Media, Memory, Metaphor

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Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and

the Connective TurnAndrew Hoskins

Available online: 11 Oct 2011

To cite this article:Andrew Hoskins (2011): Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective

Turn, Parallax, 17:4, 19-31

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Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn

Andrew Hoskins

Memory and Media Life

Around the time of the emergence of the contemporary memory boom Henry

L. Roediger III reflected on the dominance of the spatial and search (as a means of

retrieval) metaphors of memory in cognitive psychology and philosophy. Some of

the most prominent of these, Roediger observed: have been derived from the

technology of record keeping and human communication.1 He argues:

Advances in theories of human memory parallel, and perhaps depend

on, advances in technology [. . .

]. In 30 years, the computer-based

information processing approach that currently reigns may seem as

invalid a metaphor to the human mind as the wax-tablet or

telephone-switchboard models do today. Unless todays technology

has somehow reached its ultimate development, and we can be

certain it has not, then we have not reached the ultimate metaphor

for the human mind, either.2

Over 30 years later, despite, or rather because of, the mass proliferation of

technologies and media, the ultimate metaphor for mind and memory, still evades

the grasp of the cognitive and social sciences. Memory is unmoored yet dominated

by media. Forgetting or perhaps a new careless memory becomes the defaultcondition when there is no need to remember: that social obligation is carried by our

digital networks and prostheses, prosthetic memory as Alison Landsberg calls it.3

Yet, if we accept Roedigers technology-human memory theory equation (above),

then the glut of media is also a glut of memory; the past is everywhere: media ghosts

memory. And if this metaphor is too easy, too cheap, it is nonetheless fair reflection

on what mediated memory has become. Pervasive, accessible, disposable,

distributed, promiscuous.

Just to step back for a moment: the challenge of thinking and understanding

memory as mediated is complicated by pervasive talk about the media. The

anthropologist Dominic Boyer, for instance, notes that the use of the term the mediaas singular noun and collective subject only attained widespread usage as recently

as the 1970s and 1980s.4 And he goes on to argue with reference to this term: the

frequency, ubiquity and aptness of the placeholders become powerful influences

upon how we know the world around us, they become vastly important conceptual

and experiential categories, the stakes from which we pitch out tents of knowledge.5

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Memory is used in a similar fashion, as Roediger and James Wertsch argue: The

problem is that the subject is a singular noun, as though memoryis one thing or one

type, when in actuality, the term is almost always most useful when accompanied by

a modifier.6 The issue of mediated memory is entangled in these twin trajectories of

everyday talk and ubiquity. And it is not difficult to see the linkage between the

contemporary memory boom(s)7 and developments in media and technologies.8

However, in relation to media, in its digital and pervasive manifestations, it can besaid that the medium has caught up with the metaphor. And there is a growing body

of work (principally in media and communication studies) claiming that life is not

lived outside of media. So: Mark Deuze advocates a media life perspective: to

recognize how the uses and appropriations of media penetrate all aspects of

contemporary life;9 for Livingstone, social analysis increasingly recognizes that all

influential institutions in society have themselves been transformed, reconstituted,

by contemporary processes of mediation;10 and mediatization is the process

whereby social and cultural institutions and modes of interaction are changed as a

consequence of the growth of the medias influence.11 Furthermore, as Roger

Silverstone observes, media [ . . . ] define[s] a space that is increasingly mutually

referential and reinforcive, and increasingly integrated into the fabric of everydaylife.12 And survival itself is said to be premised on recognition of our environment

being inextricable from media: because [j]ust as water constitutes an a priori

condition for the fish, so do media for humans.13

Given then, the tight coupling of media and memory concepts and metaphors, what

is the nature and function of memory? If immersion is the defining characteristic of

media life, then what are the key emergent ramifications for the conceptualization

and experience of memory? In this article, I reflect upon some of the metaphorical

and conceptual developments and dead-ends in media and memory studies, and

explore the media/memory field that they shape or attempt to shape. I take the

digital, and what I call the connective turn as marking a paradigmatic shift in the

treatment and comprehension of memory and its functions and dysfunctions.

