Anachronisms of Media, Anachronisms of Memory: From Collective Memory to a New Memory Ecology

Abstract

This essay highlights uneasy orientations to the ‘collective’ in contemporary discourses of memory and suggests its resonance is in part embedded in another out-of-synch conceptualization of the ‘collective’, namely that of the ‘mass media’. Instead, the paradigm shifts in the fields of media studies and memory studies require a bolder and more comprehensive vision of the nature of media and memory in terms of contemporary ‘ecologies’ of media/memory (cf. Brown and Hoskins, 2010). This approach illuminates ‘connectivity’ as one of the key dynamics in the forging and reforging of what I have called the ‘mediatization of memory’.