Introduction

Abstract

Television has often been characterised by its ‘transience’, ‘ephemerality’, ‘forgetability’ and even more seriously, it is seen as an ‘amnesiac’, responsible for the ‘undermining of memory’. Television is not only the bad critical object in the academy, but is a bad memory object as well. In her account of the shifts in theories and concerns with memory from modernity to late modernity, Susannah Radstone observes that ‘whereas in the nineteenth century, it was the felt break with tradition and the long durée which constituted the temporal aspect of the memory crisis, in the late twentieth century, that crisis is inflected, rather, by the experiences of immediacy, instantaneity and simultaneity’ (2000, p. 7). Radstone goes on to reiterate, through Sobchack, that the development of new electronic technologies that ‘collapse the distance that previously separated an event from its representation’ is in part responsible for the ‘deepening’ of the memory crisis (ibid.). Andreas Huyssen’s Present Pasts explores how a contemporary fascination with memory might be viewed as a response to the ‘spread of amnesia’ in Western society. For Huyssen, ‘intense public panic of oblivion’ is met by the ‘contemporary public obsession with memory’ (2003, p. 17). This book offers a way of rethinking television’s role at the heart of the memory crisis and its paradoxical memory boom by examining the function of memory and nostalgia on a medium and for a medium that is often seen as a metaphor for forgetting.