This shift, however, is peculiarly problematic and is unevenly acknowledged,

embraced, and rejected across the proliferation of the fields of media/memory

studies. I dont aim to provide a comprehensive overview, being beyond the bounds

of any article-length work. Instead I articulate the key dimensions of what I see as

something of a diffused rupture between and across media/memory studies in the

face of the connective turn. This is the emergent set of tensions and transitions from a

scarcity to a post-scarcity culture14 availed through the abundance, pervasiveness

and accessibility of communication networks, nodes, and digital media content. The

connective turn includes the enveloping of the everyday in real-time or near-

instantaneous communications, including messaging, be these peer-to-peer, one-to-many, or more complex and diffused connections within and between groups,

crowds, or networks, and facilitated through mobile media and social networking

technologies and other internet-based services. I treat media here then as the

holistic mix of techniques, technologies and practices through which social and

cultural life is mediated, as well as including the more traditionally and stubbornly

conceived mass media.15

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In the terms of this special issue then, the connective turn could be seen as

envisioning a memory that is always already transcultural. That is, if we accept

Astrid Erlls definition of transcultural memory as: a certain research

perspective . . . transcending the borders of traditional cultural memory studies by

looking beyond our established research objects and methodologies.16 For as the

connective turn undermines the biological, social and cultural divisions and

distinctions of memory and memory studies, a point I develop below, it also re-casts

the potential for what may now operate as transcultural. So, my aim here is not todelineate transcultural movements of specific memories nor transcultural dialogue

between memories, rather it is to illuminate the media-technological architecture of

memory that already challenges such distinctions.

And it is the connective turn and what I shall go on to define as post-scarcity

culture that has both accentuated and blurred the fundamental paradox in the

study, treatment and understanding of memory, namely its individuality and

sociality. This has been exemplified broadly by a disciplinary division of the study of

memory-in-the-head and the study of memory-in-the-world. Cognitive psycholo-

gists and neurologists recognize (to greatly differing degrees) the role of the external,

symbolic and technological memory field and its impact on the architecture ofbiological memory17 but rarely proceed to fully incorporate the former (social and

cultural) dimensions in their work. A good example is the study of flashbulb

memory (FBM) which describes human memory that can apparently be recalled

very vividly and in great detail, as though reproduced directly from the original

experience.18 FBM has effectively developed as a sub-discipline of cognitive

psychology. Despite the vast majority of the proliferating FBM studies focusing on

the personal memory of publicly mediated events, there are very few accounts that

engage with literature, theories and methods drawn from media and cultural studies

and the social sciences other than passing reference to the metaphor and to Roger

Brown and James Kulik often credited with inventing the term.19

The study of memory in media, cultural studies and sociology is similarly

constrained through reluctance to engage with memory-in-the-head. As William

Hirst and Adam Brown state: For us, as psychologists, it is puzzling that the

individual consumers of mnemonic resources, the people who interact with them,

rarely figure in the discussions of collective memory.20 This disjuncture runs even

deeper when set against the huge growth in mnemonic resources over the past fifteen

years. In addition to my characterisation of the connective turn, many others

identify distinctive moves, moments or turns in the experience of modern life in and

with media and our relationship to the past ushered in by advances in digital

technologies.21 And this array of emergent new or digital media metaphors and

concepts are being deployed to recognize and to work through the paradigm shift

underway in media life.

In media studies this is manifested in a tension between those who recognize the

post-broadcast era22 as something distinct from what went before, and those who

seek instead to emphasize the continuities in terms of long-established explanatory

concepts and models such as media audiences, producers, and institutions. For

example, Clay Shirky identifies what he sees as a kind of delusion within the

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newspaper industry when confronted by the development of the internet: It makes

increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core

problem publishing solves the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of

making something available to the public has stopped being a problem.23

The current diffused rupture between and across media/memory studies is in part a

consequence of the rapid development of the ultimate spatial and search medium

(in Roedigers terms, above) the internet and its associated technologies yetwithout discovering the ultimate and corresponding metaphor of memory. A

growing memory lag is thus opening up: a gap between the lived experience of

particularly those born digital and an (albeit patchy and contested) academic,

public, and a political lexicon of electronically and digitally mediated or mediatized

memory24. The challenge for memory studies is then to find a new modus operandi

of media lexicon amongst this flux.

It is easy to observe the popularity of technology and media-based metaphors of

memory in comparisons made with permanent mediums of storage (paper,

photograph, audio and videotape, vinyl record, etcetera.). The durability of media

equates in this fashion to a durability of memory. Yet, the metaphor is also misleadingin that once the metaphor is in play we tend to endow memory itself with properties

that only the medium really has: permanence, detail, incorruptibility.25 But it is the

digitally-enhanced paradoxes of flux and permanence, and immediacy (of access) and

volume, that scale todays memory. And that is why I have suggested new memory as

a usefully dynamic descriptor: memory is always new given its continually emergent

state availed through the metaphors and media and technologies of the day (as well as

the same media reflexively feeding reassessments of the nature and the very value of

remembering (and forgetting) under these conditions).26

In tracing the impact of the connective turn, I turn to address the usefulness of some

old and new concepts and metaphors of mediated memory in articulating a new or

connective memory in media life.

