Screen Memory - Department of English

equation.
There are few satisfactory models of how collective memory
is constructed, how it is received, and what factors govern its
endurance. Unlike its near synonyms, myth and tradition,
collective memory is an active stratum of mentality, constantly
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in the process of reformulation. Like personal memory,
collective memory is determined by present needs and desires and,
in their service, distorts or invents the past. As examples,
David Thelen relates that in the relatively prosperous 1970s
Americans recalled the 1930s not as a time of misery and struggle
but as a time when people had been closer to each other, warmer
and more caring, and John Foster and Wayne Froman cite the very
late appearance of the Amistad mutiny of 1839-42 as a central
part of the cultural memory of Sierra Leone (Thelen 1124 and
Foster 90).
Because collective memory is not memory it must circulate in
the public realm in material form before it can lodge itself in
our minds: in documents, memorials, commemorations, rituals,
slogans or songs; “rules, laws, standardized procedures, and
records . . . . books, holidays, statues, souvenirs” (Schudson
1992:51). George Washington remains an important part of the
American collective consciousness, for example, because he is
commemorated through the celebration of his birth, the Washington
Monument and his profile on quarters and dollar bills (Johnson
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