Mediated memories: personal cultural memory as object of cultural analysis

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Notes

José van Dijck is a Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam and chair of the Media Studies Department. She is the author of Manufacturing Babies and Public Consent. Debating the New Reproductive Technologies (New York University Press, New York, 1995) and ImagEnation. Popular Images of Genetics (New York University Press, New York, 1998). Her latest book is titled The Transparent Body. A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2004). Her research areas include media and science, (digital) media technologies, and television and culture. Correspondence to: [email protected]

The term cultural memory has been most satisfactorily defined in the introduction to Bal et al. (1999); memory is often specified as relating to either individual (or personal) or collective memory. Although I argue that the term ‘cultural’ necessarily encompasses both, I add the word ‘personal’ to prevent confusion.

Other sensory perceptions, such as smell or touch, cannot (as of yet) be transformed into material representations, yet they may still form a trigger for later recall. In contrast to Proust's psychological take on remembrances of things past, some contemporary theorists have stressed the role of the senses in cultural memory. See, for instance, Seremetakis (1994).

Annette Kuhn (2000, p. 185) prefers the term ‘memory texts’ where I use ‘memory products’. I think we more or less agree on her description of the term as ‘providing a set of cultural products which, while inhabiting diverse media and forms of expression, share key characteristics in common’.

Think, for instance, of popular cultural products like the Bridget Jones Diaries, or America's Funniest Homevideos, which both expound on personal memory forms, even if some of these forms are fictional.

The reprint of La Mémoire collective, in 1968, also contained Halbwachs' unfinished essay ‘La Mémoire collective chez les musiciens’.

Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation immediately after completing his film Schindler's List. The mega‐project initiated and supervised the audio‐visual recording of over 50,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors from 57 countries and in 32 languages. More information on the project can be found at http://www.vhf.org

This double take is not unlike the modernist tendency, observed by Bruno Latour (1993), to simultaneously insist on hybridity and purification—holding on to the ontological division between human and non‐humans (things, machines) while also cancelling out their separation. The invincibility of this argumentation is possible only because they hold on to the absolute dichotomy between the order of Nature and that of Society, a dichotomy which ‘is itself only possible because they never consider the work of purification and that of mediation together’ (p. 40).

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José van dijck

José van Dijck is a Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam and chair of the Media Studies Department. She is the author of Manufacturing Babies and Public Consent. Debating the New Reproductive Technologies (New York University Press, New York, 1995) and ImagEnation. Popular Images of Genetics (New York University Press, New York, 1998). Her latest book is titled The Transparent Body. A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2004). Her research areas include media and science, (digital) media technologies, and television and culture. Correspondence to: [email protected]