Mediated Memories - Jose van Dijck

The text examines the concept 'mediated memories' and the functionality of this concept.

'Mediated memories' was the name of the graduate course at the University of A'dam's department of media studies 2004. Jose v Dijck worked the premises of the course into a book together with Thomas Elsaesser.

The text gives us different kind of perspectives on PERSONAL memory (home media) and COLLECTIVE memory (mass media). 'Media shapes our memory'

'Media and memory are not separte entities'

'Media have become our foremost tools for memory' p74

Mediated experiences 'EXTERNAL (technology) and INTERNAL (mind) memories' p75

How term Media and memory came into term mediated memory; text gives a lot of summarized perspectives on this concept by different theorists (annette Kuhn/Steven Rose/Walter Ong/Plato/George Lipsitz a.o.)

'Media are thus paradoxically defined as invaluable yet indisious memory tools...' p72/73

'Media and memory mutually constitute our everyday experiences' p76

Van Dijck defines mediated memories as "the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technologies, for creating and recreating a sense of the past, present and future of our selves in relation to others" p77 and 'mediated memories involve individuals carving out their place in history' p77

'Perception changes over time' p77

The text ends with the analysis of a photograph and shows us the functionality of the concept.

'Mediated memories as a useful concept to theorize why and how people use media technologies to remember' p78

Dennis

shaping public identity registration of family life

what happens if we stop recording our family life? do we stop evolving as a species? would we remain the same? stopping to pass on the looks and ways of our culture and behavior.

cinematic hindsight three levels of mediation -mediated acts of cognition: minds instructing instruments to manufacture desirable images of personal life -camera's registration of real life, stored for later reminiscence - visual resources for cinematic productions

audiovisual retrospectives of remembered life

Enter The Void; seeing the world through someone else's eyes is what we want to see. because we never can.

It's memory construction. And it's not like the camcorder is the first and only thing that triggered this habit to construct our memories with other ways than the mind. Especially since we now do blogging, vlogging and tweeting. But is it really an ego thing? Or do we hope to come back to it and see how we've developed and learned from our own experiences? Or do we hope that there will be that someone who finds our website and maybe learn something from us?

embodied mental projections, enabled by media technologies, embedded in cultural forms

"If referring to technology or culture at all, they typically use movies, screens, and cameras as metaphors to describe the intricate mechanism of human consciousness and memory".

"Memory, Deleuze's concept, is never a retrieval of past images, but is always a function of the present - a function embodying the essential continuation of time."