Joanne Garde-Hansen
Profesora de Cultura, Medios y Comunicación en el Centro de Estudios de Políticas Culturales y Mediáticas. Su investigación y docencia se centran en los medios de comunicación, la memoria, los archivos y el patrimonio.
Introduction: mediating the past
“The past is omnipresent” (Lowenthal, 1985)
- Where do we get an understanding of the past?
- Media, in its different forms, are the main sources for recording, constructing, archiving and disseminating public and private histories in the early twenty first century.
- It is safe to say, as we stand firmly established in the twenty-first century, that our engagement with history has become almost entirely mediated.
- It seems we are not able to understand the past without media versions of it, and the last century, in particular, shows us that media and events of historical significance are.
Un posible tema: la relación entre medios y memoria. Los retos que ha traído el Internet en la mediación de nuestro conocimiento.
- Media, in the form of print, television, film, photography, radio and increasingly the Internet, are the main sources for recording, constructing, archiving and disseminating public and private histories in the early twenty-first century.
- It seems we are not able to understand the past without media versions of it, and the last century, in particular, shows us that media and events of historical significance are inseparable.
- The focus upon media’s relationship with history is fairly recent (Baudrillard 1995; Sturken 1997; Zelizer 1998; Shandler 1999; Zelizer and Allan 2002; Cannadine 2004 to name but a few key authors) and undoubtedly performs the fi n-de-siècle experience of disgust at a war-ridden, genocidal twentieth century mixed with hope for what a new millennium might offer. It may have been born out of the simultaneous calls for an end to the grand narratives of history from key theorists of postmodernism (Lyotard 2001, Fukuyama 1992 and Derrida 1994) and a new approach to understanding the past through little narratives of and from the people, or as history from below (see Foucault 1977).
¿Por qué en 1995? ¿Con el auge del Internet en el mundo se empezaron a entender los medios como una fuente de conocimiento?
- We know from our own consumption of history that our diet consists of a great deal of televised and cinematic versions of the past mixed with selective research of the Internet. What we do not know is how true and reliable the information is, whether it challenges us to think differently or whether we simply consume what we already know rather than seek alternative histories
La web nos está volviendo menos o más críticos frente a la información que consumimos? Pensaría que más críticos debido a la cantidad masiva de información, pero por otra parte se hace más difícil investigar y aprender en un mundo «infoxicado» sin tener certeza. Ahora, le debemos creer a medios digitales tradicionales lo que nos están diciendo? Cómo sabemos? Cómo filtrar la cantidad de contenido mediático?
- Media’s popularity is its strength, its ability to democratise access to and representations of the past mean that those interested in history (professionals, politicians, students and citizens) are able to engage with the past along the lines of freedom, empathy and community (2004: 22–3). if Schama describes history as ‘the repository of shared memory’ (2004: 23), then perhaps we can begin this book with the idea that media compels an end to history and the beginning of memory.
- Andreas Huyssen argues that ‘memory – as something that is always subject to recon struction and renegotiation – has emerged as an alternative to an alleg edly objectifying or totalizing history, history written either with small or capital H, that is, history in its empiricist form or as master narra tive’ (Huyssen 2003b: 17).
¿Cuál es la diferencie entre memoria, memoria colectiva e historia?
Memory vs. History: On the Neverending Struggle to See Clearly Into the Past
- «Since he died it has been my mission to turn memory into history. I photograph, I paint, I journal, and most importantly, I write. Everything must be archived; I do it for some undetermined future reader, researcher, historian».
- Se entiende por memoria, en muchos casos, como algo personal, en primera persona, subjetivo. La memoria se olvida, no es posible decidir qué se recuerda.
- » We might put these concepts into a crude map by saying that «history» is an organized and evidence-based presentation of of the processes and events that have occurred for a people over an extended period of time; «memory» is the personal recollections and representations of individuals who lived through a series of events and processes; and «narratives» are the stories that historians and ordinary people weave together to make sense of the events and happenings through which a people and a person have lived.»
- Es la memoria una contraposición a la historia oficial?
Media: the first draft of history
- ‘Media witnessing’ has now become one of the key concepts for understanding the relationship between experiences, events and their representations.
- media witnessing is produced through the complex interactions of three strands: ‘witnesses [memory] in the media, witnessing [memory] by the media, and witnessing [memory] through the media’.
- While we admire the idea of the determined journalist unearthing the hidden story, getting the facts and telling the truth in the face of danger, in reality we also know that in our media ecology of ‘24-hour news’, repetition, recycling, studio analysis and highlights, it is more likely that journalists stand around waiting for history to happen. In fact, we are now in a position where journalists are no longer the fi rst drafters of history at all but Twitter users are, sending out tweets of the Mumbai bombings in 2007 or the earthquake disaster in China in 2008 before CNN reporters even got out of bed (see Ingram 2008).
- Seven years ago I aired the ‘original’ audio recording of Herbert Morrison’s report to media students and we discussed the power of early broadcast radio as witness, the emotive response in Morrison’s voice and his ability to convey the tragedy and trauma through sound (‘Oh, the humanity’, is his mournful, oft repeated plea to the listener). However, my students were unable to emotively connect to this event at all, it was not part of their collective or cultural memory.
- Is memory a popular, dumbed-down, emotional, untrust worthy purveyor of half-truths and trauma: an agent of repression and self-editing? Or is memory’s amorphousness and lack of disci pline (Sturken 2008: 74) the very tonic needed to uncover the active, creative and constructed nature of how human beings understand their past?
