Media and Memory

Abstract

Before we examine in detail, later in the book, how photography and recorded music facilitate remembering and are drawn upon as mnemonic resources, we need to consider more fully their characteristic features as both communications technologies and cultural forms. As ways of recording, storing, retrieving and replaying certain events and sequences of events from the past, they have, of course, not remained static over time. Their various means of production, reception and use have changed a great deal since the key moments of their invention and early development.¹ Change and modification mark the history of these two technologies and have to be part of the story we tell about them, yet running through them is one relatively constant factor, which is the actual mechanical recording of images and performances. It is this which they always have in common, and it is this which provides us with our starting point: their convergence in recording and evoking the past. Beyond that convergence, how they record assorted events in the past and transmit them into an assortment of futures has always been divergent, in a number of significant ways, so we need also to delve into what most obviously differentiate photography and recorded music as ways of capturing and returning to what has happened in the past.