Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
When an author is defining a title for a book, simplicity is not the only watchword. The title has to be easily remembered – and not necessarily by the potential readers who could, would and should read it. It has to be memorable to the archiving power of research/commercially-driven Internet search engines that trawl data and retrieve information for those who are actively seeking out a topic or who might stumble across it. It has to be contractible in text speech, taggable for blogs, storable on tweet decks, searchable in publisher's web pages and not be too drowned out by the superfluous when Google returns its search results. The wrong choice of book title and bloggers, tweeters, Facebookers, and e-literate researchers using del.ico.us will not commit, create and connect the book to the mnemonic technologies, structures and networks that form our mediated ecology in which our ideas circulate. The fact, therefore, that this book is entitled Media and Memory should not mean that the author thinks that the two spheres conjoin easily, equally and permanently. They do connect and this book is about making those connections. The use of the conjunctive could simply be there because any student from any field of study interested in the connections between the two would most likely enter ‘media and memory’ into the search engine box. The title is smoke and mirrors. I could have just as easily replaced the conjunctive with a preposition or an infinitive and then a whole different spatial, temporal and existential relationship between the two spheres would have opened up. Media as Memory, Memory as Media, Media is Memory, Memory is Media, Media in Memory or Memory in Media. Consider these all, at one and the same time, the title of this book.
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- Media and Memory , pp. vii - ixPublisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011