UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

Media and Memory
The most ubiquitous—albeit questionable and disputable in terms of authenticity and validity—
way of representing the past in 21st century is through mass, electronic and digital media (where it
is endlessly remediated). The media in the most rudimentary sense convey externalisations of
individual, internal worlds, and are the sine qua non of collectively imagined communities. If in
oral societies it was the spoken word that was the (unfixed, malleable, ‗expirable‘) conveyor of
information, ideas, mythologies, later on it was the invention of writing and print that relegated the
word (speech) from the aural to the visual. 14 And it was this shift that enabled the circulation of
information and ideas beyond the domain of face-to-face communication bound to specific
coordinates in time and space. As Walter J. Ong argued, the shift from orality to literacy was the
key development in the history of humankind. It facilitated a re-conceptualisation of not only
society and culture, but also of economy and science. Moreover, ―print encouraged the mind to
sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space.‖ 15 With this in mind it
could be argued that the mental space conceptualised as an individual, internal and relatively
sealed off inner world was in a great need to find means for externalisation of thought beyond the
limits of the spoken word.
The long tradition of the study of memory sometimes seems to be obscured, as much as it is
fuelled, by the fascination and sometimes outright obsession with the role of memory in everyday
life. It would be imprudent, however, to claim that the fascination with memory as we are
witnessing it today originated in the 20th century, or with the onset of industrial revolution and the
rise of the nation state only a couple of centuries earlier... The fugitive pieces of places and times
past and passed have been part and parcel of lives of humans ever since most early days, notably
in the Antiquity, and through to the Middle Ages. 16 Nevertheless, the processes of nation states
formation throughout much of Europe during the late 1700s and the 1800s necessitated a new,
rather ‗unnatural,‘ if not entirely fictitious, invention of tradition. The thus far pre-nationals had to
be transformed on political, social and cultural levels into a compassionate/compatriot community,
if only an imagined one. 17 Into a community whose members believed, as much as felt, that they
belonged to this and not that particular nation with long(est)-lasting tradition, millennial glory and
heroic history. To this end the past was vigorously and fiercely reinterpreted, renarrated and
14 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 121–132.
15 Ibid.,129.
16 See the classic historical overview of memory practices by Frances Yeates, The Art of Memory, Harmondsworth,
Penguin Books, 1966.
17 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso,
1991.
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