through its media) at a given time? Thus, as Wulf Kansteiner

(2002: 193) argues: ‗As one leaves behind the relatively safe ground of eyewitness

memories, agency in memory politics, and concern with powerful events like genocide

and war, collective memory begins to escape one‘s conceptual grasp. In fact, one faces a

veritable paradox: the more ―collective‖ the medium (that is, the larger its potential or

actual audience), the less likely it is that its representation will reflect the collective

memory of that audience‘. For Kansteiner, this is a part of a methodological problem for

memory studies, thus: ‗there remains the distinct possibility that the monuments, books,

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and films whose history has been carefully reconstructed can quickly pass into oblivion

without shaping the historical imagination of any individuals or social groups.‘ (2002:

192). Collective memory studies that take various media as their modus operandi often

perpetuate the homogenization of the ‗user-experience‘ (Merrin, 2008) and worse,

temporally extend this homogenization to presume a continuity and stability, both of the

collective, and of the memory.

One can look to assumptions as to the nature and impact of the mass media, as well

as collective memory, to begin to unravel an explanation. Nick Couldry (2003, 2005) for

example, argues that contemporary social life operates through ‗media rituals‘ that

construct the media as providing privileged access to a mythical ‗centre‘ of the social

sphere. He sees the mass media (or rather what he calls ‗central‘ media) ‗through which

we imagine ourselves to be connected to the social world‘ (2005: 60) as reproducing

‗‖the myth of the mediated centre‖: the belief, or assumption, that there is a social centre

to the social world and that, in some sense, the media speak ―for‖ the centre‘ (ibid.) If

Couldry‘s model of the naturalization of media power holds, then one can extrapolate this

out to ‗the myth of the mediated past‘, at least in relation to ideas about assumptions as to

the role of mass media in forging collective memory. Interestingly, Couldry‘s (2003)

account of media rituals, although including a very small section which notes the likely

and growing significance of the Internet, doesn‘t see the symbolic power of the (central)

media as being radically challenged by the growth of digital technologies and media.

Indeed, this is despite (or perhaps even because of) his somewhat pessimistic view of the

complicity in ‗current structures of media power‘ of ‗our standard, centralized concept of

mediation‘ (2003: 139). In other words, Couldry‘s notion of ‗mediation‘ (and I address

this term later) which he defines as an approach that seeks to shake off the confines of

earlier media studies (a much less radical version of Merrin, above) through seeing that

‗the very existence of media in our societies transforms those societies, for good or ill‘

(original italics, 2005: 59), is far from making the idea of the myth of the mediatised

centre and thus the symbolic power of the central media redundant.

Couldry‘s treatment of the mass media and his delimiting of the prospects for a

model of mediation is indicative of a disjuncture in media studies around the paradigm

shift identified here in terms of the emergent ecology of media. Even with the insight

afforded through the critical evaluative tool of mediation, it is clear that the discourses of

broadcast-age thinking (institutions and audiences, for example) clutter the way forward.

These unfortunately seem too readily translated into theories of collective memory.

For example, Aaron Beim (2007) although acknowledging the power of an array of

conceptual frameworks applied to remembrance of the group, argues that collective

memory studies have nonetheless been inhibited by defining memory to be collective

only when it is institutionalized. Part of the problem for Beim is that ‗collective memory

analyses conflate the production of the object and its reception‘ (2007: 7). This is an

interesting articulation of the conceptual challenge when applied in the context of the

new memory ecology. Namely, a central dynamic of the emergent mediatization of

memory is precisely the complicating of the notions of production and reception.

Ironically, and in keeping with Schwartz‘s point above, that: ‗The confusion… refers to

the analysis, not the reality, of collective memory‘ (ibid), the focus on these analytical

distinctions and conflations overlooks the very emergent phenomena that challenges

these same analytical dimensions and debates. The terms themselves are synonymous

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with a broadcast era model of mass communication. In fact, it is easy to identify the age

of mass media (or ‗central media‘, in Couldry‘s terms, above) as the age of collective

memory, conceptually and experientially. Radio and later television‘s capacity to mediate

simultaneously first to a national and later routinely to a global audience provided in this

way a common and shared experience, imagined or otherwise, and thus arguably

memories, of nodal news events.

In the academic study of so-called ‗media events‘, i.e. when programming

schedules are interrupted and 24-hour news channels move to continuing extended

coverage of a major news story, these are seen as extraordinarily powerful in shaping

memory. Dayan and Katz (1992: 213), for example, argue: ‗media events and their

narration are in competition with the writing of history in defining the contents of

collective memory. Their disruptive and heroic character is indeed what is remembered,

upstaging the efforts of historians and social scientists to perceive continuities and to

reach beyond the personal‘. The simultaneous televisual mass audience is indeed a

seductive phenomenon, both in terms of the supposed unifying reception of the event and

the national and/or global collective memory arising from this shared experience of the

real-time vicarious witnessing of the event. Indeed this notion has driven a whole subfield

of memory studies, not from sociology or media studies, but from cognitive psychology,

namely the study of ‗flashbulb memories‘ (FBMs). In relation to the study of FBMs of

public events, psychological approaches have focused on the mass media, and often

exclusively television. Notably, this is the remembering of the hearing (and also viewing)

of news of a momentous event that marks historical memory (an assassination of a

political leader, a natural catastrophe, or a terrorist attack, for example). Of course, the

potential influence of the mass media in shaping memory is related to the idea of a ‗mass‘

audience in forging a collective (often simultaneous) reception of an event (i.e. the

‗media event‘: Dayan and Katz, 1992) and its later anniversary-marking (the expansion

of Western news programming has fed the current obsession with commemoration and

memorialisation). So, there is little shortage of often highly repetitive media content

available to feed FBMs, as Hirst and Meksin (2009: 213) succinctly put it: ‗Media

coverage is the quintessential externally driven act of rehearsal‘.

