Some Sense of Time. Remembering Television (original) (raw)
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Cathode Ray Memories: Television as memory and social practice The history of television in Ireland is, predominantly, an institutional history. Indeed, rather than studying television in Ireland most commentary addresses Irish television as embodied by Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ). There are plentiful accounts of RTÉ, its programmes, personalities and the circuits of institutional power surrounding it. This is a history populated by political and clerical elites, and written by their cultural counterparts. Institutional crises surrounding RTÉ have been used as a proxy for the experiences of Irish people. With few alternatives, this perspective has underpinned common sense understandings of how television has helped to shape Irish society. Ironically, in attempts to explain the effect of the medium in Ireland the medium itself is overlooked. There is little comment on the changes in pace and scale that television technology has introduced. There has been no investigation of the medium’s effect on the use of time, daily habits, family routines and so on. Such ubiquitous changes, lying outside the fields of parliamentary and cultural politics, have been overlooked. They are hidden in plain sight. To understand the effect of television in Ireland, as opposed to Irish television, this paper moves beyond the narratives that have predominated heretofore. Methodologically, it takes a necessary step beyond the limitations of a dependence on broadcast archives, newspaper records and official archives. It asks people, rather than tells them, how television has shaped their lives. Following the life story methods of Jerome Bourdon, it presents a pilot analysis of Irish memories of television. It tries to identify, and make explicit, common themes in the collective memory of television. Mindful of the medium, its affordances and the everyday rituals that are built around it, the paper traces and analyses memories of how television has re-shaped social practice.
In this article, television is reconsidered as a hybrid ‘repertoire’ of memory. It is demonstrated how new dynamic production and scheduling practices in connection with highly accessible and participatory forms of user engagement offer opportunities for television users to engage with the past, and how such practices affect television as a practice of memory. The media platform Holland Doc is discussed as a principal case study. By adopting and expanding Aleida Assmann’s model of the dynamics of cultural memory between remembering and forgetting, a new model to study television as cultural memory is proposed which represents the medium’s hybridity in the multi-platform era.
Remembering Life with Television: An Analysis of Israeli Students
1998
This study analyzes Israeli students' memories of television in the context of family life, and considers culture and systems as well. The study was geared toward broadening the understanding of individuals' perceptions of the role of television in the family, as well as gaining insight into the collective story or stories of life with television in Israel. Forty-three Israeli university students were asked to write about their personal histories and experiences of and with television; similar autobiographies by American students from a study in the late 1980s were used for comparison. The analysis of the autobiographies covered the categories of television use, interaction, play and imitation, cognition, emotions, consumer behavior, and national identity/world knowledge. The analysis showed that most respondents had pleasant memories of watching the children's programs on ITV, remembered the introduction of color television, and grew up in families that did not limit viewing, except perhaps for homework time. Many remembered television as a tool for bringing the family together; the introduction of cable was seen to cause disagreements over what to watch. Many students reported a feeling of nostalgia for earlier days when the family watched together, and many expressed a kind of fear of the new television environment for children. Some wrote about the importance of the medium during times of crisis. Television seemed to become less important to students as they pursued university studies and developed critical attitudes toward it. Respondents from non-majority groups--for example, Israeli Arabs--reported somewhat different experiences with the medium. (Contains 10 references.) (EV)
Television Dramas as Memory Screens
Image & Narrative, 2011
Within this article I am focus upon the construction of both social and personal memories within the television drama, drawing upon Landsberg's notion of prosthetic memory and King's identification of 'afterwardsness' as ways of comprehending the construction of memory and the past within texts. The examples are
Constructing Memory through Television in Argentina
Latin American Perspectives, 2016
Television represents Argentina’s recent past through three specific links with social memory: as an “entrepreneur of memory,” shaping public agendas, as a vehicle of intergenerational transmission of past events, and as a creator of meaning through images, sounds, and words, a “stage for memory.” An analysis in terms of the links between television and the memories constructed around the forced disappearance of persons during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship reveals the complex way in which the obstacles when narrating an extreme experience are combined with the attempt to sell a product and entertain the spectator. La televisión representa el pasado reciente de la Argentina a través de vínculos específicos con la memoria social: como un “emprendedor de la memoria” definiendo las agendas públicas, como un vehículo de transmisión intergeneracional sobre el pasado y como un creador de significados por medio de imágenes, sonidos y palabras, esto es, un “escenario para la memoria.” ...
Remembering in the wild: recontextualising and reconciling studies of media and memory
Memory, Mind & Media
Studies that locate memory entirely within the head may pay less attention to the properties, practices or cultures of the media with which people remember than studies of ‘memory in the wild’, where memory is seen to extend beyond the individual, into the distributed activities of people and material things. While memory in the head is, apparently, individual and susceptible to universal effects, memory in the wild is emergent and relational. Studies of memory in the wild, therefore, produce results that are harder to pin down but may form a stronger basis for interpreting the importance of context. It is an important, interdisciplinary challenge to reconcile evidence from studies based on these different conceptions, so that we can better understand how people remember and forget, individually and collectively, and the relationship between context, environment, and memory. I argue that wherever memory is located or studied, all remembering can be framed as in the wild, and that do...
Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age
The Journal of American History, 2002
Third, the technical and stylistic features of television as a medium strongly influence the kinds of historical representations that are produced. History on TV tends to stress the twin dictates of narrative and biography, which ideally expresses television's inveterate tendency towards personalizing all social, cultural, and (for our purposes) historical matters within the highly controlled and viewer-involving confines of a well-constructed plot structure. The scholarly literature on television has established intimacy and immediacy (among other aesthetics) as inherent properties of the medium. 4 In the case of intimacy, for instance, the limitations of the relatively smaller TV screen that is typically watched within the privacy of the home environment have There is a method behind the societal self-absorption implied by presentism. Ken Burns's The Civil War, for example, attracted nearly forty million viewers during its initial telecast in September 1990 and has since been seen by an estimated seventy million Americans. Much of this documentary's success must be equated with the way in which Burns's version of this nineteenth-century conflict, stressing the personal ramifications of the hostilities, makes the war comprehensible to a vast contemporary audience. and I therefore acknowledge the help and assistance of Paul Fleming and Deborah Carmichael at Oklahoma State University (where Film & History is published) as well as the continuing interest of all the readers of this longstanding and important academic resource. I also want to thank Dean Karen Gould, College of Arts and Letters, and Old Dominion University, for supporting a research sabbatical during which I was able to bring this anthology to completion. We express our deepest thanks to our families for their love and understanding. Finally, we hope that one abiding result of this