Extensions, Ecologies, Circuits

The digital networks that today mediate self and society produce new and

sometimes highly contradictory social relations of apparently greater fluidity,

complexity and density. This begs the question: what happened to memorys

moorings? We hear (endlessly) about the social bonds of place, family and

community. These provide frameworks or props for that most shared, most

communal, most cited of memories: collective memory. Much has been written

about how new media and communication technologies do not necessarily weakensocial ties, but instead string them out across time and space. Disembedding and

reembedding is how Anthony Giddens puts it.27 Where then is collective memory

to be found?

Lets rewind and approach this question from the opposite direction in the hope of

arriving at the same destination: where is individual memory to be found? Well, that

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of course concerns all-that-is-internal: matters of the mind: thought, consciousness,

cognition. Now a curious thing has been happening in the sciences-of-the-mind

for a long time and is recently in-vogue. That is, cognition the mental process of

awareness, perception, remembering has been seen as extended, scattered and

distributed outside of the head and across social and cultural worlds. I say curious, as

the extension metaphor has a long and seemingly parallel history in media studies.

Look no further than the mid-twentieth century defining work of media guru

Marshall McLuhan: All media are necessarily extensions in technological form ofone or more of our senses. The electronic media together add up to an

externalization of our sensorium.28 And the connective turn has ushered in a

renaissance of McLuhans work, seen by many as prophetic of the impact of the

digital on media life. Meanwhile, cognitive science and philosophy have developed

the extended mind thesis29 which John Sutton defines as the idea that mental

states and processes can spread across the physical, social, and cultural

environments as well as bodies and brains.30 However, the role of media in the

workings of the extended mind is not prominently or consistently accounted for.31

Certainly very widely cited work such as Landsbergs Prosthetic Memory explores

how modernitys mass culture (film and television) makes memory transportableand potentially transcultural. Yet this is a pre-connective turn perspective on

memory and so barely touches upon the radical networking and diffusion of memory

ushered in with the advent of digital technologies. And to date there still does not

appear to be a significant cross-fertilization of work say in digital or comparative

media studies with the philosophy of the extended mind. A more integrated model of

media and cognition is needed to facilitate a more holistic or ecological vision of

memory after the connective turn.

However, there are some interesting synergies crystalizing around a view of memory

as a kind of circuit that extends from individual cognition out into the world and

back again. Clark for example, argues that we see and feel through a kind of

feedback loop, a kind of autopoiesis of self rather than society.32 For instance, Clark

identifies this looping process in accounts of artistic creativity: The sketch pad is

not just a convenience for the artist, nor simply a kind of external memory or

durable medium for the storage of fully formed ideas. Instead, the iterated process of

externalizing and re-perceiving turns out to be integral to the process of artistic

cognition itself.33 One can see how memory itself is looped out not just

heterochronously across a range of media and materials (friends, conferences,

photos, letters, date books)34 but the very condition of remembering is increasingly

actively and re-actively constructed on-the-fly and through its mediatized

emergence through a range of everyday digital media.

What then is the very character and quality of memory forged through suchnetworks and circuits in run-time? Bernard Stiegler writes of his portable

computer: I can read myself, listen to myself, see myself and download my own

work, and all of this makes for a very strange circuit: at once a kind of short circuit of

my own memory.35 As our memory is increasingly connected with, newly ordered

through and distributed across complex networks of digital media and technologies

in our new memory ecology, what are the prospects for the sharedness, stability and

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continuity of memory (often attributed to some kind of collective)? We connect to

our web memory: Google, Flickr, social networking etc. and our web memory

connects to us. What are these digital archives? Memory aids, nodes, portals? Or are

they actuallypart ofmemory: inseparable from memory through the connections we

make with them. Unlike human memory, mediatized memory is always on.