Most of the archetypal media events (the 1967 assassination of U.S. President John

F. Kennedy; the 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger; the 1997 death of

Diana, Princess of Wales) that have informed the genesis of FBM studies are products of

an age of broadcast media. In this way they carry with them the residues of the medium

that they were produced by and experienced through, one might say ‗old memory‘. Yet

their resonance in the new memory ecology is transformed via their accelerated

remediation via digital media.

Of course, there is an inherent reflexive dimension to events constructed as nodal in

the broadcast era, and particularly in their cyclical feeding by commemorative or

memorial cultures. However, the media, or whatever one wants to call the media and

communication technologies that forge our everyday connections with others and with

the world out there, no longer only or occasionally amplifies or coheres memory around

or on events they make public and newsworthy. Rather, there is a radical diffusion of

memory, through the digital networks of the early 21st century. This is not to argue that

the broadcast media no longer represent public events though to be nodal or at least

thought ought to be nodal in collective memory (mythical or otherwise), for the same

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commemorative rituals are still played out across a range of news media. For example, in

June 2009, the 20th

anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the 65th

anniversary of the D-Day landings, were both filling broadcast airtime and news and

other websites (as well as ceremonial events held around the world) and indicative of the

continuing commemorative boom of 20th

century conflicts and catastrophes. However, it

is the digital media which command the revelation of a ‗long tail‘ to past events the

publicly mediated memories of which in the pre-internet, broadcast era, were largely

constrained by the mostly cyclical coverage and of course the technological limits of the

media of the day.

The expansion of television in the digital age, as well as the vastness of the Internet,

have enabled a greater mixing of the personal and the public, and a routine meshing of

the witnesses to events (including those seen as perpetrators and victims) and archives

comprising data of these and other events deemed connected. The components of news

sites marking the anniversaries of events deemed newsworthy are now well-established.

The BBC News website, for example, published its ‘20 years on: Memories of

Tiananmen‘ pages online on the 28th

May 2009, comprising an array of photographs, and

audio and video recorded of the event and of interviews by the ‗people affected by the

massacre‘ as well as by those journalists who also witnessed the event as they reported on

it. The memories represented included the accounts of a senior Communist Party official

of the day, a student protest organiser, a bereaved mother, a worker‘s spokesman, a local

resident, and Jeff Widener, the photographer who took the iconic image of the singular

protestor standing in front of the convoy of the tanks in the square.

An important analytical question is what does this mediatization of witnessing? It is

too easy to see this saturation of commemorative discourses, or even perhaps the

commemorative component of the saturation of media, as indicative of an intensification

of collective memory. The simultaneous mass audiences of the era of which Dayan and

Katz wrote of in 1992 have since become diffused in their media consumption across

thousands of television channels and millions of websites. Moreover, they have become

equipped with the tools of digital consumption, organization and production, notably as

‗prosumers‘. Although this is not necessarily the end of media events at which times

large audiences tune into television and online to breaking news stories deemed

momentous, rather their later and ongoing mediatization is more radically diffused and

extended in the post-broadcast era. Furthermore, the accumulation and increased

accessibility of the digital media documentation of past events may actually diminish a

‗collective memory‘ in the sense defined above, i.e. its strength being adjudged on the

basis of a (undefined) quantitative measure.

In sum, I am not suggesting merely a conceptual corollary of collective memory

and mass media, in terms of their jarring against the paradigmatic shifts in the fields of

memory and media studies, respectively. Rather, they are mutually reinforcing of ways of

restrictive thinking that combine as a transdisciplinary force (albeit not consciously) to

inhibit the revelation of the transformations being ushered in by the processes of

mediatization. I now turn to address this challenge and illustrate some of the discourses

(embedded in media studies) that mitigate against the formation and the embracing of

more usefully dynamic and expansive models of the contemporary relationship between

media and memory.

11

Revolutions Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who

do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while

those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last

couple of decades haven‘t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the

pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real

world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were

treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of

popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions

unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

Clay Shirky (2009) ‗Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable‘

Shirky in his influential blog observes how despite the industry‘s awareness of the

advance of the internet it could not envision a journalism without newspapers (the

‗unthinkable‘ in his title). In this way searching for an organizational and economic

model to ‗save newspapers‘ was (and is) an entirely pointless pursuit. This way of

thinking is indicative of a broader field of stubbornly persisting analyses of the nature and

influences of that still called by some the study of ‗the mass media‘, ‗the media‘ and

‗mass communication‘ and the forms, technologies, content, influences (power),

institutions, owners, controllers, producers, audiences and other components thereof. This

book takes this problematic as not only a corollary of, but also deeply embedded in

contemporary ways of thinking about memory, and especially the ubiquitous notion of

collective memory, as already outlined. It is not just that identifying ‗paradigmatic‘ trends

is difficult until some time after the changes they usher in have long since become

unremarkable, but that so-called ‗new media‘ forms, practices, and influences, constitute

a transformed ‗ecology‘ but that resistance is sometimes invested in most by those who

have shaped the theories, models and methods that have illuminated that which is now

and suddenly in flux.

