Petra Milički - Essay 1

Collective memory refers to the shared pool of information held in the memories of two or more members of a group. 1 It can be formed, shared and passed on by small (e.g., a group of blog consumers ) or large groups (e.g., an entire nation). There are many similarities with individual memory, but also some key differences and features.

With the increasing dominance of the New media and more dynamic and it’s diffused model of mediation, media studies need a critical re-evaluation of the influence of mass communication/media studies on individual memory, collective memory and monumentalization of the narrative.

“In place of a top-down, one-to-many vertical cascade from centralised industry sources we discover today bottom-up, many-to-many, horizontal, peer-to-peer communication. ‘Pull’ media challenge ‘push’ media; open structures challenge hierarchical structures; micro-production challenges macro-production; open-access amateur production challenges closed access, elite-professions; economic and technological barriers to media production are transformed by cheap, democratised, easy-to-use technologies.“ 1

In his essay ‘7/7 and connective memory: Interactional trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture’ Andrew Hoskins is introducing the model of “connective memory” according to which the individual memory is generated through the series of contacts between people, digital technologies and media, rather than as product of individual or collective remembrances.

>>> (to be added) By applying the principle of Hoskins’ ‘connective memory’ to an example of memorial culture of the former Yugoslavia, the essay will examinate to what extent the interpenetrations of the digital mass audience can shape different and competing narratives and how can this influence the monumentalization of the subject in question.

Memories are influenced by political and cultural forces. Government policies, social rules and norms, as well as popular culture and media influence the way events are remembered. The influence of politics on memory is seen in the way history is written and passed on.

This influences memory not only in a way in which events are remembered and recorded, but also how they are discarded. The opposite of collective memory is the collective forgetting or social amnesia. Social amnesia can be a result of “forcible repression” of memories, ignorance, changing circumstances, or the forgetting that comes from changing interests.2

Collective memory is sustained through a continuous production of representational forms. In our media age - and maybe particularly during the last decade of increasing digitization - this generates a flow of, and production of, second hand memories3. Particular narratives and images are reproduced and reframed, yet also questioned and contested through new images and so forth.

Andrew Hoskins examines how these events and memories are mediated in the age of the Internet or as Andrew Hoskins would call it - ‘post-scarcity era’.

The increasing tension between the volume of material that can be made available online and the decreasing capacity of anyone to consume/understand it, driven by the availability, portability and pervasiveness of digital devices converges with a memorial culture determined to re-consume past conflicts and catastrophes,forms a new kind of memory.

According to Andrew Hoskins, in the age of compulsive culture of digitization and archiving, a different kind of mass has been developing. “The new mass is constituted through its connectivity, rather than ‘collectivity’, and thus doesn’t ‘possess’ collective memory in a way that traditional models of ‘the audience’ and ‘mass media’ have been attributed such a condition” (cf. Dayan and Katz, 1992).

Hoskins’ introduces a concept of ‘connective memory’, as a “sensitizing tool to highlight the moment of connection as the moment of memory.” Memory is, in this way, generated through the series of contacts between people, digital technologies and media, rather than as product of individual or collective remembrances.

“The connective turn is the massively increased abundance, pervasiveness and accessibility of digital technologies, devices and media, shaping an ongoing re- calibration of time, space (and place) and memory by people as they connect with, inhabit and constitute increasingly both dense and diffused social networks.”

Events that are subjected to this kind of media treatment are the ones that “...acquired a substantial and recognizable memorial status in terms of the relative extent of their ongoing presence in media–public discourses as signifying a particular relevance and meaning in ‘memory’ to a given community of persons.”

>>> (to be added) One of these events is the ongoing Yugoslavia situation.

However, despite the digital mainstream monumentalization of certain images, sounds and narratives around the meanings of recycled news data also perpetuate space for speculations and contestations around personal and political narratives on the events.

Drip-by-drip remediations in the mainstream media, as well as the alternative media formats as news portal comments, forums and even youtube comments, are opening space for speculations and contestations around personal and political narratives on the events in question. This is all opposing to the notion of monumentalization of the narrative.

The continual emergence of sets of ‘new’ pasts, a ‘new memory’ challenges unified or unifying ‘collective’ orientations to the past. This includes the media of memory. So, for instance, the idea of the static and material archive as a permanent place of storage, is being undermined by the much more fluid temporalities and dynamics of ‘permanent data transfer’ (3) or at least ‘networked’ for reactivation at any time. Indeed, a ‘diffused memory’ is a living memory that is articulated through the everyday digital connectivity of the self (with others and with the past) that can be continually produced, accessed and updated, but which is also subject to different although nonetheless highly significant modes of ‘forgetting’.