Mediated Memories

27 Sunday May 2012

Posted by John in Media Ecology, Memory, Mnemonic Practices, Social Memory

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In her book, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, José van Dijck introduces the concept of “mediated memories,” media-produced personal mementos such as those one might keep in a shoe box.¹ “These items,” she explains, “mediate not only remembrances of things past; they also mediate relationships between individuals and groups of any kind (such as family, school classes, and scouting clubs)” (1). As memory objects, van Dijck argues, mediated memories represent both our autobiographical memories and cultural identity.

While social memory studies has always claimed that autobiographical memory—personal remembering—is entwined with the social,² her focus on these mediated memory objects which have a simultaneous personal and cultural connection has led her to also coin the term “personal cultural memory,” which she defines as “[t]he acts and products of remembering in which individuals engage to make sense of their lives in relation to the lives of others and their surroundings, situating them in time and place” (6). She then explains that within this construct the terms personal and cultural are “threads that bind memory’s texture: they can be distinguished, but they never can be separated” (6).

This conception of personal cultural memory is important she argues because it

allows for a conceptualization of memory that includes dimensions of identity and relationship, time and materiality […] The term emphasizes that some aspects of memory need to be explained from processes at work in our society that we commonly label as culture—mores, practices, traditions, technologies, mechanics, and routines—whereas the same processes contribute to, and derive from, the formation of individual identities. Yet by advocating a definition of cultural memory that highlights the significance of personal collections, I do not mean to disavow the import of collective culture. Quote to the contrary, if we acknowledge that individual preferences are filtered through cultural conventions or social frameworks, we are obligated to further explore the intricate connection between the individual and collective in the construction of cultural memory (8).

I’ve been greatly enjoying reading van Dijck’s book as it compliments, complicates, overlaps, and extends my own thinking on mnemonic practices and mnemonic objects and the complicated and blurry boundary between autobiographical and social memory. I find particularly useful her conception of the relationship between the personal and the cultural as threads that can be identified but can not be separated.

With this post, I hope to be getting back to one of the original functions of this blog: that of a commonplace book for my thinking about and research into memoria. [↩]
Quite literally: this claim was first made by Maurice Hawlbachs, the sociologist who proposed the concept of collective memory. [↩]

Memory Work: Making Another’s Past Your Own

22 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by John in Memory, Mnemonic Practices, Probes, Social Memory

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From a larger piece written one Saturday last October:

I realized earlier this morning that I’ve been contemplating memory for ten years now. I realized this earlier this morning as I was looking at a photograph on a shelf across from me, a picture of Gil [my fiancée’s deceased husband] holding their infant daughter, a photo which must have been taken close to 12 years ago. While I’m often saddened by the fact that he never got to watch his daughter grow up, and that she has grown up never knowing him, I’m also comforted by this photo. Taken after he was diagnosed with cancer, he is clearly happy and he is with his daughter. It’s a picture of family, of a family, and a picture of my family. This photo represents a past that has become as much a part of me as my own.

In the ten years I’ve been contemplating memoria, I’ve never had any intention of dealing with memoir, of life writing, as that’s the one aspect of memory and writing that has been and continues to be well explored. However, this past year I’ve found myself confronted with a central tenet of social memory studies, a subject of much interest to me, which is the belief that all memory is social, that even our personal memories are filtered through and remembered within the framework of social experience.

While I never knew him, I have had to struggle with integrating into my own experience memories of a man who died in January 2000. With both of Lisa’s parents dead before her daughter was born, Gil’s parents became Lisa’s parents, and they and the rest of his family and his friends have readily embraced me into their family. The home of his childhood—not the house, but the area and the family cabin—places that have been dear to Lisa for 20 years, are becoming dear to me. I now live in the house that he and Lisa bought to raise their child in, which is also the house in which he died. Even if Lisa weren’t working on a memoir of the experience of giving birth to a daughter and then losing a husband to cancer, all within 13 months time, I could not escape his presence, his memory, if I’d wanted to. Integrating that past, his presence, with my own past and my own experience is memory work. And so I now find myself contemplating memoir as a practice of memory.