To give a pivotal example: In 1998 Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst

published their Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Perfomance and Imagination. This

book proposed a model for conceptualizing audiences developed from a chronology of

three audience research paradigms they identify as: (1) ‗Behavioural‘ (audiences were

thought to be influenced by ‗media effects‘ and this could be tested through empirical

‗before and after‘ measures); (2) Incorporation/Resistance (this defined audience research

in terms of ‗ideology‘, in that members were seen as traversing a spectrum of

incorporating and/or resisting the dominant ideology of the day through their media

consumption); and (3) the emergent ‗Spectacle/Peformance‘ paradigm redefines both

what an audience is and what it does. It is this latter idea implying that the very concept

of ‗audience‘ may actually be challenged (even though in a book called ‗Audiences‘) in

relation to its prior history that heralds a significant shift in the field. Abercrombie and

Longurst defined three types of audiences (although not exclusive of one another):

‗simple‘, ‗mass‘ and ‗diffused‘. The first (simple) describes the gathering in public spaces

involving a high degree of co-presence between spectators and event. The second (mass)

is the audiences of mass communication, of the broadcast media, the consumers of the

DVD, the video game, for example. The third (diffused) describes the nature of the

12

audience-media relationship in our ‗media drenched society‘ (1998: 69) in which

‗everyone becomes an audience all the time‘ (1998: 68). Thus, ‗being a member of

audience is no longer an exceptional event, nor an everyday event. Rather it is

constitutive of everyday life‘ (1998: 68-9).

Although overlooked at the time, particularly the idea of a ‗diffused audience‘ was

quite visionary (especially in the context of the date of its publication) and has since

gained more traction. Evidence of this comes from the dismissing of Abercrombie and

Longhurst by some of the leading audience traditionalists. For example, David Morley

(2006: 115) rejects the need to significantly reconceptualise issues around the advent of

‗new media‘ and paraphrases Abercrombie and Longhurst as he complains that: ‗We are

endlessly being told that we need to ―go beyond‖ old models of media–and even that we

should now abandon the very idea of an audience as a separable entity–as we are now,

audiences almost all of the time‘ (ibid.) Martin Barker is even more damning in his

deriding of what he lumps together as ‗a crop of ―general theories of the audience‖‘: ‗At

their worst they are so bad as to be laughable. My own personal ―favorite‖ of this kind is

Abercrombie and Longhurst‘s Audiences (1998)… Not all are as bad as this one, but even

at their best, they read more like clever position-taking than as attempts to advance our

overall understanding of audiences and audience research (2006: 126). It is perhaps ironic

that both Morley and Barker‘s castigation of what they perceive as a threat to the

contemporary relevance of the long-standing field of audience research is based on their

presentations to a 2003 conference entitled ‗the Future of Audience Research‘. Whether

one is sympathetic to the grounded trajectory of empirical research of the British

traditionalists, or whether one sees their position entrenched through a modus operandi of

the broadcast media, there is nonetheless a clear disjucture here.

To return to the Shirky extract above, the ‗unthinkable scenario‘ as applied to the

world of British media studies is the end of the relevance of the term ‗audience‘.

Continuing this analogy, a modern day ‗pragmatist‘ in straightforwardly espousing the

‗unthinkable‘ is William Merrin. In his call for a ‗Media Studies 2.0‘ he observes in his

2008 blog: ‗Look at the violence done to the richness of the new media user-experience

in reducing their functioning to an ‗audience‘. They represent instead a fundamental

challenge to and transformation of the broadcast-era model of the discipline. They

demand a richer, more sophisticated reading of the complexities of the digital era: they

demand a post-broadcasting, digital paradigm‘. To be fair to Barker and Morley the

publication of their articles (above) was three years after their conference presentations,

and my using them as exemplars here is another three years on. In terms of the pace and

the extent of the technological and cultural developments in digital media in the twenty-

first century, this time lag is a lifetime. Thus, the disjuncture I write of here may already

have been surpassed, or, as I suspect, even further engrained to a degree that the concept

of ‗audience‘ is seen as only a remnant of broadcast models of communication.

Moreover, the profound difficulty with attempting to comprehend such rapid and

profound changes is that that which commentators attempt to describe (especially through

the temporal-lags of academic articles and books) is pre-paradigmatic. So, on

‗audiences‘, for example, Merrin argues: ‗For many, new media seemed to offer a

realisation of the ‗active audience‘, extending those practices they had identified with

new possibilities of interactivity, but this interpretation is backward-looking, still trying

to understand the post-broadcast world through broadcast-era categories‘ (ibid.) The

13

difficulty then is not only in providing terms adequate for description and analysis of our

experience in and the consequences of the shifting mediatized environment, but also in

the prolonged conceptual and theoretical hangover of the terms and parameters of the

debate.

To propose an exploration of the new memory ecology then is ambitious, owing

to the challenges in identifying and seeking to understand ‗revolutions‘ as with Shirky‘s

articulation above, including the natural resistance to such an endeavour and also to the

inherent instability of pre-paradigmatic models. Yet, the two ecologies are related

through the co-evolution of memory and technology, most recently marked by the

‗connective turn‘. This conceptualisation is deliberately in contradistinction to the

pervasive and exhausted notion of ‗collective memory‘ in that the term connective

memory shifts the locus of individual and social remembering to the dynamic of

connection in the present. However, it is the connectivity and potentiality of connectivity

through digital media and communications that not only becomes a greater determinant

of what is treated as and becomes ‗memory‘ and that which is forgotten, but also which

shapes the very character and quality of memory. Thus, it would be wrong to assume that

accessibility and abundance necessarily shape a coherent, deep, and stable social

memory, but that the parameters of the terms of remembering and forgetting in our new

memory ecology have been transformed. In other words, the consequences on the

character of memory in late modern society are somewhat patchy and remain in rapid

evolution.