One possible explanation for the diffused rupture between and across

media/memory studies in the face of the connective turn is the sudden misfit ofmany of the media metaphors of memory, especially in the face of their continued

use. For instance, the predominance of artificial metaphors of human memory is

seen as owing to their materiality, as Douwe Draaisma suggests: Artificial memories

seemed to prove the viability of a material explanation for human memory, without

reference to something as ethereal as mind or consciousness.36 However, new media

technologies, networks and invisible information infrastructures and software have

significantly blurred the distinction between artificial memory37 on the one hand

and human memory on the other. The technological unconscious38 provides an

emergent viable immaterial explanation of connective memory. These kinds of

posthumanist claims are often wrapped up in a shift to a more holistic visioning of a

media ecology, or as Steven D. Brown and I have suggested, a new memoryecology.39

Ecology is the science of the relationships between organisms and their

environments. An ecological approach steps back for a view of the whole, to make

claims about the sum of the parts. So, rather than hiving memory off into distinct

and separate zones or even containers the body, the brain, the social, the cultural

etcetera an ecological approach is interested in how these together work or dont

work in producing memory. Put differently, remembering is not reducible to any

one part, but is made through an ongoing interaction between all the parts. An

ecological approach has a history rooted in the study of media. Many associate

media ecology with some early work of Neil Postman.40 For Postman, it is the

matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding,

feeling, and value.41 But he acknowledges the media ecologists George Orwell,

Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan that came before him. Given this lineage, it

is perhaps surprising that the media ecology approach today is sometimes seen as a

separate and distinctive branch of media and communication studies, rather than as

core to the discipline. Media ecology is then the idea that media technologies can be

understood and studied like organic life-forms, as existing in a complex set of

interrelationships within a specific balanced environment. Technological develop-

ments, it is argued, change all these interrelationships, transforming the existing

balance and thus potentially impacting upon the entire ecology.

However, the new media (and memory) ecology is distinctive in its reflexiveintensity, complexity, and scale. It facilitates unknowable dimensions to actions:

causal relations are increasingly difficult to predict given the underdetermined

character of social and political relations when subject to the connectivities of digital

media.42 For instance, Katherine Hayles draws upon Thomas Whalens

characterization of this ecology as a cognisphere: which gives a name and shape

to the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly

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embedded.43 The challenge posed for those interested in the formation and

articulation of memory in its broadest sense is to account for human agency

amongst the automated machinic communications that have collapsed or even

renewed the search metaphor of memory seen as dominant by Roediger (above).

For instance, complex algorithms often barely understood by or even known to

the user have transformed the searchability, findability, and retrievability of

information about the past, upon which individual, social and cultural memories,

are today routinely informed and shaped for generations anew.

And, a dominant and perhaps the dominant metaphor of media and memory to

which such algorithms are applied and also transformative of is the archive, which

I now turn to consider.

Space, Time, Archive

Archives have long been seen as the external and institutional basis for the

remembering and forgetting of societies at different stages of development across

history, and as an ultimate storage metaphor of memory. However, Jens Brockmeierindicts the archival model as part of a crisis of memory, in its failing to adequately

represent the capacities of human memory.44 Wolfgang Ernst, albeit for different

reasons, shares this skepticism on the usefulness of the archival memory metaphor.

He argues that there has occurred a shift from archival space to archival time

owing to the dynamics of permanent data transfer. So, Ernst states: In cyber

space the notion of the archive has already become an anachronistic, hindering

metaphor; it should rather be described in topological, mathematical or geometrical

terms, replacing emphatic memory by transfer (data migration) in permanence.

The old rule that only what has been stored can be located is no longer applicable.45

But today the archive itself is transformed, mediatized, networked, and part of the

newly accessible and highly connected new memory ecology. In this way it offers

renewed metaphorical and conceptual scope for articulating memory for the

emergence of communities which constitute what Arjun Appadurai calls a new and

heterogeneous sociology.46 Under such conditions, Appadurai argues, instead of

presenting itself as the accidental repository of default communities (like the nation),

the archive returns to its more general status of being a deliberate site for the

production of anticipated memories by international communities.47 The potential

of the digital archive, however, is realized in the experience of more complex

temporalities of self and others. Online environments afford a more visceral sense of

the self as a node in media and thus in connective memory.

For example, the heavily marked cycles of 24-hour television news have for sometime refracted an external world segmented into composite fractions of clock time,

shaping or conflicting with our internal sense of the passage of time. Compare this to

the non-punctual time of the Internet48, providing a different experience of the

continuity of time, even though it is also a platform for, and remediates, other more

punctual and cyclical media (radio, TV, press). One can say then that digital media

have complicated the temporal dimensions against which we measure our sense of

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presence in-the-world, and increasingly blurred this with our sense of presence in-

the-media, and also presence-in-memory.