As I’ve hinted at from time to time, I spent a good chunk of the last decade severely depressed. Even situational depression, left untreated and allowed to grow, can be devastating, and by the time I was free of the root causes, I’d lost my sense of self, was left with a deep self-loathing, and had picked up some serious anxieties. Writing, particularly scholarly writing, became a casuality and attempts at writing, at doing scholarship, regularly resulted in panic attacks followed by jags of self-loathing for being a failure at what I so much wanted to do.

I’m still picking up a piece of myself here and there, still trying to finally put to rest the anxieties and self-doubt that threaten to once again become self-loathing, but I’m mostly fine and have been for over a year. I mention this, I think, because I’ve been in the long process of reclaiming myself since the end of 2008, and everything was still a bit new when I found myself not only reframing my life to accommodate my relationship with Lisa and her 12-year old daughter, but also in working through the presence of Gil. My own scar tissue hadn’t completely healed before I directly confronted the trauma of a young death and its aftermath on the life of the woman I love.

I’ll readily admit that this presence I feel is largely of my own construction, and things like the few photographs of him in common rooms of the house such as those in the living room remain where they are because I requested that they not be put away or moved to Miss Mo’s room. It is more complicated than that, though, as Lisa is herself working on a memoir of that experience, and it is in large part the intellectual work that we each do and the sharing of that work which drew us together. I can’t imagine not listening as she talks ideas and memories through, or not reading and commenting on early drafts, or not talking about the theory and practice of remembering and writing.

It is, however, a hard thing to read about that pain and loss. While I don’t need to reach out and comfort the woman I am with—she’s had enough time to make peace with her past—I feel an intense need to reach out and comfort the woman she was 12 years ago, a woman I wouldn’t even know for another 6 years. It hurts because the pain she feels and the comforting she needs are real but at the same time she herself does not exist, and so while I feel her pain, I am not allowed the solace we feel when we provide comfort to those we love. Even though I do all this by choice, all of this confronting and integrating of a past that is not mine in a way that allows me to place it within framework that I can understand, this is hard work.

And in working through all this I have had driven home to me that this is memory work. The integrating of the lives of others into our own life is memory work regardless of whether or not we realize it as such, and the closer and stronger the relationship, the harder the work to be done. Whether or not we give this work a tangible form for others to read or see or listen to, to do this work is to recompose oneself and one’s relationship with the world and the past, and that is the work of memoir. While up until now I’ve not had any real interest in thinking about memoir as part of my work on memoria, in working through all this and in falling in love with a woman who is writing a memoir about the experience of having a daughter and losing a husband to cancer in the space of 13 months, I can’t help but start thinking about memoir as a practice of memory.

All of this serves as preface for this: Back in August, I started using 750words.com. I’ve not used it consistently like I’ve been meaning to—in fact, I’ve only used it 4 times—but one interesting feature I’ve found is that will generate a series of reports and a word cloud based upon what you’ve written. Not knowing exactly what I was going to write today other than that I wanted to riff off the piece I wrote last October, I opened up 750words and wrote. What emerged is the start of an attempt to work out the complex idea of integrating the memories of others into your own—of my personal experience of how, as Maurice Halbwachs argues, all memory is social—and an argument with Barthes on the relationship of photographs to memory. Since I really wasn’t sure where I was going, I’m finding fascinating the data 750words pulled to create a report which consists of both a word cloud and of charts on, among other things, what I was feeling, what I was concerned about, what I focused on, and what my mindset was. Go ahead and take a look.