In taking the principles of this idea forward, I am proposing here a model of the

mediatization of memory that fully implicates the mutual interpenetration of the new

media and new memory ecologies and which captures the dynamics of memory as

qualitatively transformed through the flux of connectivity between individuals, groups

and societies, and between ourselves and those which have been described as the

mechanisms, institutions, and to employ a media metaphor, ‗data‘ of memory. Yet,

although ease of connection may enable ease of ‗retrieval‘ (to deliberately use a much

misplaced memory metaphor) the quality and endurance of memory aided in this way

seems less certain. For example, an educational reform group has criticised the

‗modularisation‘ of the ‗A-Level‘ system (courses and exams for 16-18 year-olds and

required for entrance to most UK universities) for creating a ‗learn and forget culture‘iv

.

Bailey, one of the group‘s supporters, argues that ‗sitting a mathematics A-level paper

now is more like using a sat-nav system than reading a map… If you read a map to get

from A to B, you remember the route and learn about other things on the way. If you use

a sat-nav, you do neither of those things‘ (ibid.) And so it is with digital technologies and

archives in that memory becomes less about remembering and more a question of

knowing where to look. The very effort and skill involved in the activity of memory, of

seeking out and assembling an understanding of the past in the present, seems to be under

threat, circumvented by the ease of access and a sense of a profound diminishment of the

scarcity-value of the stuff of the past.

So, the very basis of a publishing and broadcasting model of media

communication which underpins accounts of the relationship between (mass) media and

remembering, have been undermined with the connective turn. As Shirkey (2009) argues,

‗It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the

core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of

14

making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem‘ (ibid.)

Similarly, it makes increasingly less sense to premise a model of memory on the scarcity

of representations of the past; the age of ubiquitous media inevitably shapes ubiquitous

memory. Making sense of this relationship is the aim of what follows.

To begin to outline at least some of the dimensions of an epidemiology of the new

memory ecology, I briefly outline here as a transversal disciplinary tool a key conceptual

vehicle introduced above, namely ‗schema‘.

Schema: the organisation of experience

A classical starting point for an explanation of schemata at the level of the individual is to

say that every time memory is ‗made‘ or ‗remade‘ in the present it becomes ‗active‘.

Writing over three-quarters of a century ago, Frederic Bartlett, who had a significant

influence on the psychology of memoryv, claimed that the key process of remembering

involves the introduction of the past into the present to produce a ‗reactivated‘ site of

consciousness: ‗Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and

fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the

relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organised past reactions or

experience‘ (1932: 213). It is not a question of the past itself as an entity as such, but,

‗our attitude towards‘ it and our ‗organisation‘ of past experiences. So, crucially,

individual memory is seen as dynamic, imaginative, and directed and shaped in and from

the present.

This ‗active mass of organised past reactions‘ (ibid.) against which new incoming

information is compared and subsequently processed, Bartlett calls schemata.vi

As Paul

Connerton (1989: 6) for example, argues,

in all modes of experience we always base our particular experiences on a prior

context in order to ensure that they are intelligible at all; that prior to any single

experience, our mind is already predisposed with a framework of outlines… The

world of the percipient, defined in terms of temporal experience, is an organised

body of expectations based on recollection.

(‗Organisation‘ and ‗expectation‘ are critical here, for they are also central to the

relationship between media and memory, albeit in different ways, either side of the

connective turn, and I return to explore these in this context below).

So, the effectiveness of memory is determined by the repertoire of schema

available to the individual. Recognition and understanding of events unfolding in the

present is made through a prism of what has gone before. In this way, individual

remembering has, according to Bartlett, a ‗constructive character‘. Writing over three-

quarters of a century ago, Bartlett used the metaphor of playing a skilled game to

illustrate this point: ‗We may fancy that we are repeating a series of movements learned a

long time before from a text-book or from a teacher. But motion study shows that in fact

we build up the stroke afresh on a basis of the immediately preceding balance of postures

and the momentary needs of the game. Every time we make it, it has its own

characteristics‘ (1932: 204). The idea of schema then should be seen as part of a model

that treats memory as dynamically forged through an interpenetration of an accumulative

past and an orientation to the past in the present. In this regard, the availability of

15

schemata is seen to affect the prospects for remembering. For example, Roy G.

D‘Andrade (1995: 189) argues: ‗The lexicon permits the rememberer to construct

descriptions of what is to be remembered, and it is the interaction of these descriptions

with the things to be remembered that influences memory‘ (original italics). Presumably,

this also holds for social and cultural lexicon and descriptions, but also and crucially their

interaction with individual ones.

It is the nature and extent of this ‗interaction‘ but across and between the

disciplinary memory domains (individual, social and cultural, for example), that holds the

key to understanding the dynamics of the new memory ecology. For example, more

recently, Aaran Beim proposes an interactionist approach to the functioning of schema in

remembering. He argues that: ‗collective memory analyses should consider the bundles

of memory schemata that are located at a supraindividual level of social life and formed

through social interaction. The interaction here is binary: (1) the interaction between

culturally related individuals, and (2) the interaction between individuals and institutional

forms. This interaction produces cognitive schemata that people use to make sense of the

past‘ (2007: 8).