However, it is instantaneity and pervasiveness that constitute the fundamental

contradiction of the digital archive. The seemingly compulsive immediacy of instant

or real-time connection/publication/dissemination online (including the sending of

texts, emails or other messaging services) accumulates a digital archive that is

unimaginable in both scale and in its accessibility and searchability. There is aninherent ambiguity in what can be conceived as the containment and contagion of

connective memory in that it inhabits (connects) simultaneously with the realms of

both present and the past, or in media-memorial terms, the archive. So, despite or

because of the hugely powerful tools and technologies of digital communications and

archival databases, the hyper-immediacy and connectivity of having the mediatized

world at your fingertips produces paradoxically a gravitational pull that Paul

Virilio calls a residual abundance.49 It is not just that the infinite scale of

the Internet and digital archives tests the parameters of human imagination, but it is

their availability in the here-and-now that is both exhilarating and overwhelming.

The now much more visible long tail of the past is increasingly networked througha convergence of communication and the archive. Smart phones and other highly

portable digital devices act as prosthetic nodes that extend the self across an array of

communication and consumption networks, personal and public. And the past itself

becomes increasingly insinuated by the rapid spread of digital networks and a

potentially continuous connectivity. This includes social networking sites, which

host a continuous, accumulating, dormant memory, with the ongoing and often

unseen potential to transform past relations through the re-activation of latent and

semi-latent connections. This residual abundance, to come back to Virilios phrase,

is an accumulation of many potential future re-initiations or re-connections between

individuals and groups that would once have been very difficult to find prior to the

connective turn. Hence, there is a kind of digital dormant memory, awaiting

potential rediscovery and reactivation lurking in the underlayer of media life.

However, our proliferating digital trails of residual abundance may also serve to

prevent healthy and necessary forgetting. As Jaron Lanier suggests, theres a kind of

entrapment to a world in which ones ex-partners remain connected with your

current friends on Facebook, even if you delete your own friendship with them:

A Facebook generation young person who suddenly becomes humiliated online

has no way out, for there is only one hive.50

Lanier is a good example of the rapid emergence of a new body of populist writers

(Clay Shirky, Charles Leadbeater, Dan Tapscott and David Weinberger for

example) who champion or deride the impact of digital technologies and media onculture and society. Another is Nicholas Carr who, in his entire book, The Shallows,

berates what he sees as the outsourcing of memory on or to the Internet. He trawls

through a great deal of academic work and pop-psychology to warn of the perils of

connectivity as a kind of loss of memory, intellect, and identity: The Webs

connections are not ourconnections and no matter how many hours we spend

searching and surfing, they will never become our connections. When we outsource

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our memory to a machine, we also outsource a very important part of our intellect

and even our identity.51 So, for Carr, there becomes an imperative to make

everything searchable, taggable, mineable in a myriad of ways which results in a

kind of wholesale fragmentation of attention-span, of texts, of everything.

You dont have to look too far to find other critics of the impact of new technologies

in diminishing the human capacity of memory. In the UK, for example, an

educational reform group has criticized the modularization of the A-Level system(courses and exams for 16 18 year-olds required for entrance to most UK

universities) for creating a learn and forget culture.52 Bailey, one of the groups

supporters, argues that sitting a mathematics A-level paper now is more like using a

sat-nav system than reading a map [ . . . ] If you read a map to get from A to B, you

remember the route and learn about other things on the way. If you use a sat-nav,

you do neither of those things.53 The sat-nav metaphor is a good example of the

tensions arising through socio-technical practices between human memory and

those activities seen as outsourced to digital networks and archives.

A number of the works of the new preachers and pessimists on Internet effects and

social networking differentiate the super media-literate generation so-called borndigital as particularly vulnerable and/or advantaged, from preceding generations.

There has been little systematic study, however, of the shifts in memory cultures and

practices in relation to changing media technologies. A notable exception is Ingrid

Volkmers pioneering international comparative study of media, news generations

and memory, which hints at a generational shift in the relationship between media

and memory.54 Volkmer led the Global Generations Media project, which explored

the specific media experiences aligned to the formative years of three generational

groups (labeled: print/radio, black-and-white television, and Internet). The

project adopted Mannheims sociology of knowledge55 approach to identify the

generational entelechies of each group, namely, the structuring of the common

experiences of each generation the creation of incessantly superseded, creativelywilled generational world-views.56 So, Volkmers approach entailed revealing the

relevance of the media environment for generation-specific perceptions of the world,

despite national, cultural, and societal differences.57

However, given the resonance of formative years to the formation and the

endurance of memory identified by some psychologists (memories drawn from the

lifespan between the ages of 10 and 30 for those aged over around 35 years 58) this

study may be a bit premature given the relative recency of the development of the

Internet. Yet, there are nonetheless some interesting speculative findings from

Volkmers team. For example, drawing on her data across media generations,

Christina Slade speculates that there is fundamental change from the older to theyounger generation [ . . . ] in the way that space and time are conceived.59 For

the youngest cohort, then simultaneity, not order, is of essence. They do not see the

world in terms of events laid out on a map, but in terms of the time of the media

events, and their own location when they found out about them.60 And I will just

conclude this section with considering a final example of the simultaneity of vision

afforded by the online digital archive.

