Emily Keightley

The Modalities of Nostalgia

Nostalgia has been viewed as the conceptual opposite of progress, against which it is negatively viewed as reactionary, sentimental or melancholic. It has been seen as a defeatist retreat from the present, and evidence of loss of faith in the future. Nostalgia is certainly a response to the experience of loss endemic in modernity and late modernity, but the authors argue that it has numerous manifestations and cannot be reduced to a singular or absolute definition. Its meaning and significance are multiple, and so should be seen as accommodating progressive, even utopian impulses as well as regressive stances and melancholic attitudes. Its contrarieties are evident in both vernacular and media forms of remembering and historical reconstruction. The authors argue that these contrarieties should be viewed as mutually constitutive, for it is in their interrelations that there arises the potential for sociological critique.

Remembering research: memory and methodology in the social sciences

This article examines the conceptualisation and use of memory in the social sciences, both as a methodological tool and as an object of research. The article situates memory as a vast potential resource for the social sciences in the exploration of relations between public and private life, agency and power, and the past, present and future. It goes on to recognise that the methodological issues surrounding the use of memory have, with few exceptions, rarely received sustained attention. The article argues for, and moves towards, developing a coherent account of the variety of practical techniques of using memory in data collection and analysis, and their appropriate use within a clear epistemological framework which distinguishes itself from conventional historiography and it’s criteria of validity. It is argued that without this attention to method, memory will remain on the margins of social science research.

Communities of memory and the problem of transmission

In this article we explore the issue of memory transmission by considering it along the two temporal planes on which it occurs: vertically, through time; and horizontally, in time. It is because we regard memory transmission as involving the mutual interaction of these two planes that we introduce the concept of the mnemonic imagination. The value of the concept is that it enables us to see, inter alia, how communities of memory emerge. Our route into this is the sociology of generations and most particularly the evidence of mnemonic transmission provided by second-generation Holocaust narratives. The purpose of the article is to bring together a range of work relevant to the sharing and inheritance of memory across and within time, to explore the application of collective mnemonic frames in processes of personal remembering, and so move us closer to understanding the mechanism by which experience derived from others becomes integrated into our own life-stories.

From immediacy to intermediacy: the mediation of lived time

This article argues that claims of time in late-modernity collapsing or becoming irretrievably accelerated do not sufficiently account for the range of experiences of time that are supported in a media-saturated culture. Achieving this requires an empirical and conceptual shift. Research on the domestication of media technologies provides an initial empirical framework for this kind of exploration, but as well as rhythmic practices and processes of media use, experiences of time involves the imaginative and symbolic provisions of the media. Using Bergson’s concept of the zone of indeterminacy, the mediation of time will be considered as occurring in zones of intermediacy. This conceptual tool allows an exploration of the relational nature of temporal experience and the active negotiation of various mediated temporalities that this involves.

For the record : Popular music and photography as technologies of memory

Phonography and photography have been extensively discussed and analysed, but their complementary features as media of communication have received relatively little attention. Chief among these is the way in which, as technologies of recording, preservation and retrieval, they have affected forms of social remembering and orientations to historical time. Over the last century and more, phonograph music and photographic images have acquired strong and resonant associations with both personal and public memory, but how they actually help us engage with the past remains difficult to assess. When we look behind their familiar, everyday presence we realise that in their relations with time, memory and the process of remembering, they are both highly accurate and highly elusive. That is the paradox defining their mutual connections with the past.

The self-interview: a new method in social science research

This article presents the new method of self-interviewing as an empirical tool specifically for use in memory studies research. The article traces some of the empirical limitations specific to the field of memory studies and reviews the existing tools used in this area. It particularly focuses on some of the limitations of qualitative interviewing, the memory work method and diary methods in generating data on the processes of vernacular remembering at the same time as making visible the meaning that remembering has for participants in their everyday lives. We propose the self-interview as a method which addresses some of these limitations. In elaborating the value of the self-interview, we draw extensively on fieldwork that we have conducted using this method. Although the self-interview does not divest memory studies of the need for a range of other methods, the self-interview is an important addition to its currently rather sparse methodological tool kit.

Technologies of memory: Practices of remembering in analogue and digital photography

This article demonstrates the need always to consider change against continuity and continuity against change in the analysis of mnemonic technologies. It does so by exploring what has happened in the move from analogue to digital photography, looking, in particular, at how this has affected the meanings of personal photographs and the practices of remembering associated with them. In contrast with technologically determinist perspectives which have been, however latently, manifest in writing on new media, the value of exploring vernacular photography as a specifically mnemonic practice is that it turns our attention to the ways in which photographic practices are bound up with longer term social uses and cultural values. Our analysis focuses on changes in four key categories of photographic practice that relate to the analogue/digital shift: photo-taking, photo-storing, photo-viewing, photo-sharing – all of which have consequences for the uses of photography as a mnemonic resource. They have all been altered in varying degrees by the advent of digital technologies, but with people continually making comparative evaluations of old and new, drawing on the former as a key aspect of learning how to use the latter.

