The Mediatization of Memory

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-thingspast 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 ‗intermedial‘ 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 coevolution 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 inbetween 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 premodern 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‘, copresent 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.

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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

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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 twentyfirst 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

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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

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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 threequarters 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

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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

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(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.

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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 semipublicly with one another through messaging services including in real-time or near realtime. 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 imagebased 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 ‗hyperarchival‘. 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

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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

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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 nearsimultaneity 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

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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 storyteller 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

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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 dedifferentiated. 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

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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 runtime (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.

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Notes 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 with Holocaust and other conflict memories: see Hirsch 1997, Landsberg 2004, and Weissman 2005, on ‗post‘, ‗prosthetic‘ and ‗fantasy‘ memories, respectively. i

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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 19351945, 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). ii

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. viii

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