Abstract
Cultural memory is unthinkable without media. It would be inconceivable without the role that media play on both levels — the individual and the collective. On the individual level, the sociocultural shaping of organic memories rests to a significant extent on mediation: memory talk between a mother and her child, oral communication within a family, the significance of photographs for media-based (re-)constructions of our childhoods, the influence of mass media and its schemata on way we code life experience. Even more so, memory on the collective level — that is, the construction and circulation of knowledge and versions of a common past in sociocultural contexts — is only possible with the aid of media: through orality and literacy as age-old media for the storing of foundational myths for later generations; through print, radio, television and the Internet for the diffusion of versions of a common past in wide circles of society; and, finally, through symbolically charged media such as monuments which serve as occasions for collective, often ritualized remembering.
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© 2011 Astrid Erll
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Erll, A. (2011). Media and Memory. In: Memory in Culture. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230321670_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230321670_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-29745-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-32167-0
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