The Macintosh, 1984, and Social Memory

24 Saturday Jan 2009

Posted by John in English Studies, Memory, Scholarship, Social Memory, Technology

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Today is the Macintosh computer’s 25 birthday. My first computer was an Apple II Plus, and my love affair with the Mac is long running. As I got ready to head off to college, my parents gave me the choice of a car or a Mac Plus, and without blinking an eye, I chose the Mac. Apple’s “1984” ad serves as a mnemonic image for me, representing the dynamic relationship between literature and social memory. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I define four such mnemonic images, one for each of the four issues of memory I explore in depth. (The other three are mental, verbal, and graphic imagery as a process of meaning making; database practices as compositional tools; and the intersection of rhetoric and social memory.) Here’s the section from that first chapter in which I briefly discuss the ad:

And, finally, my last memory is that of the Apple Computer television ad which broadcast during the 1984 Super Bowl. This ad, set in an Orwellian world, begins with a group of mindless human drones shuffling into an auditorium. Projected onto a large screen is the close-up of a man’s face, who begins a speech with “Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives.” Interspersed with these images is that of a woman running down a hallway chased by soldiers. She runs into the auditorium, and before the soldiers can catch up with her, she hurls a hammer into the screen, which then blows up. The commercial ends with the message, both written and spoken, “On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’” (Macintosh).

Intentionally drawing upon George Orwell’s novel 1984, Apple’s commercial positions IBM in the role of Orwell’s Big Brother and positions themselves in the role of the resistance against Big Brother’s tyranny. This ad works because Orwell’s novel has become a commonplace in American culture. Even though the commercial was only ever broadcast once, the ad itself has become a commonplace for many in the advertising and technology industries and for Americans in general. As Kevin Manley explains in USA Today column marking the 20th anniversary of the commercial, few people remember that both Radio Shack and Atari ran commercials for their computers during that same Super Bowl. Moreover, he notes, a number of technology industry leaders identify Apple’s “1984” commercial as having had a profound influence on their choice of a career. Likewise, Ted Friedman, a Communications professor at Georgia State University, argues that for the rest of us the “1984” commercial was a “critical moment” in our “conception of the proper uses and cultural implications of personal computers.” In chapter six I explore the dynamic relationship between literature and social memory. Rather than argue that literature serves as a vehicle for social memory, I argue that literature and social memory exist within a dynamic relationship with each other. Not only does the creation and interpretation of literature involve an active engagement with social memory, social memory itself limits the interpretive space around a text even as literature itself can, as with 1984, define the interpretive space around personal experience and social and historical events.

While I return to “1984” and 1984 in chapter six, I focus on Ivanhoe, Starship Troopers, and, most completely, Beowulf. Or, actually, I did. This chapter is almost certainly being cut. While the earlier chapters are much more rhetorical and composition studies based, I do discuss medieval literature throughout the dissertation. After all, as anyone familiar with medieval rhetoric knows, the poetic was part of medieval rhetoric. And chapter two, “Towards a New Revived Canon of Memory,” begins with two quotes, one of which is from James J. Murphy’s “Poetry without Genre”:¹

The so-called “Romantic Movement” in European literature at the end of the eighteenth century produced not only an emphasis on poetic individualism […] but also produced what can only be called a theory of non-theory. The radical shifts in Western views of human thought […] produced in English writers like Samuel Taylor Coledridge [sic] and William Wordsworth a theoretical justification for a view diametrically opposed to the metapoetics of the middle ages and Renaissance. But since we are all children of our own age no matter how much we try to escape it, we sometimes forget that what we call “modern” ideas about free poetic creation are very modern indeed—perhaps less than two centuries old. Our ancestors marched to quite a different drummer, and even if we ourselves understand this, we must be sure always to make our students understand it as well. A metapoetic of a rhetoric without genre that lasted for two thousand years must surely have some value today. (7-8)²

The Beowulf discussion is detailed enough to stand on its own, but I wanted to add the discussion of Ivanhoe and Starship Troopers to demonstrate that it’s not just oral tradition/folktale/epic/mythhistory that exists within a dynamic relationship with social memory. If it’s cut, and I understand why it probably will be, it will still work out into two articles.

Any way, today the Macintosh turns 25. Wish your Mac a happy birthday. (You do have a Mac, don’t you?)

