Media and memory

pp. 113-143

in: Astrid Erll, Memory in culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

Cultural memory is unthinkable without media. It would be inconceivable without the role that media play on both levels — the individual and the collective. On the individual level, the sociocultural shaping of organic memories rests to a significant extent on mediation: memory talk between a mother and her child, oral communication within a family, the significance of photographs for media-based (re-)constructions of our childhoods, the influence of mass media and its schemata on way we code life experience. Even more so, memory on the collective level — that is, the construction and circulation of knowledge and versions of a common past in sociocultural contexts — is only possible with the aid of media: through orality and literacy as age-old media for the storing of foundational myths for later generations; through print, radio, television and the Internet for the diffusion of versions of a common past in wide circles of society; and, finally, through symbolically charged media such as monuments which serve as occasions for collective, often ritualized remembering.