Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- In Memory of Lise Garde-Hansen
- Introduction: Mediating the Past
- Part 1 Theoretical Background
- 1 Memory Studies and Media Studies
- 2 Personal, Collective, Mediated and New Memory Discourses
- 3 Using Media to Make Memories: Institutions, Forms and Practices
- 4 Digital Memories: The Democratisation of Archives
- Part 2 Case Studies
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Digital Memories: The Democratisation of Archives
from Part 1 - Theoretical Background
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- In Memory of Lise Garde-Hansen
- Introduction: Mediating the Past
- Part 1 Theoretical Background
- 1 Memory Studies and Media Studies
- 2 Personal, Collective, Mediated and New Memory Discourses
- 3 Using Media to Make Memories: Institutions, Forms and Practices
- 4 Digital Memories: The Democratisation of Archives
- Part 2 Case Studies
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Media and the development and history of media from the printing press to the blogosphere have been caught in a tension between democracy and control. Pierre Nora has argued that a ‘democratization of history’ can occur if emancipatory versions of the past surface: ‘Unlike history, which has always been in the hands of the public authorities, of scholars and specialised peer groups, memory has acquired all the new privileges and prestige of a popular protest movement’ (2002: 6). Therefore a free and creative media brings with it democracy, or at least the possibility of democratisation. New media technologies of digital and online media are thought to be key players in this process of freeing information and knowledge. Nicholas Negroponte in Being Digital (1995) thought so and his book provided many prophetic statements about the power and positivity of digital creativity we see today. Yet digital culture brings with it a great paradox whereby it contributes as much to amnesia and collective forgetting as to remembering, ‘What if’, asks Andreas Huyssen, ‘the boom in memory were inevitably accompanied by a boom in forgetting? What if the relationship between memory and forgetting were actually transformed under cultural pressures in which new information technologies, media politics, and fast-paced consumption are beginning to take their toll’ (2003 a: 17)?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Media and Memory , pp. 70 - 88Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011