Murphy, James J. “Poetry without Genre: The Metapoetics of the Middle Ages.” Latin Rhetoric and Education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Burlinton, VT: Ashgate/Variorum, 2005. VIII. 1-8. [↩]
The other is one of my all-time favorite memory quotes, take from Janet Coleman’s Ancient and Medieval Memory: “I have meant only to indicate that the modern world is, in some important ways, reformulating issues and some answers that were already at the heart of medieval discussions [of memory]. Most of us remain unaware that modern science, some modern history and modern philosophy have inherited from the Renaissance a trivialization of over 1,000 years of previous history” (xvii). [↩]

Assignment: Social Memory Textual Collage

27 Sunday May 2007

Posted by John in Memory, Social Memory, Teaching Resources

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Introduction¹
Most of us are familiar with the notion of individual or autobiographical memory, the memories that we have based upon our own experiences. Such memories, to a large extent, help define who we are and how we act. Autobiographical memory, however, isn’t the whole story of who we are as remembering beings. There is a social component to our memory as well. How many of us directly experienced the attacks of September 11, 2001 or the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq? Even though most, if not all of us do not have such experiences, we all have memories of these events, and those memories help shape our politics today. Likewise, while none of us experienced the American Civil War, life in the American English colonies in the decade before the Revolutionary War, slavery, or American frontier life, both we and our culture have memories of these events, and these memories shape how we live and act today. Regardless of who we are or where we are from, there are historical figures and events that instill us with pride or fill us with anger or inspire us or shape how we react to new experiences and ideas. This is the effect of social memory. We are all members of mnemonic communities and we all undergo mnemonic socialization.

In the glossary to her book Theories of Social Remembering, Barbara A. Misztal defines mnemonic communities as “groups that socialize us to what should be remembered and what should be forgotten. These communities, such as the family, the ethnic group or the nation, provide the social contexts in which memories are embedded and mark the emotional tone, depth and style of our remembering” (160). She defines mnemonic socialization as “the process by which people, especially children, learn what should be remembered and what should be forgotten; they are familiarized with their collective past so that the continuity and identity of the group are sustained” (160). In addition to family, ethnic group, and nation, mnemonic communities can include schools, religious communities, formal groups such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and informal groups such as fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels or J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books or The Daily Show. Mnemonic socialization can occur in many ways, including through such things as rituals and practices, myths and stories, education, and experience.

The Assignment
Your assignment is to create a collage of good passages so as to build a textual portrait of yourself as represented by your social memory. Using the included discussion above and the quotation below as a starting point, draft a series of “verbal snapshots” which you can use to make your textual collage. In class, we will explore a number of prewriting activities which can help you generate passages to use in your collage. Also feel free to incorporate quotes from other poeple in your collage as long as you cite such work and you clearly indicate those words and ideas as the words and ideas of someone else. While not required, you might find it useful to include commentary on such quoted passages. Again, the theme of your textual collage is you as represented by your mnemonic communities and your mnemonic socialization. Your final Project should be 4 – 5 pages in length.

The Process
After drafting a number of verbal passages, try the following:

Look through all the pieces you have written so far and choose the pieces or passages you like best.
Write some more short pieces about you and your social memory. What you have already written will lead you to other possibilities and ideas.
Spread all your passages out on a table or the floor so that you can see them all. If you’ve composed with a computer, print each of your passages out and separate them.
Arrange your passages in what seems the best order. Feel free to do the choosing and arranging by interest or intuition.
You will likely see the need to write a few more sections. Perhaps other experiences or thoughts come to mind, perhaps an opening or closing piece. Do not write a traditional introduction or conclusion.
Revise it all.
Copyedit your collage carefully so that it looks its best when your friends and classmates see it. Feel free to also play with formatting and design.

Based upon your peer-review, revise your essay at least once. Please submit your project in a folder or envelope with the following:

the final draft of your essay, clearly marked as such,
a printout of your essay, with comments, from Comment,
all earlier drafts of your essay, clearly marked as draft 1, draft 2, etc.,
any prewriting you may have,
and a brief cover letter discussing what changes you made after the peer review, why you made them, and why you believe your final draft successfully fulfills the assignment.

