Television and the Collapse of Memory

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Abstract
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.

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