Again, the problem of memory here is being articulated in a way that prescribes

an epidemiological response. Not only is this a matter of interactions between self and

other, self and society, but also self with self, in the building and shaping of memory

schema. And here I do mean memory schemata and not somehow separable and distinct

‗collective memory schemata‘. One way through the conundrum of the differentiation

and separation of individual and social memory is found in the assessment of Hirst and

Manier (above) in that they envisage such an approach as treating ‗collective memories‘

as ‗shared individual memories‘ (2008: 189). These should be located then ‗not ―in the

head‖ or ―in the world‖, but in the interaction between what is out in the world and what

is in the head‘ (ibid.) Again, if this case is to be argued, I think it more productive to

declassify the collective and the individual, and ‗shared memories‘ seems to readily

capture the dynamic without necessarily or irreducibly being considered as either

individual or collective. And it is the nature, form and uses of schema that provide a

means to identify and to track such memories.

The dynamic context here is the reflexive workings in the new memory ecology.

Others go further in relation to an epidemiological approach, or more often called a

‗systems‘ approach, by arguing that it is the reflexive workings of rather than in a given

ecology which is defining of its perpetuation. For example, Luhmann (2000: 109)

(drawing on Kant) argues: ‗schemata are not images which become concretely fixed at

the moment of depiction; they are merely rules for the repetition of operations… Thus,

memory does not consist of a supply of images which one can look at again whenever

necessary. Rather, it is a question of forms which, in the ceaseless temporal flow of

autopoiesis, enable recusions, retrospective reference to the familiar, and repetition of

operations which actualize it‘. The idea of ‗autopoiesis‘ is the process whereby a system

produces its own organization, and also regenerates and maintains itself. This, I will

come onto argue, is also applicable to the notion of ‗network‘, which has renewed

application through the connective turn. Whereas, Luhmann‘s conceptualization of this

term and of schemata he applies to a study of the ‗system‘ of mass media.

Luhmann‘s work is significant (although overlooked in this context) to the study

of contemporary mediated memory in his bringing of some of the terms of psychology

16

(schema, but also ‗cognitive map‘, ‗prototype‘, ‗script‘, for example) to a mapping of the

systemic relationship between memory and the mass media. For instance, he identifies

the ‗recursivity‘ of news, whereby incoming information and events that today pass as

‗news‘ are routinely framed, measured, and inevitably shaped in an unfolding present

with reference to and through the uses of past and archival images, sounds, and events.

This includes the deployment of ‗media templates‘ (Kitzinger, 2000; Hoskins 2004,

2007; Hoskins and O‘Loughlin, 2007) a term most often associated with reference to the

medium of television. Moreover, Luhmann‘s contribution is significant to the purposes of

this book, given his modelling of memory in the context of broadcast era mass media, in

other words, prior to the connective turn. His The Reality of the Mass Media although

published in its English translation in 2000 was actually based upon a lecture given in

1994. Although revised since, notably this was conceived at the very height of the

broadcast era. Luhmann‘s work then, provides a useful comparative basis for an

exploration of the nature of post-connective turn memory through probing changes in the

nature and workings of mediatized schema today.

So, what might previously have been seen and investigated as separate individual,

social and cultural schemata, be these seen as neurological, or institutionalized in social

or cultural groups or forms, for example, become extended (to use a McLuhanist

metaphor) and hybridized through the processes of mediation/ization and remediation

(Bolter and Grusin, 1999). Moreover, the mediatization of memory involves a potentially

continuous cycle of the premediation and remediation of schemata. For instance, in her

work on the ‗site of memory‘ of the ‗Indian Mutiny‘ (the mid-nineteenth rebellion against

British rule in India), Asrid Erll (2009: 111) identifies ‗two basic processes of

convergence‘, namely ‗premediation‘ and ‗remediation‘ in the contested and shifting

remembering of this event across time, space and cultures. By premediation Erll

considers how, ‗existent media which circulate in a given society provide schemata for

new experience and its representation‘ and remediation she refers to how ‗especially

those events which are transformed into lieu de memoire are usually represented again

and again, over decades and centuries, in different media‘ (ibid.) Similarly, Ann Rigney

(2005: 18) notes how sites of memory emerge and sustain through the repetitions of

media representations and a range of remediated versions of the past that ‗converge and

coalesce‘ but also which serve to critically reflect and renew (cf. Erll and Rigney, 2009:

5). This sounds close to a model of autopoiesis of cultural memory.

However, to go further, the mediatization of memory operates paradoxically in its

simultaneous convergence (an accumulation and radical connectivity and integration) but

also dispersal and diffusion (individuals increasingly curatorial of circulating digital

content) of mediatized schema. For example, Henry Jenkins argues that the hybrid media

space of YouTube represents a move ‗towards an era where the highest value is in

spreadability (a term which emphasizes the active agency of consumers in creating value

and heightening awareness through their circulation of media content)‘ (2007: 95).

YouTube (and other file-sharing and social networking sites) provide a nexus of

communications and media data (sounds, images, textual comments etc) that accrue value

through the principle of their radical connectivity with the many (hits, circulation,

remediation), yet the many are differentiated through their capacity to edit, re-mix,

reconstitute, and remediate the media data from which shared memories of the past are

dynamically but also individually made and remade in the present.

17

The making of memory is thus subject to a whole set of shifting dynamics,

including being embedded in and distributed through our ‗sociotechnical practices‘ (cf.