Digital media - social memory: remembering in digitally networked times

Memory studies emerged as a constellation of research drawn from across the social sciences and humanities in the late 1990s and the turn of the millennium. While its consolidation as a field was most significantly marked by the launch of the journal Memory Studies in 2008, memory remains a concern across the range of its constituent disciplines. Media, Culture & Society, quite early into the field, published a themed section on social memory in 2003. A decade on, it is to this same theme that this collection of articles returns. The treatment of social memory in 2003 conceptualised it as ‘beyond but not distinct from the individual; it is not necessarily divided by the private or public, or bounded by the nation state. Social memory is taken to include aspects of culture as well as social practices and structures’ (Reading, 2003: 5). This understanding of memory, as produced in the interstitial space between individuals who remember and social groups, and being communicated in and across time by media technologies and cultural forms, has been accepted across memory studies scholarship. Nevertheless, the particular processes of mediation and cultural transmission involved in the articulation of social memory remain only partially accounted for. Rapid changes in digital technologies, the greater availability of historical materials online, and increasing digital connectivity across the world, have kept the processes that constitute mediated social memory in flux. This themed section seeks to explore some processes of social remembering that are constantly on the move by considering how it is that we remember in digitally networked times. How does social memory work through the use of digital media? The articles in this special section explore these questions from a variety of perspectives. Anna Reading considers the material requirements for digital memory technologies and explores the political economies that structure and support contemporary practices of remembering. She interrogates some comfortable metaphors such as ‘the cloud’ and ‘server farms’, showing how access to our own pasts and the pasts of others is dependent on real, material conditions and their exploitation. The subsequent articles explore the specific digital remembering practices that are underpinned by this set of political and economic relations. Brenda Chan and her co-authors consider how webbased technology is used by both the state and the public to archive and share memories 532985 MCS0010.1177/0163443714532985Media, Culture & SocietyEditorial research-article2014

Trauma, discourse and communicative limits

Trauma is a term that is widely used in memory studies, along with a number of other academic fields and disciplines. This article takes issue with its loose and indiscriminate application. Such application generates an unresolved paradox: trauma is associated with memories of events that are uncontrollable, yet large-scale commemorative practices or processes of social reconciliation assume that experiences of these are controllable, amenable to being assimilated into narrative form and so available for rhetorical purposes. Following an examination of this paradox, the article looks in detail at two examples of experience involving painful memories of two kinds – those which have become integrated into relatively easily told stories, and which can then involve rhetorical work, and those which have not become woven into a life-narrative and so are not available for such work. The article also considers some of the methodological and analytical problems that occur when traumatic or painful memories arise in the course of sociological fieldwork.

ECHOES AND REVERBERATIONS

Photographic images and popular songs are commonly used as ways of representing or evoking the past. They occur routinely in various media, at times singly, at others in conjunction with each other, as complementary cultural forms. Their presence is also commonplace in everyday life, in personal music collections and family photo albums, where they mark past events and periods in people’s lives, and help replay them in their memories. They may do this in different ways, but their roles in remembering are not necessarily at odds because of these differences. They may be made to refer to each other across these differences, they may be used interchangeably as ways of engaging with the past, and their differences may be approached in terms of their mutual illumination. Together, what they bring to popular interpretations and understandings of the past may be just as, if not more significant than how they operate on their own. Bringing consideration of photography and phonography together both as vehicles of remembering and as historical forms is the first major aim of this paper. We accept that this has to be done in full recognition of their obvious differences. Many photographs are taken and used non-professionally by individuals, families and communities, and while forms of recorded music are in some cases made and disseminated under the direct control of singers and musicians, for the most part there is nothing like the same parallel with amateur photographic self-production. More broadly, the codes and conventions, idioms and styles associated with specific images and sounds need to be carefully taken into account, as do their different modes of cultural reception. They cannot simply be run into each other without regard for their constitutive semiotic make-up, or the particular forms of recording and reproduction technologies involved in their production and consumption. These are commonplace analytical considerations. Yet the obvious differences between photographic images and popular music the most basic being their appeal to distinct human senses all too easily lead to their becoming starkly opposed to and separated from each other. It is then as if auditory and visual cultures never meet, interact or play off each other. That is clearly not the case, and when we come to think about how they operate as vehicles of recalling and reassembling the past, there is no conceptual or methodological requirement that they always be studied apart, by experts in either visual or sonic fields of communication. This is why we want to contest their analytical separation and so bring popular music and photography into realignment as forms of remembering and representing the past. As well as standing these two cultural forms in contrast to each other, they can also be compared, in our view fruitfully. The second aim of the paper is to consider how these communications technologies can act as vehicles of remembering and as historical forms. We discuss the range of ways in which responses are made to photographs and recorded music across the differences of period and place, moving between indifference to, and intimacy of connection with, what