Memory Matters: The Evolution of Scholarship in Collective Memory and Mass Communication

Abstract

This essay explores the evolution of research in collective memory and mass communication, highlighting its interdisciplinary roots and looking to the future as this genre expands. Understanding the collective beliefs about the past that inform a social group, community, region, or nation's present and future is critical to understanding the relationship between media and culture in this age of mass communication because mass media have become an important means by which people understand the past.

Keywords:

• Public Memory
• History
• Journalism
• Media
• Culture

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janice Hume

Janice Hume (Ph.D., University of Missouri School of Journalism, 1997) is an associate professor in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. She is author of Obituaries in American Culture and co-author of Journalism in a Culture of Grief, and has published memory studies in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism History, and American Journalism