(Geoffrey C. Bowker 2005; Nancy Van House and Elizabeth F. Churchill 2008; Richard

Grusin, forthcoming), for example, in the use of websites and services such as MySpace,

Facebook and Twitter which allow users to continually display and to shape biographical

information, post commentaries on their unfolding lives and to interact publicly or semi-

publicly with one another through messaging services including in real-time or near real-

time. Other ‗dynamic‘ so-called ‗Web 2.0‘ platforms include file sharing systems, for

example Flickr and YouTube, which mesh the private and the public into an immediate

and intensely visual and auditory present past. The very use of these systems contributes

to a new memory, a mediatized memory that challenges the temporal and spatial

metaphors and concepts previously constitutive of the parameters of the study of

memory.

So, the construction of memory in our new memory ecology is ‗imbricated‘ in

digital recording technologies and media but also in the standards and classifications

resulting from their growth that inevitably and often invisibly regulate our sociotechnical

practices (see Bowker and Susan Leigh Star 1999: 2). For example, the temporality of

images themselves are changing. For instance, as research by Van House (2008) has

shown, photos are actually becoming less archival: ‗while people do still make archival

images, many are treated as ephemeral and transitory, including being used for image-

based communication, in effect visual or multimodal messaging‘ (Van House and

Churchill, 2008: 298). Thus the images made of and in everyday life that will shape

tomorrow‘s memory, are struck through with the paradox of the digital – on the one hand

digital data possesses an apparent permanence and longevity (through its accessibility

and reproducibility), but on the other, is vulnerable to its treatment not of the matter of

memory, but merely as message, as communication, and even in this way, being ‗hyper-

archival‘.

But, what does this radical diffusion of our memories equate to? Thus, as

Geoffrey Bowker observes: ‗we loop memory out heterochronously across a range of

media and materials (friends, conferences, photos, letters, date books…) so that at any

one time we can, in theory, draw it all together along the single timeline of our past‘

(2008: 226). Yet, as this process of the distribution of our selves becomes increasingly

mediatized across our new memory ecology, what do our memory traces constitute?

Although the temporality of images and other such media data is changing though

digitization and thus can be seen as more revocable and less stable, they nonetheless at

the same time engender a greater future memory potential. Fred Ritchin (2009: 141) for

instance contrasts the analog to the digital: ‗Most digitally constructed photographs

depend, as does the analog, on the shutter‘s release. But they use rows of pixels, each one

defined in its color and hue as an integer, rather than chemically processed grain. As

such, the digital photograph can be conceived of as a meta-image, a map of squares, each

capable of being individually modified and, on the screen, able to serve as a pathway

elsewhere‘. The reconstitutive potential of this data is unlimited and as our digital media

translate more and more into data the digital distribution and malleability of memory

(individual, social, cultural) appears infinite.

In sum, I have outlined the usefulness of schema to the beginnings of a mapping

of an epidemiology of contemporary memory and the impact of mediatiatization in this

18

regard. I now turn to provide an illustration of the key shifts of the connective turn in the

move from collective to mediatized memory and I set out the structure of the rest of the

book.

The Connective Turn

The table above summarises the key dimensions of the formation of collective memory

compared with memory in the new memory ecology. These features are uneven and

sometimes overlapping but are nonetheless indicative of the emergent impacts of

mediatization.

The move from mass media/collective memory to ubiquitous media/memory

outlined above will be assessed with the aim of developing an epidemiology of memory

across the following themes which form the basis of the structure of the substantive

chapters which follow. These are:

2. Collective

The term ‗collective‘ (rather than ‗social‘) has been most attached to the study of memory

beyond the individual. This is attributable in part to the 1980 translation into English of

Maurice Halbwachs‘ (1914-1945) The Collective Memory (which was first published in

1950 as La Mémoire Collective, although written in the 1930s).

The new media of memory render a past that is not only potentially more visible,

accessible, and fluid, than that which preceded it, but which also seems at one level more

easily revocable and subject to different mediatized modalities. What would the founding

father of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs have made of such formations? For

instance, Halbwachs argued that when the individual made use of ‗group memory‘ this

‗does not imply the actual presence of group members‘ and he goes on to say: ‗I need

19

only carry in mind whatever enables me to gain the group viewpoint, plunge into its

milieu and time, and feel in its midst‘ (1980: 118). Well, the actuality of the group today

is cast and bonded in new ways via the virtuality and the simultaneity or near-

simultaneity of the group (from proximate to the global). There is no need to ‗carry in

one‘s mind‘ much beyond that which facilitates access to the group; today, memory in

this way is less a question of remembering and more a matter of where to look in the

present. Despite writing in a period of then unprecedented growth in the mass media,

Halbwachs does not once mention the electronic media. His aid memoires to the city, for

example, include an architect, historian, painter, businessman, the novelist, and a map,

but no other media. Although Halbwachs makes tantalising references to newspapers as

though the mediated milieu is right under his nose, he does not appear to see its

relevance. Following Halbwachs, the term ‗collective‘ has become a pivotal to

contemporary discourses on memory, but barely challenged in relation to developments

in new media

This chapter develops the critique of collective memory introduced above and

claims that the new memory ecology heralds the end of its usefulness. Thus, the apparent

collectivities forged and sustained through the previously relatively unifying frames and

events of the mass media which to some extent facilitated the impression of a consensus

over the ‗frames of reference and temporal markings of the past‘ (Gross, 2000) have been

shattered. For instance, although the digital media herald the potential for the

‗emergence‘ (Johnson, 2002) of new ‗collectivities‘ (cf. Surowiecke on ‗crowds‘, 2005),

‗connectivity‘ does not equate to ‗collectivity‘.

