Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the ...

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Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn Andrew 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 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605573

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parallax, 2011, vol. 17, no. 4, 19–31

Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn Andrew Hoskins

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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 today’s 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 default condition 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 Roediger’s 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 media ‘as 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 parallax ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online q 2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2011.605573

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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 memory is 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 be said 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 media’s 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 everyday life’.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 don’t 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 nearinstantaneous communications, including ‘messaging’, be these peer-to-peer, oneto-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 Hoskins 20


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 Erll’s 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 to delineate 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 psychologists and neurologists recognize (to greatly differing degrees) the role of the external, symbolic and technological ‘memory field’ and its impact on ‘the architecture of biological memory’17 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 era’22 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 parallax 21

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 Roediger’s terms, above) – the internet and its associated technologies – yet without 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 misleading in 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 today’s 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 memory’s 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 weaken social 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? Let’s 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 Hoskins 22


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 of one 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 McLuhan’s 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 thesis’29 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 Landsberg’s ‘Prosthetic Memory’ explores how modernity’s mass culture (film and television) makes memory transportable and 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 such networks 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 parallax 23

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 actually part of memory: 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 of many 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 memory’37 on the one hand and human memory on the other. The ‘technological unconscious’38 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 memory ecology’.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 don’t 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 developments, 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 reflexive intensity, 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 Whalen’s characterization of this ecology as a ‘cognisphere’: which ‘gives a name and shape to the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly Hoskins 24

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 Brockmeier indicts 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 some time 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 parallax 25

presence in-the-world, and increasingly blurred this with our sense of presence inthe-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 an inherent 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 through a 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 Virilio’s 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, there’s a kind of entrapment to a world in which one’s 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 on culture 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 Web’s connections are not our connections – and no matter how many hours we spend searching and surfing, they will never become our connections. When we outsource Hoskins 26


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 don’t 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 group’s 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 ‘born digital’ – 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 Volkmer’s 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 Mannheim’s ‘sociology of knowledge’55 approach to identify the generational ‘entelechies’ of each group, namely, the structuring of the common experiences of each generation – the creation of ‘incessantly superseded, creatively willed generational world-views’.56 So, Volkmer’s 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 years58) 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 Volkmer’s team. For example, drawing on her data across media generations, Christina Slade speculates that there is ‘fundamental change from the older to the younger 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. parallax 27


Across the twentieth century, commentators acclaimed the accelerating transformations 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 Boden’s 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 events coverage 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 2010– 11 Coroner’s 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 a multimodal 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. Hoskins 28

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 don’t 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 doesn’t 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 inthe-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 the mediatization 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 memory’s 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.231–246. 2 Henry L. Roediger III, ‘Memory Metaphors’, p.244. 3 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation 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.4–5. 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.9– 22.

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 O’Loughlin, 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.137–148. 10 Sonia Livingstone, ‘On the Mediation of Everything: ICA Presidential Address 2008’, Journal of Communication, 59 (2009), pp.1–18. 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.105–134. 12 Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p.5. parallax 29

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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.63–83. 14 See Andrew Hoskins, ‘7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional Trajectories of Remembering 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.73–99; 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 Je´roˆme Bourdon, ‘Some Sense of Time: Remembering Television’, History & Memory, 15:2 (2003), pp.5–35. 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.95–113. 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.17–28; William Uricchio, ‘The Algorithmic Turn: Photosynth, Augmented Reality and the Changing Implications of the Image’, Visual Studies, 26:1 (2011), pp.25– 35; 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 Hoskins 30

home disciplines, but Internet research itself has never had a single paradigm’ (2005: 240). Interestingly, albeit for differing reasons, the ‘nonparadigmatic’ 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’, in Memory: An Anthology, ed. Harriet Harvey Wood and A. S. Byatt (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), pp.80– 88. 26 See, Andrew Hoskins: ‘New Memory: Mediating History’, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 21:4 (2001), pp.191– 211; ‘Television and the Collapse of Memory’, Time & Society, 13:1 (2004), pp.109 – 127, and ‘Digital Network Memory’, in Mediation, 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.223–226. 31 See, for example, Richard Menary, The Extended Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 32 Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind; see also: Niklas Luhmann, 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, 26:2–3 (2009), pp.33–45. 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.175–90.


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Steven D. Brown and Andrew Hoskins, ‘Terrorism in the New Memory Ecology: Mediating and Remembering the 2005 London Bombings’, Behavioural Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, 2:2 (2010), pp.87–107. 40 Neil Postman, ‘The Reformed English Curriculum’, in The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, ed. Alvin C. Eurich (New York: Pitman, 1970), pp.160–168. 41 Neil Postman, ‘The Reformed English Curriculum’, p.161. 42 See, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin, War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War. 43 Katherine N. Hayles, ‘Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23:7–8 (2006), pp.159–166. 44 Jens Brockmeier, ‘After the Archive: Remapping Memory’, Culture & Psychology, 16:5, p.10. 45 Wolfgang Ernst, ‘The Archive As Metaphor’, Open, 7 (2004), pp.46–43. 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.14–25. 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: An International Study of Media Memories across Generations (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.1–10. 58 David C. Rubin et al., ‘Autobiographical Memory Across the Lifespan’, in Autobiographical Memory, ed. David Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp.202–224. 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 Anthropology’, Anthropological Quarterly, 78:1 (2005), pp.197–211.

Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Research Professor in Global Security in the Adam 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 of Media, 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 O’Loughlin) and War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War (Polity, 2010, with O’Loughlin).

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