Memory

Memory is the modality in which the past is made new again and again. As Donald Lowe explains, “There is no past in itself. It is forever lost. But each present symbolizes a past on its own terms” (1982, 39). Mediated forms of communication shape the meaning of memory through both their form and their content. The technologies of telegraphy, photography, sound recording, radio, motion pictures, and television transformed experiences of time and place by connecting the “here and now” to the “there and then.” The photograph, the phonograph, and the motion picture preserved images, sounds, and performances across time, exposing audiences dispersed over space to memories of a vicariously shared “past” that they had not experienced personally. Mass communication undermined the specificity of local memories and traditions by producing new experiences of temporal simultaneity across spaces (Cooley 1909; Czitrom 1982). Accelerating processes that had been produced initially by the typographic revolution of the fifteenth century, electronic mass media transformed the subjective perception of time and space by circulating cultural texts beyond the historical moments, places, communities, and traditions that imbued them with their original social meanings (Benjamin 1969). This produced a new chronology of discourse, as each item of media entered a dialogue already in progress, an intertextual conversation in which each new image or utterance answered something that came before and invited commentary from what came after. The artifacts of commercial culture became registers of change over time as media from earlier eras bore the marks of their senescence, shaping a sense of what it meant to live in the present through the ways it differed from visual and aural representations of the past.