Theorizing Media Memory: Six Elements Defining the Role of the Media in Shaping Collective Memory in the Digital Age

Neiger, Motti

doi:10.1111/soc4.12782

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…National and regional mainline news media, that is, media that attempts to select stories based on an objective assessment of newsworthiness, offers a social archive of significant events in public life, although sifted by editorial teams (Entman 2010; Neiger 2020; Zandberg, Meyers, and Neiger 2012). To be sure, mainline newspapers often adopt editorial styles that reflect the values and political preferences of different groups (eg, liberal or conservative viewpoints) (Amenta et al .…”

Section: Methodological Justification and Data Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biopower under a state of exception: stories of dying and grieving alone during COVID-19 emergency measures

et al. 2022

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions for visitors and caregivers in healthcare settings and long-term care (LTC) facilities were enacted in the larger context of public health policies that included physical distancing and shelter-in-place orders. Older persons residing in LTC facilities constituted over half of the mortality statistics across Canada during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the poststructuralist work of Agamben, Foucault and Mbembe we conducted a thematic analysis on news reports. The extracts of media stories presented in our paper suggest that the scholarship on (bio)power and necropolitics is central for understanding the ways the COVID-19 crisis reveals the pragmatic priorities—and the ‘health’ and political values—that undergird the moral imagination of the public, including the educated classes of advanced Western democracies. Our critical analysis shows that by isolating individuals who were sick, fragile, and biologically and socially vulnerable, undifferentiated population management policies like social distancing, when piled on the structural weakness of health systems, reproduced inequities and risk for those in need of medical care, advocacy, and social companionship in acute moments of illness, death and grief. Considering the unprecedented deployment of governmental power via public health interventions based on social regulation to protect the population during the crisis—how can we understand so much death and suffering among the most vulnerable?

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Section: Methodological Justification and Data Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biopower under a state of exception: stories of dying and grieving alone during COVID-19 emergency measures

et al. 2022

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“…The majority of digital mnemonic objects assume this form. For example, digital projects like The September 11 Digital Archive (2023) or the Oral Archive of Memoria Abierta -a collection of victims' testimonies of State terrorism in Argentina (Memoria Abierta, 2023) are databases made up of text blocks, images, digital video clips and links to other pages. Institutionally, the digitization of cultural heritage that museums, libraries and national archives have undertaken since the dawn of the digital age presents itself as sometimes immeasurable databases.…”

Section: The Shift From Narrative To Databasementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Narrative is a central concept in cultural memory studies (Erll, 2011a; Freeman, 2010; Neiger, 2020; Rigney, 2016). It is assumed that memory has a narrative form in which the representations of the past adopt the form of stories.…”

Section: The Shift From Narrative To Databasementioning

confidence: 99%

The digital turn in memory studies

Mandolessi

2023

Memory Studies

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This article examines the changes experienced by collective memory in the digital era. Contrary to the thesis that digital memory entails a new type of memory, which is radically different from the traditional conceptualization, I argue that the practice of digital memory materializes and implements the theoretical claims made by Memory Studies since the field’s inception – collective memory conceived as a process, mediated and remediated by multiple media, with the participation of dynamic communities that perform rather than represent the past. In the article, I address what I propose are the following four major transformations that collective memory has undergone in the digital era: (1) the new ontology of the digital archive; (2) the shift from narrative as a privileged form of collective memory to the cultural form of the database; (3) the reconfiguration of agency, in which a distributed memory is performed by human and non-human agents in a dynamic entanglement; and (4) the shift from mnemonic objects to mnemonic assemblages, comprising persons, things, artefacts, spaces, discourses, behaviours and expressions in dynamic relatedness.

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“…For the retrospective repertoire, this change means that the roles of producers and recipients of mnemonic communication are being modified. Their experiences with and participation in collective memory are no longer organised through the active production of content and passively imagined spectatorship but along unequal possibilities of participation and diverse memory practices in the networked evocation of the past (Garde-Hansen et al 2009; Lohmeier and Pentzold 2014; Neiger 2020; Prey and Smit 2018).…”

Section: Communicative Remembering In Digitally Networked Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicative remembering: Revisiting a basic mnemonic concept

Pentzold,

Lohmeier,

Birkner

2023

Mem. Mind & Media

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The article attempts to clarify what today constitutes communicative remembering. To revisit this basic mnemonic concept, our theoretical contribution starts from available approaches in social memory studies that assume a binary distinction between cultural and communicative modes of memory making. In contrast, we use concepts that treat them not as structural, historically and culturally distinct registers but as a repertoire of retrospection that hinges on the evoked temporal horizon and media usage. To further interrogate this practical articulation of memories, we direct our attention to the habitual, communicatively realised engagement with the past. We finally turn to the ways communicative remembering is done in digitally networked environments, which provide us with a pertinent mnemonic arena where rigid dichotomies of communicative memory versus cultural memory are eroded.

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Theorizing Media Memory: Six Elements Defining the Role of the Media in Shaping Collective Memory in the Digital Age

Cited by 12 publications

References 60 publications

Biopower under a state of exception: stories of dying and grieving alone during COVID-19 emergency measures

Biopower under a state of exception: stories of dying and grieving alone during COVID-19 emergency measures

The digital turn in memory studies

Communicative remembering: Revisiting a basic mnemonic concept

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