collective memory

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Collective memory is a term coined by Maurice Halbwachs, separating the notion from the individual memory. The collective memory is shared, passed on and also constructed by the group, or modern society. The debate was taken up by Jan Assmann, who wrote Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (The Cultural Memory). Assmann distinguishes between the Cultural memory and the Communicative memory, whereas the former fulfills a storage function and the latter the function of an everyday memory that is situated in the present. More recently scholars such as Paul Connerton have extended the concept to include the human body as a site for the collective processes of retention and propagation of memory. Pierre Nora's contributions to the role of place and spaces of shared memory (the "lieux de memoire" that we all inhabit) are also significant.

Collective Memory and Memorialization

The collective memory of a nation is represented in part by the memorials it chooses to erect. Public memory is enshrined in memorials from the newly opened Holocaust memorial in Berlin to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Whatever a nation chooses to memorialize in physical monument, or perhaps more significantly, what not to memorialize, is an indicator of the collective memory.

Collective memory is also sustained through a continuous production of representational forms. In our media age - and maybe particularly during the last decade of increasing digitization - this generates a flow of, and production of, second hand memories (see e.g. James E Young). Particular narratives and images are reproduced and reframed, yet also questioned and contested through new images and so forth. Collective memory today differs much from the collective memories of an oral culture, where no printing technique or transportation contributed to the production of imagined communities (see Benedict Anderson) where we come to share a sense of heritage and commonality with many human beings we have never met - as in the manner a citizen may feel a sort of 'kinship' with people of his nation, region or city.

The concept of collective memory, initially developed by Halbwachs, has been explored and expanded from various angles - a few of these are introduced below.

James E. Young has introduced the notion of 'collected memory' (opposed to collective memory), marking memory's inherently fragmented, collected and individual character, while Jan Assmann develops the notion of 'communicative memory', a variety of collective memory based on everyday communication. This form of memory is similar to the exchanges in an oral culture or the memories collected (and made collective) through oral history. As another subform of collective memories Assmann mentions forms detached from the everyday, it can be particular materialized and fixed points as, e.g. texts and monuments.

The theory of collective memory was also discussed by ex-Hiroshima resident and atomic bomb survivor, Kiyoshi Tanimoto in his tour of the United States as an attempt to rally support and funding for the reconstruction of his Memorial Methodist Church in Hiroshima. He theorized that the use of the atomic bomb had forever been added to the world's collective memory and would serve in the future as a warning against such devices. See John Hersey's Hiroshima novel.

The idea was also discussed more recently in The Celestine Prophecy and subsequent novels written by James Redfield as a continuing process leading to the eventual trancendance of this plane of existence. The idea that a futuristic development of the collective unconscious and collective memories of society allowing for a medium with which one can transcend ones existence is an idea expressed in certain variations of new age religions.

Collective memory in mass media

The examples and perspective in this section deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page.

The arrival of film in the first half of the 20th century created many images, film scenes, news scenes, photographs, quotes, and songs, which became very familiar to regular moviegoers and remained in their collective memory. Examples could be the films of Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino. During cinema visits people could watch News Reels who brought them news stories from over the world. For the first time in history a mass audience was able to view certain stories, events and scenes all at the same time. They could all view how for instance the Hindenburg disaster was caught on camera and see and remember these scenes all at once.

When television became a global mass entertainment medium in the 1950s and 1960s the collective memory of former cinema visitors increased when various films could be repeated endlessly and worldwide on television broadcasts. For example old films like The Wizard of Oz, King Kong and cartoons like Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry have been shown internationally and almost non stop on television channels. Hereby particular film scenes have become well known even to people who hadn't seen these films on their original cinematic release. The same applies for television shows like I Love Lucy which have been repeated so often over the decades that certain episodes and scenes have become classics.

When newsreels in the cinema gradually made place for television news broadcasting it became a habit for mass audiences to watch the daily news on television. Worldwide this led to a new kind of collective memory where various news events could be shown much quicker than with the cinema News Reels. Therefore certain filmed news stories could be shown on the same day they happened and even live during the broadcast itself. Millions of people have viewed the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the landing of Apollo 11 in 1969, the Wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana (1981) and the 11 September 2001 attacks on their television. In fact, certain questions like "What were you doing when.... happened?", usually referring to a large, heavily mediatized event, have become a very important question in the history of the development of the collective memory. Many people can remember what they were doing when certain internationally big media events occurred and these type of questions are usually used as a sort of milestone in individual people's life. For example, "What were you doing when you heard that John Lennon was shot?". And due to television repeats these moments could be relived even long after the actual event happened. The introduction of video stores and video recorders in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s and the DVD player and Youtube in the 2000s even increased the opportunity to view and check out famous and infamous movie and TV scenes.