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Across the twentieth century, commentators acclaimed the accelerating transform-

ations in time and space that afforded a new sense of proximity over distance.

NowHere became a metaphor of choice, as with the title of Roger Friedland and

Deirdre Bodens collection61, who characterize: The experiential here and now of

modernity is [ . . . ] in a real sense nowhere yet everywhere. But new ways of telling,

showing and seeing were ushered in with the twenty-first century accelerant of

digital technologies and media. Television news and sports and other eventscoverage were once acclaimed for their multiplicity and simultaneity of vision: they

afforded closer, more complex and multiple perspectives, simultaneously in one

screen. And digital interactivity has afforded greater apparent control in

determining (pausing, rewinding, forwarding, archiving) viewer perspectives on

televisual content. But today, it is the database that accesses new archival

perspectives on events. Of course, television itself is increasingly database-like

with its increasing interactivity and connectivity, but today online, there is an

emergent archeological compression of previously scattered media particles of

events.

These trends effect new hypernarratives that fuse the (paradoxical) immediacy of

the online environment (instantly accessible and navigable) and the residual power

of the assemblage of the digital archive. To take a recent example, in the UK, the

BBC on their online news site have created a dense, multi-modal archival timeline

of the 2005 London bombings (7/7), which tell the story of the attacks on Aldgate,

Edgware Road, Russell Square and Tavistock Square as well as the emergency

response. This follows the recent completion of the 201011 Coroners Inquest

into 7/7 which examined in great detail some of the issues of the delays in

emergency services reaching and attending the victims of the bombings in a range of

locations.

The website provides a dense multiple-threaded audio, visual, and audio-visual

hypernarrative, aggregated from a spectrum of amateur and official sources,

depicting the bombers, victims, emergency services, politicians, bystanders etcetera,

all contained within a graphic timeline plotted across the four locations of the

attacks.62 Users can move the timeline and click on the array of sources to see/hear

aspects of the event unfolding in different locations at different times on the 7th of

July 2005. In this way, hypernarratives forged through the tight packing and

layering of digital and digitized media content, afford a memory beyond real-time.

That is to say digital databases re-spatialize and re-temporize events through their

interactive assembling and mapping of disparate simultaneities, which effect amultimodal hypernarrative. On the one hand the hypernarrative acts as a

comprehensive monumentalization of memory, powerfully fixing events in their

multiple iterations within a single perspective or timeline. On the other, the same

fine-grained corpus makes available an account (in relation to both its

comprehensiveness and the duration of open access) potentially subject to

unprecedented scrutiny and challenge.

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Conclusion

The connective turn is shaping an ongoing re-calibration of time, space (and place)

and memory by people and machines as they inhabit and connect with both dense

and diffused social networks. The shifts in media-memorial cultures refract a tension

between those who embrace a vision of memory as always already transformed

mediatized and those who resist and condemn the metaphorical and the medial

expansion of memory. Perhaps this is an overstatement.

Rather, but more seriously, it is more accurate to say that some commentators dont

even see media as part of their purview of the study of memory. David Berliner, for

example, condemns the usages of the term memory in anthropology, and its

dangerous act of expansion particularly in its conflation with culture,63 yet

doesnt even mention media in this context.

Some of the reliable dichotomies of memory and memory studies, the individual and

the collective/social, the public and the private, and memory in-the-head and in-

the-world, are increasingly insolvent. And even and especially if the new metaphors

of technology and media are struggling to grasp the speed and the scale of themediatization of memory, it is much too late to put memory back into its box.

Instead, media life is also memory life. Memory is lived through a media ecology

wherein abundance, pervasiveness and accessibility of communication networks,

nodes, and digital media content, scale pasts anew. An ecological modeling is

therefore needed to illuminate a holistic, dynamic and connected set of memorys

potential itineraries.

Notes

Thanks to Rick Crownshaw for his encouragement

and support and to the anonymous reviewers for

their helpful feedback.1 Henry L. Roediger III, Memory Metaphors in

cognitive psychology, Memory & Cognition, 8:3

(1980), pp.231246.2 Henry L. Roediger III, Memory Metaphors,

p.244.3 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Trans-

formation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass

Culture (New York: Columbia University Press,

2004).4 Dominic Boyer, Understanding Media: A Popular

Philosophy (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm, 2007),

pp.45.5 Dominic Boyer, Understanding Media, p.9.6 Henry L. Roediger III and James V. Wertsch,

J.V., Creating a New Discipline of Memory

Studies,Memory Studies, 1:1 (2008), pp.922.