3. Archive

Archives have been traditionally the external and institutional basis for remembering and

forgetting of societies at different stages of development across history. Today, the

archive is increasingly mediatized – part of a new accessible and highly connected new

memory ecology. The archive can even be seen as a medium in its own right as it has

been liberated ‗from archival space into archival time‘ (Ernst, 2004: 52). That is to say,

the idea of the static archive as a permanent place of storage, is being replaced by the

much more fluid temporalities and dynamics of ‗permanent data transfer‘ (ibid.)

Whereas, the archives of the broadcast era mass media were stored in the archival space

of the vault or library subject to the material conditions of order, classification and

retrieval (i.e. access), it is connectivity that becomes of primary significance to the digital

archive.

Mediatization delivers a ‗long tail‘ (Anderson 2007) of the past (images, video etc.)

whose ‗emergence‘ into future presents is contingent in terms of the when, but also in

terms of its access by whom. David Weinberger (2007) calls this the ‗third order‘ of

information, involving the removal of the limitations previously assumed inevitable in the

ways information is organized. (The ‗first order‘ is the actual physical placing or storage

of an item and the ‗second order‘ is that which separates information about the first order

objects from the objects themselves such as the card catalogue.) Weinberger argues that

‗the ‗miscellanizing‘ of information not only breaks it out of its traditional organizational

categories but also removes the implicit authority granted by being published in the paper

world (2007: 22). Thus, under these conditions, the archive appears to have new

potential, liberated from its former inherently spatial and to some extent institutional

20

constraints. Indeed, the traditional materiality associated with the artefactual archive has

been challenged with the fluidity, reproducibility, and transferability of digital data. In

this way archives as they have become increasingly networked have become a key strata

of our ‗technological unconscious‘, transcending the social and the technological.

However, the temporality of images, for example, are changing and as research by Van

House (2008) has shown, photos are actually becoming less archival: ‗while people do

still make archival images, many are treated as ephemeral and transitory, including being

used for image-based communication, in effect visual or multimodal messaging‘ (Van

House and Churchill, 2008: 298). Thus the images made of and in everyday life that will

shape tomorrow‘s personal and public memory, are vulnerable to the shifts in today‘s

sociotechnical practices enabled through the highly fluid, transferable and erasable

memory-matter of digital data.

So, conversely, it may be that the very prospects for the deletion and

disconnection of mediatized memory will actually afford the material objects (and

metaphors) of cultural memory, of photographs, magnetic tape, letters, monuments, etc.

greater significance. Can then the immateriality of mediatized memory and an investment

in and preservation of a materially-authentic past co-exist? Will the ‗tagging‘ of images

in Flickr ultimately shape what will become the equivalent of what Aleida Assman

(2008) differentiates as ‗canon‘ and ‗archive‘ for those we share our photographs with?

This chapter examines the shifts in the form and the potential of the archive as a

mediator of memory in the present and future, and as a challenge to the stability and

continuity of notions of collective memory.

4. Witness To have witnessed, or rather experienced, an event, conveys a certain status on the story-

teller as primary source. Personal testimony conveys authority and credibility on the

speaker, whether they witnessed a street-crime and are retelling their account in a court of

law, or if they were present at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and are contributing to one of

the countless television documentaries on the historic events of 1989. Those who actually

experienced an event or were eyewitnesses to it carry with them literally a living

memory. Their accounts are often treated as primary sources by historians and others

wishing to learn more about past events.

Here, I explore the mediatization of witnessing as the ever-accumulating

technologies of the digital media shape and direct a contemporary near-obsessive

commemoration of events. These commemorative and memorial discourses are derived

from a collecting of the individual, personal, and wherever possible, emotional accounts

of eyewitnesses to, and survivors of, past wars and catastrophes, but often illustrated by,

if not embedded in, the visual record through stills, video, and film. Thus, the cycle of

mass-mediated commemoration has shifted in recent years to envelop the much more

recent past, the past still intimately connected with the present, owing to the mass and

immediate availability of mediatized witness testimony to and (amateur and professional)

stills and video footage of the catastrophes and conflicts of recent times.

This chapter examines the institutional media memory of events (branded and

commodified, i.e. the ways in which news broadcasters attempt to become synonymous

with the witnessing and experiencing of selective key events). I explore the potential in

the new memory ecology for the challenging of institutional accounts of the past and for

21

alternative accounts to emerge and to endure outside of the dominant frames of reference

(the spectacular, the iconic and the sanitised) of the mainstream media.

Moreover, the very credibility and also value of remembering (and forgetting) is

made explicit through discourses of witnessing. This chapter interrogates the value placed

on remembering as witnessing has become increasingly mediatized. This importantly

includes examination of the role of schema and its remediation across the accounting of –

the witnessing of – events (often catastrophic) deemed nodal and essential to ‗collective

memory‘. Thus, I disaggregate collective memories from their apparent ‗quality of

obligation‘ versus their ‗proliferation‘ (Bridget Fowler, 2005: 54).

5. Entelechy

For any generation, a dominant medium is said to give structure to common experience –

an ‗entelechy‘ (Mannheim, 1952; Volkmer, 2006) – that shapes mediated engagement

with events. Not only do the dominant technologies of witnessing, documenting,

recording and archiving of the day, affect the legitimising, the contesting and events for

example, but these shape the prospects for future remembering and forgetting of pasts.