Thanks to all these innovations certain scenes have become part of audiences' collective memory. This makes it easy for journalists, comedians, advertisers, politicians, etc. to make references to these scenes, knowing that a large audience will recognise and understand them without further explanation. For example, when president Ronald Reagan concluded a speech on March 13, 1985 against the increase of taxes he said "Make my day". Most people in the audience and TV viewers understood the reference to the Clint Eastwood film Sudden Impact and laughed and cheered as a consequence of that. The dance moves from Michael Jackson's music video for "Thriller" have been repeatedly shown on TV so much that they are instantly recognizable and therefore imitated frequently for comedic effect in films, TV shows, commercials, etc. Whenever a comedy show or film features a scene where someone is killed or threatened in a shower most people understand it's a parody of Psycho. Various cartoons from Bugs Bunny to Shrek have spoofed famous fairy tales, knowing that everybody is familiar with the original stories and will immediately laugh at every deviation. The roar of movie monster Godzilla and Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan yell have become instantly recognizable and easy to put into a context, even without the images.

Numerous TV shows and films such as The Simpsons, Family Guy, Scary Movie, the Shrek films, , and the films of Mel Brooks, have referenced, parodied, imitated and recreated these famous scenes, often to the point of overkill. Certain observers, like Kenneth Tynan in a quote from his diaries from October 19, 1975 have noted that due to the heavy rotation and repeats of all these famous film scenes, often even without their original context, they have become of the cultural consciousness. He wrote: "Nobody took into account the tremendous impact that would be made by the fact that films are permanent and easily accessible from childhood onward. As the sheer number of films piles up, their influence will increase, until we have a civilization entirely molded by cinematic values and behavior patterns." (Quoted from TYNAN, Kenneth, The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, Bloomsbury, 2001, page 66). The influence of television scenes on collective memory has been noticeable with children who are able to quote lines and songs from commercials, films and TV shows they have watched regularly. Some young children who have watched a large amount of television have been known to react in an unnatural way to certain situations, comparable with overacting, because they recreate scenes they remember seeing in similar situations on television. There have been cases reported of people who've compared their own life too much with the romanticized, idealized life depicted in films and television series. They try to recreate the happy families, perfect love relationships,... they remember seeing on television or in movies.

Not all scenes who were once collective memory are remembered as well today. Certain TV shows, commercials and films that were popular in one decade are shown less frequently on television in the next. So certain scenes don't rest in the collective memory of the next generation. Many references in old Bugs Bunny cartoons to Hollywood stars and radio shows who were famous in the 1940s, are almost obscure now to modern viewers. On the other hand certain scenes have remained in the collective memory, due to being so constantly repeated in other media and are well known even for people not familiar with the original film. For example: even people who never saw the film King Kong know there's a scene where the big gorilla climbs the Empire State Building with a human girl in his hand. This is yet another negative evolution of the multireferential films and TV shows. Younger audiences, unfamiliar with the original subject being referenced in a contemporary film or TV series, do not recognize the reference and assume that, for instance a Twilight Zone plot reference in The Simpsons has been thought up by the creators of The Simpsons instead of the other way around. In some cases references or parodies of older movies in contemporary films and TV shows are almost comparable to plagiarism, since they just mimic or imitate a famous scene frame-by-frame instead of adding a funny new element.

See also

• Meme
• Collective intelligence, Distributed cognition
• Sociology

Sources

General Studies

• Jan Assmann: Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, Stanford UP 2005
• Maurice Halbwachs: On Collective Memory, Univ of Chicago Press, 1992, ISBN 0226115968
• Pennebaker, James W. Paez, Dario. Rime, Bernard: Collective memory of political events : social psychological perspectives, Mahwah, New Jersey. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 1997.

Case Studies

• Cole, Jennifer : Forget colonialism? : sacrifice and the art of memory in Madagascar, Berkeley [etc.] : Univ. of California Press, 2001[1]
• Fritsch, Matthias : The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida, State University of New York Press, 2006
• Neal, Arthur G.: National Trauma and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century. Armonk, N.Y. M.E. Sharpe: 1998
• Lipsitz, George: Time Passages : Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press: 2001.

Handbooks

• Prucha, Francis Paul. Handbook for Research in American History: A Guide to Bibliographies and Other Reference Works. University of Nebraska Press: 1987
• Encyclopedia of American Social History. Ed. Mary Clayton et al. 3 vols. New York: Scribner, 1993.
• Blazek, Ron and Perrault, Anna. United States History: A Selective Guide to Information Sources. Englewood, Colorado. Libraries Unlimited: 1994

Bibliographic Databases

• Academic Search Complete
• MLA International Bibliography
• JSTOR
• Historical Archives
• Educational Recourses Information Center

External links

• For a Sociology of Collective Memory short discussion with bibliography of French works by Marie-Claire Lavabre, Research Director at CNRS - Centre Marc Bloch (CEVIPOF)
• Interdisciplinary Study of Memory Site by John Sutton, Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney. Links to many bibliographies
• History in the Public Sphere course by Harold Marcuse, History Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. With bibliography and links to readings.