Andrew Hoskins

Television and the Collapse of Memory

There is a certain evanescence to contemporary experience. A shortening of temporal horizons, diminishing attention spans, and a saturation of time and place, are all said to be characteristics of our mediated age. A key consequence of these ‘emerging new structures of temporality’ (Huyssen, 1995: 253) is a transformation in our relationship with the past. ‘Memory’ is in itself a contradictory experience of time as it does not involve the retrieval of some past moment but, rather, an assembling of a view of that past moment, in and from the present. The media, however, intervene in this process by often constructing a view of the world as a perpetual and pervasive present through the real time lens of television news. In this article I suggest there has occurred a ‘collapse’ in memory with reference to three pivotal media events: The 1991 Gulf War; the catastrophe of 11 September 2001; and the 2003 Iraq War, as markers of a transformation of the relationship between television, the present, and the past.

The Mediatisation of Memory

There is little doubt that the landscape of memory has transformed in modern times. How, what and why individuals and societies remember and forget is being shaped by technological, political, social and cultural shifts that interpenetrate memory and memories, their makers, deniers and their (identified mistakingly or otherwise as) ‘repositories’. For instance, public and popular culture and the politics of conflict and security are infused with memory discourses and are conjoined through the contemporary’s obsession with commemoration and that which Erika Doss (2008) calls ‘memorial mania’.

7/7 and connective memory: Interactional trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture

The 2005 London bombings is both marked by and is a marker of a post-scarcity memorial-media boom. There is a new contagion of the past driven by a memorial culture unstoppably equipped with the availability, portability and pervasiveness of digital devices, enabling the instant aggregation and archiving of everything. The ‘digital’, it can be said, insinuates itself in the past. In such circumstances, what are the prospects for the development and maintenance of individual memories? And, how can we consider such questions beyond the traditional dichotomous models of memory that assume memory as an orientation to something once complete and residual, and thus always already partial and in decline? This article employs a concept of ‘connective memory’ as a sensitizing tool to highlight the moment of connection as the moment of memory. Through examining the archival (institutional) and individual remembrances of the London bombings, I treat ‘memory’ as a trajectory of connections that contribute to but also collide with the emergent post-scarcity memorial-media boom.

Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn

Advances in theories of human memory parallel, and perhaps depend on, advances in technology [ . . . ]. In 30 years, the computer-based information processing approach that currently reigns may seem as invalid a metaphor to the human mind as the wax-tablet or telephone-switchboard models do today. Unless today’s technology has somehow reached its ultimate development, and we can be certain it has not, then we have not reached the ultimate metaphor for the human mind, either.

Signs of the Holocaust: exhibiting memory in a mediated age:

In our globally mediated age our relationship with the past is increasingly interpreted through the lens of our presentist media. Conventional means of representing and remembering historical events have to some extent been superseded, with technological advances permitting increasingly electronically mediated viewpoints. Indeed, new generations, fed on a diet of instantaneous information, possess new expectations of how the past should be viewed. This creates a problem for historians keen to retain a purist perspective on events, and, especially in respect of the Holocaust, the contemporary representation of which is the subject of much critical discourse and debate. This article examines one site of contemporary Holocaust representation: the Holocaust Exhibition housed at the Imperial War Museum, London. I consider whether the designers’ objectives in seeking an ‘authentic’ sampling of objects of this event - providing real ‘signs’ of the Holocaust - is adequate to the expectations of visitors of a post-Holocaust generation. This involves exploring how the exhibition positions ‘history’ and ‘memory’, with the latter viewed as problematic in relation to an event constructed historically as both unique and incomparable.

Analyzing the semantic content and persuasive composition of extremist media: A case study of texts produced during the Gaza conflict

While terrorism informatics research has examined the technical composition of extremist media, there is less work examining the content and intent behind such media. We propose that the arguments and issues presented in extremist media provide insights into authors’ intent, which in turn may provide an evidence-base for detecting and assessing risk. We explore this possibility by applying two quantitative text-analysis methods to 50 online texts that incite violence as a result of the 2008/2009 Israeli military action in Gaza and the West Bank territories. The first method—a content coding system that identifies the occurrence of persuasive devices—revealed a predominance of moral proof arguments within the texts, and evidence for distinguishable ‘profiles’ of persuasion use across different authors and different group affiliations. The second method—a corpus-linguistic technique that identifies the core concepts and narratives that authors use—confirmed the use of moral proof to create an in-group/out-group divide, while also demonstrating a movement from general expressions of discontent to more direct audience-orientated expressions of violence as conflict heightened. We conclude that multi-method analyses are a valuable approach to building both an evidence-based understanding of terrorist media use and a valid set of applications within terrorist informatics.

Terrorism in the new memory ecology: Mediating and remembering the 2005 London Bombings

In an era marked by the apparent saturation of terror and the ubiquitous mediation of all‐things‐past, the value of and the prospects for the remembering of terrorist attacks appear caught up in the velocity of the immediate circulation of media data and in the cyclical iterations of news images. Rather than these processes affecting a reduction or obliteration of memory, we discern how an interplay of individual and cultural frameworks is used for making sense of violent events in this environment through preliminary analysis of empirical work exploring the mediation and the commemoration of the 2005 London Bombings. We achieve this through cross‐fertilizing psychological and media and cultural studies approaches via the concept of ‘schema’ to show how remembering is dynamically configured through socio‐cultural practices and shifting media logics. In this way, we advocate a holistic approach to a ‘new memory ecology’, drawing upon the emergent field of ‘memory studies’.

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

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’.

Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories

In the science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time, first published in 1976, Marge Piercy envisaged a future society in which the characters would have ‘kenners’, mobile communication and personal memory prosthetics strapped to the wrist and connected to a world wide electronic network. In March 2006, Piercy’s kenner, in effect, became a reality when Nokia announced its 4G mobile phone designed to strap to the user’s wrist.

Arrested war: the third phase of mediatization

After Broadcast War and Diffused War comes Arrested War, the latest paradigm of war and media. Each paradigm coincides with a discrete phase of mediatization. This article explains how war and media operated during each phase, describing the key characteristics of war, the form and nature of the prevailing media ecology, and how power was exercised by and distributed within government, military, and media elites. Following the sense of flux and uncertainty during the second phase of mediatization, when digital content and non-linear communication dynamics generated Diffused War, Arrested War is characterized by the appropriation and control of previously chaotic dynamics by mainstream media and, at a slower pace, government and military policy-makers. We use the ongoing Ukraine crisis to examine Arrested War in operation. In setting out a new paradigm of war and media, we also reflect on the difficulties of periodizing and historicizing these themes and ask what theoretical and conceptual tools are likely to be needed to understand and explain Arrested War.