¿Cuál es la importancia de la memoria y la memoria colectiva para generaciones que no se interpelan con los hechos ocurridos y narrados de esta manera? ¿Es importante para la investigación y la preservación del conocimiento solamente? ¿Por qué nos importa preservar las memorias de las personas?
From History to Memory
- If we temporarily separate the two terms then the past can be articulated as history (the writing of the past) or as memory (the personal, collective, cultural and social recollection of the past).
- Media (texts, photographs, cinema, television, radio, newspapers and digital media) negotiate both history and memory. We understand the past (our own, our family’s, our country’s, our world’s) through media discourses, forms, technologies and practices. Our understanding of our nation’s or community’s past is intimately connected to our life histories.
- Often victims of history, such communities engage with per sonal, collective, shared and cultural memories in connective ways in order to preserve their heritage.
- However mobile, global or local our present interactions we actively connect ourselves to our pasts through a continual and dynamic accumulation of personal media archives (perhaps over whelmingly when I look at the thousands of digital photographs accumulating on my laptop or the stacks of audio cassette ‘mix’ tapes I can no longer play).
- José van Dijck has termed ‘mediated memories’ (2007). When we leave the territory of history and embrace the more inclusive domain of memory we reveal some important questions: how is memory different to history, is it a substitute for history, does it make history, does it make it up, or does history determine what is remembered and forgotten?
- How have media delivery systems themselves and all the memories associated with and held within them become history?
- memory is a physical and mental process and is unique to each of us. It is this uniqueness and differentiation that often makes it difficult to generalise about its relationship with media. Memory is emotive, creative, empathetic, cognitive and sensory. We rely upon it, edit it, store it, share it and fear the loss of it.
- Marshall McLuhan (1994) would argue that media are extensions of memory.
- Capturing the past is becoming increasingly sophisticated and memory tools such as television, fi lm, photocopiers, digital archives, photographic albums, camcorders, scanners, mobile phones and social network sites help us to remember.
- All these mediations of the past project multiple framings, which demand responsible analysis.
- understanding the archives we leave for future generations and the way in which we use media to help articulate our own histories both as producers and consumers.
- While this book offers original research in the case studies it is also essentially designed as an introduction to the study of how we individually and collectively make sense and order of our past through media.
Memory studies and Media studies
- memory and remembering
- memory could offer unmediated access to experience or to external reality (Radstone and Hodgkin, 2005)
- Upsurge of memory (Pierre Nora 2002): opening of existing and the creation of new archives for public and private scrutinity//desire to commemorate, remember and memorialise in ways other than statues and monuments
- Memory: something we live with but not simply in our heads and bodies. We express, represent and feel our memories and we project both emotion and memory through the personal, cultural, physiological, neurological, political, religious, social and racial plateaux that form the tangled threads of our being in the world.
- Locating memory in the brain or mind may miss the bodily, or corporeal and sensory, aspects of memory and remembering. It sometimes evokes a physical reaction. A scent, a sound, a texture, they all trigger memories as images and narratives in your mind that you re-experience, visualise, narrativise and feel.
- We are not simply human beings mapped onto a landscape or situated in ecology. As memories come and go, are lost and found in our minds, so too, the present moment (full of people, places, events, actions, experiences and feelings) connects with past moments (full of people, places, events, actions, experiences and feelings). These connections are not simply with our own personal past, but with a whole range of pasts that are one a micro-level such as histories of family, local community, school, religion, and heritage, and on a macro-level such as histories of nation, politics, gender, race, culture and society. (15)
- Our memories are most of the time triggered rather randomly in a fleeting and disordered way. Whatever we do, when we practise memory on an everyday level we are actually undertaking a function: to remember.
- flashbulb memories // eyewitness memories // experiential memories.
- Memory so interesting for the arts, humanities and social sciences from its creative and undisciplined character: it is interdisciplinary // multi-disciplinary // cross-disciplinary // indisciplined. (Me lleva a pensar en el libro de Ariana Hernández, mundos bioinmersivos)
- Experiential and ordinary accounts of memory from public and private sources have as much value as academic sources.
Memory studies
- First thinkers: all french. What connects them contextually is their reaction to a 20th century Europe in danger: of succumbing to fascism, rewriting history, of the destruction of people, memories, histories and archives. For these writers, a concept of memory desestabilises “grand narratives” of history and power. Memory, remembering and recording are the bery key to existence, becoming and belonging.
- Memory studies have continued to research less mediated, more authentic, more personal and more individualised accounts of memory.
- Bergson: memory in terms of space rather than time. Where are all the memories you cannot recall that are not useful at this present moment?
- Pierre Nora: his work deals with studying the construction of french national identity through the less usual sites of memory: street signs, recipes and everyday rituals. His approach to history through memory signals a shift in historiography, the writing of history, to a more everyday level. – Producing a history in multiple voices. – Emphasises place and locaton and draws into memory studies the importance of community and experience. Memory places are developed as a broad catch-all terms for “any significant entuty, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community. (Nora 1996)
- Nora: Memory is constantly on our lips because it no longer exists.
- Le Goff: relationship between history and memory with a focus upon myth, testimony, witnessing, living memory, orality and experiencia that all to some extent pose a threat to the written word of historians.
- Memory studies: deepen our understanding of social, cultural, collective, personal, public and community memory. (24)
Referentes de memory studies:
- The past is a foreign country – David Lowenthal
- How societies remember – Paul Connerton
- Frames of remembrance: the dynamics of collective memory – Irwin Zarecka
- Twilight memories: marking time in a culture of amnesia – Andreas Huyssen
- Rewriting the soul: multiple personality and the science of memory – Ian Hacking