Half the World Away: Television, Space, Time and Memory

Abstract

This chapter is constructed around a series of examples drawn from cinema, contemporary art and television itself that reveal much about the place of television within the popular imagination. More specifically, each represents a different way in which television’s role in the construction of collective and individual memory can be articulated, explored and imagined. It is not an exhaustive compendium of television’s multiple relationships with memory — there is still much to be discovered — but an introduction to existing thought and a rethinking of the phenomenological aspects of this relationship; a relationship which finds fruitful lines of inquiry by considering the symbolic functions taken on by television as a visual medium and a material object.