Following my earlier setting out of new principles of organisation of a new memory

ecology, this chapter examines how these are particularly applicable to the generation

described as being ‗born digital‘, in contradistinction to earlier generations. This includes

growing up in an ecology in which media production and consumption have become de-

differentiated. To this end, I draw on work from the Global Generations Media projectvii

,

which identified older cohorts ‗media memories were specific to a technology… younger

generations were awash in media product. As media become more enveloping, the source

became less important‘ (Slade, 2006: 207). In this way, the digital media literacy of the

young is an important differentiator of their emergent generational entelechy, and perhaps

radically so in comparison to the development and shifts in mass media experienced by

preceding generations. This is precisely the challenge I introduced earlier in the need to

assess the impact of the fluidization of digitized content, the revelation of a ‗long tail‘ of

the past, and the availability of new modes of digitally-afforded participation in new

kinds of public spheres.

This chapter examines the prospects of a schema-based model of memory in this

specific mediatized context of a digital entelechy, to enable an exploration of the shifts

from a representational to a medial engagement with media and the past produced anew

through this engagement.

6. Epidemiology This concluding chapter summarises the debates outlined across the book and speculates

as to the likely future conditions and possibilities for an epidemiological study of

memory. I anchor this in an examination of accounts of the co-evolution of humans and

technology and the prospects for memory. For example, philosopher/cognitive scientists

such as Andy Clark argue how we see and feel through a kind of feedback loop (a kind of

autopoiesis of self rather than society, cf. Grusin, forthcoming). For instance, he

identifies this ‗looping process‘ in accounts of artistic creativity: ‗The sketch pad is not

just a convenience for the artist, nor simply a kind of external memory or durable

medium for the storage of fully formed ideas. Instead, the iterated process of

externalizing and re-perceiving turns out to be integral to the process of artistic cognition

22

itself‘ (2003: 77). One can see how memory itself is ‗looped‘ out not just

‗heterochronously across a range of media and materials (friends, conferences, photos,

letters, date books…)‘ (Bowker, above.) but the very condition of remembering is

increasingly actively and re-actively constructed on-the-fly, notably memory is

characterised through its mediatized emergenceviii

through a range of everyday digital

media. The metaphor ‗on-the-fly‘ is also found in the field of computing. To provide one

example from the area of programming computer audio and electro-acoustic music, being

developed at Princeton:

On-the-fly programming (or live coding) is a style of programming in which the

programmer/performer/composer augments and modifies the program while it is

running, without stopping or restarting, in order to assert expressive,

programmable control for performance, composition, and experimentation at run-

time (Wang and Cook, 2004:1).

On-the-fly memory is not just a constructive version of memory that builds on and indeed

requires previous moments out of which it emerges, accumulates and which also acquires

new characteristics with and in each passing moment. In this way I return to connect the

notion of Bartlett‘s (ibid.) ‗constructive character of remembering‘ with consideration of

the reflexive intervention of digital media and technologies in this process.

I consider again the very character and quality of memory forged through such

networks and circuits in ‗run-time‘. For instance, Bernard Stiegler (2009: 41) writes of

his portable computer: ‗I can read myself, listen to myself, see myself and download my

own work, and all of this makes for a very strange circuit: at once a kind of short circuit

of my own memory‘. As our memory is increasingly connected with, newly ordered

through and distributed across complex networks of digital media and technologies in our

new memory ecology, what are the prospects for its sharedness, stability and continuity,

in other words the elements often sought in accounts of collective memory? I conclude

that an epidemiological approach is essential to interrogate the multiple and

interconnected transformations of the mediatization of memory and for the development

of appropriately dynamic and evolutionary research in and of our new memory ecology.

23

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Notes i For just a flavour: Jan Assman (1995: 128-9) contrasts the dynamics of ‗communicative‘ or

‗everyday memory‘ with the fixity of ‗cultural memory‘; others focus on an ‗experiential‘ form of

engagement with a past that reaches beyond generational memories, and this is particularly so

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28

ii Dan Sperber ‗An Epidemiology of Representations‘ (transcript of talk given 27 May 2005)

available at: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sperber05/sperber05_index.html. iii Aleida Assman (2007) ‗Europe: A Community of Memory?‘ Twentieth Annual Lecture of the

GHI, GHI Bulletin 40 (Spring 2007): 11-25. iv Katherine Sellgren (2009) ‗A-Levels ‗too much like sat-nav‘‘. BBC news, 17 June 2009,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8103274.stm (accessed June 2009). v The resonance of work of Bartlett is indicated by the re-issuing of his classic text Remembering:

A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, 63 years after its original publication. vi According to Neisser (1978/2000) debates over the nature and use of ‗schemata‘ in psychology

revived in the 1970s after many years of being largely ignored. vii

Volkmer‘s (2006) pioneering transnational and trans-generational study provides important

evidence of the co-evolution of media and memory. The ‗Global Media Generations‘ project

launched in 1998 applied Mannheim‘s (1952) ‗theory of generations‘ to a study of three cohorts

selected on the basis of their experience of media particular to their ‗formative‘ years. Thus the

corpus was divided into (1) those born between 1924-1929, their formative years being 1935-

1945, the ‗print/radio‘ generation, (2) those born between 1954-1959, their formative years being

1965-1975, the ‗black-and-white television generation‘, and (3) those born 1979-1984, their

formative years being 1989-1999, which were labelled the ‗Internet generation‘ (Volkmer, 2006:

6-7). viii See also the uses of ‘emergence’ in the marking of more dynamic models of a range of contemporary phenomena: Johnson, 2002, Sawyer, 2005, and Hoskins and O’Loughlin, forthcoming.