7 See Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban

Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jay Winter,

Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory

and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 2006).8 Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin, War and

Media: The Emergence of Diffused War(Cambridge:

Polity Press, 2010), pp.104 119.9 Mark Deuze, Media Life, Media, Culture &

Society, 33:1 (2011), pp.137148.10 Sonia Livingstone, On the Mediation of

Everything: ICA Presidential Address 2008,

Journal of Communication, 59 (2009), pp.118.11 Stig Hjarvard,The Mediatization of Society: A

Theory of the Media as Agents of Social and

Cultural Change, Nordicom Review, 29:2 (2008),

pp.105134.12 Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the

Rise of the Mediapolis (Cambridge: Polity Press,

2007), p.5.

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13/14

13 Norm Friesen and Theo Hug, The Mediatic

Turn: Exploring Concepts for Media Pedagogy,

in Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, ed.

Knut Lundby (New York: Peter Lang, 2009),

pp.6383.14 See Andrew Hoskins, 7/7 and Connective

Memory: Interactional Trajectories of Remember-

ing in Post-Scarcity Culture, Memory Studies, 4:3

(2011).15 See Andrew Hoskins, 7/7 and Connective

Memory.16 Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).17 Merlin Donald,A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of

Human Consciousness (London: W. W. Norton,

2002), p.310.18 See Roger Brown and James Kulik, Flashbulb

Memories, Cognition 5 (1977), pp.7399; Eugene

Winograd and Ulric Neisser, eds, Affect and

Accuracy in Recall: Studies of Flashbulb Memories

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);

and Martin Conway, Flashbulb Memories (Hove:

Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995).19 Roger Brown and James Kulik, Flashbulb

Memories. There are few notable exceptions, such

as J e ro me Bourdon, Some Sense of Time:

Remembering Television, History & Memory,

15:2 (2003), pp.535.20 William Hirst and Adam Brown, On the

Virtues of an Unreliable Memory: Its Role in

Constructing Sociality, in Grounding Sociality:

Neurons, Mind, and Culture, ed. Gu n R. Semin and

Gerald Echterhoff (London: Psychology, 2011),

pp.95113.21 See, for example, Will Straw, The Circulatory

Turn, in The Wireless Spectrum: The Politics,Practices and Poetics of Mobile Media, ed. Barbara

Crow, Michael Longford and Kim Sawchuk

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010),

pp.1728; William Uricchio, The Algorithmic

Turn: Photosynth, Augmented Reality and the

Changing Implications of the Image, Visual

Studies, 26:1 (2011), pp.2535; David M. Berry,

The Computational Turn: Thinking About the

Digital Humanities, Culture Machine, 12 (2011)

available at: ,http://www.culturemachine.net/

index.php/cm/article/view/440/470..22 William Merrin, Media Studies 2.0, available

at: ,http://mediastudies2point0.blogspot.com..23 Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the

Unthinkable, available at: ,http://www.edge.org/

3rd_culture/shirky09/shirky09_index.html..24 One complicating factor here is the rapid

emergence of the Internet so that, as Christine

Hine suggests, Internet research can be seen as a

preparadigmatic sphere in that: It seems more as

if we all brought our paradigms with us from our

home disciplines, but Internet research itself has

never had a single paradigm (2005: 240).

Interestingly, albeit for differing reasons, the non-

paradigmatic aspects of memory studies/social

memory studies (Olick and Robbins 1998; Olick

2008: 21) have troubled some amidst the rapid

development of this field.25 Ulric Neisser, Memory With a Grain of Salt,

inMemory: An Anthology, ed. Harriet Harvey Woodand A. S. Byatt (London: Chatto & Windus,

2008), pp.80 88.26 See, Andrew Hoskins: New Memory: Mediat-

ing History, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and

Television, 21:4 (2001), pp.191211; Television

and the Collapse of Memory, Time & Society, 13:1

(2004), pp.109 127, and Digital Network

Memory, inMediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics

of Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney

(Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter), pp.91 106.27 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity

(Cambridge: Polity, 1990).28 Marshall McLuhan,Letters of Marshall McLuhan

[1960], ed. Matie Molinaro et al. (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1980), p.256.29 Andy Clark,Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and

World Together Again(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1997) and Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind:

Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension(Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2008).30 John Sutton, Memory and the Extended

Mind: Embodiment, Cognition, and Culture,

Cognitive Processing, 6:4 (2005), pp.223226.31 See, for example, Richard Menary, The

Extended Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

2010).32

Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind; see also: NiklasLuhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media [1996],

trans. Kathleen Cross (Oxford: Polity Press,

2000), and Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect

and Mediality After 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2010).33 Andy Clark,Supersizing the Mind, p.77.34 Geoffrey C. Bowker, Memory Practices in the

Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p.226.35 Bernard Stiegler, Teleologics of the Snail: The

Errant Self Wired to a WiMax Network, Theory,

Culture & Society, 26:23 (2009), pp.3345.36 Douwe Draaisma, Douwe,Metaphors of Memory:

A History of Ideas About the Mind, trans. Paul

Vincent, (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2000), p.231.37 Steven Rose, The Making of Memory: From

Molecules to Mind(London: Bantam Books, 1993).38 Nigel Thrift, Remembering the Technological

Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of

Position, Environment and Planning D: Society and

Space, 22:1 (2004), pp.17590.

Hoskins

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14/14

39 Steven D. Brown and Andrew Hoskins,

Terrorism in the New Memory Ecology: Mediat-

ing and Remembering the 2005 London Bomb-

ings, Behavioural Sciences of Terrorism and Political

Aggression, 2:2 (2010), pp.87107.40 Neil Postman, The Reformed English Curri-

culum, in The Shape of the Future in American

Secondary Education, ed. Alvin C. Eurich (New York:

Pitman, 1970), pp.160168.41 Neil Postman, The Reformed English Curri-

culum, p.161.42 See, Andrew Hoskins and Ben OLoughlin,War

and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War.43 Katherine N. Hayles, Unfinished Work: From

Cyborg to Cognisphere, Theory, Culture & Society,

23:78 (2006), pp.159166.44 Jens Brockmeier, After the Archive: Remap-

ping Memory,Culture & Psychology, 16:5, p.10.45 Wolfgang Ernst, The Archive As Metaphor,

Open, 7 (2004), pp.4643.46 Arjun Appadurai, Archive and Aspiration, in

Information is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and

Retrieving Data, ed. Joke Brouwer and Arjen

Mulder (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2003),

pp.1425.47 Arjun Appadurai, Archive and Aspiration.48 See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

(New York: Zone, 2002) and Lisa Gitleman,

Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of

Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).49 Paul Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 1997),

p.24.50 Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

(London: Allen Lane, 2010), p.70.51 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is

Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember

(New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.,

2010), p.195.52 Katherine Sellgren, A-Levels too much like

sat-nav. BBC news, 17 June 2009, ,http://news.

bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8103274.stm.

[accessed June 2009].53 Katherine Sellgren, A-Levels too much like

sat-nav.54

Ingrid Volkmer, ed.,News in Public Memory: AnInternational Study of Media Memories across Gener-

ations (New York: Peter Lang, 2006).55 Karl Mannheim, Essays in the Sociology of

Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1952).56 David Kettler and Colin Loader, Karl

Mannheim and Problems of Historical Time,

Time & Society, 13:2/3 (2004), pp.155 172.57 Ingrid Volkmer, Preface, in Volkmer, ed.,

News in Public Memory, pp.110.58 David C. Rubin et al., Autobiographical

Memory Across the Lifespan, in Autobiographical

Memory, ed. David Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1988), pp.202224.59 Christina Slade,Perceptions and Memories of

the Media Context, in News in Public Memory, ed.

Ingrid Volkmer, pp.195 210.60

Christina Slade, Perceptions and Memories of

the Media Context, p.209.61 Roger Friedland and Dierdre Boden, eds,

NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity (Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press, 1994).62 7/7 inquests: Emergency delays did not cause

deaths, Timeline at: ,http://www.bbc.co.uk/

news/uk-13301195..63 David C. Berliner, The Abuses of Memory:

Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropol-ogy, Anthropological Quarterly, 78:1 (2005),

pp.197211.

Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Research Professor in Global Security in theAdam Smith Research Foundation, College of Social Sciences, University of

Glasgow, UK. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of the SAGE journal of Memory

Studies, Co-Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan Book Series: Memory Studies and

founding Co-Editor of the SAGE journal ofMedia, War & Conflict. His most recent

books are:Media and Radicalisation: Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology

(Routledge, 2011, with Akil Awan and Ben OLoughlin) and War and Media: The

Emergence of Diffused War(Polity, 2010, with OLoughlin).

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Media, Memory, Metaphor