In the cover letter, feel free to also include such information as:

resources which you drew upon,
what you struggled with,
what you think you learned,
what writing and rhetorical issues you focused upon, etc.

The quote
In their introduction to Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives, Maria G. Gattell and Jacob J. Climo write:

Memory is the foundation of self and society. [. . .] Without memory, the world would cease to exist in any meaningful way, as it does for persons with amnesias or dementias that make them forget the self through inability to remember some or all of their past and to create new memories in their ongoing life. Without memory, groups could not distinguish themselves one from another, whether family, friends, governments, institutions, ethnic groups, or any other collectivity, nor would they know whether or how to negotiate, fight, or cooperate with each other. From the simplest everyday tasks to the most complicated, we all rely upon memories to give meaning to our lives: to tell us who we are, what we need to do, how to do it, where we belong, and how to live with other people. (1)

This assignment is based upon the collage assignment in Elbow and Belanoff’s A Community of Writers: A Workshop Course in Writing and Being a Writer: A Community of Writers Revisited. [↩]

Thoughts on Mnemonic Socialization

25 Friday May 2007

Posted by John in Memory, Social Memory

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A bit of house-keeping here. I wrote the following last fall as a follow up to an assignment in the first-semester composition course I was teaching:

I’d like to add a bit to what I already said today about social memory, mnemonic communities, and mnemonic socialization. I’m not trying to suggest that who we are is only determined by our mnemonic communities and mnemonic socialization any more than I want to argue that we are who we are solely because of our genetics or our upbringing. Just as we are shaped by both our genetics and our upbringing, we are who we are because of both our personal, autobiographical memory and our social memory.

In one sense, “mnemonic communities” and “mnemonic socialization” are fancy terms for the social groups which influence us and our socialization. On the other hand, there are good reasons for using the modifier “mnemonic” to highlight that we are in this context specifically and purposefully dealing with issues of memory. What we need to realize, however, is that “mnemonic” means much more than an aide to memory like a string tied around one’s finger or a simple rhyme to remember some set of facts. In this context, it also means “of or related to memory,” and it includes much more than memorization and information recall.

Mnemonic communities, which again can be anything from one’s family, religious community, profession, cultural or national heritage, and social groups, influence one’s mnemonic socialization. For instance, our habits of mind, values, assumptions, traditions, practices, beliefs, and perceptions of the world are all strongly influenced by our mnemonic socialization.

For instance, I talked a bit today about my family being from the Western United States and, specifically, from a (frontier) farming tradition. I place high value on freedom, independence, self-reliance, and a hands-off authority. But I also place high value on personal responsibility not only to oneself but to one’s community. I feel more comfortable and at home up in the mountains than I do in highly urban areas like Chicago, Portland, Denver, New York, or even Midtown St. Louis here around SLU. There are a number of reasons for this, but a large part of it has to do with my mnemonic socialization.

I also place high value on education and on being an educator. This too, I’m sure, is largely a function of my mnemonic socialization inherited from my family. My mother, her brother and sister, and both of my grandmothers were all teachers. But this valuing of education runs deeper than that. Both of my grandmothers went to college in the 1920s, back when it was unusual for anyone to go to college, let alone women who grew up on farms in the rural West. It’s easy for us to just think, “well of course he values education, education is important!” and it’s another thing to stop and think about why I value education. I was never pushed to go to college to get a high paying job, but, at the same time, it was always assumed that I would go to college. I was raised with the belief that education was itself valuable, and if you look at my family’s history, this has clearly been an accepted truth for at least four generations (my great grandfathers, both farmers, believed so much in the value of education they sent their daughters to college even though few men in their small rural farming communities went to college).

Our mnemonic socialization also effects how we perceive and understand things, actions, and events. Whether we are pro-life or pro-choice, whether we are for gun ownership or gun control, or whether we feel more sympathy for the people of Israel or the people of Lebanon largely has to do with our mnemonic socialization. The types of food we like to eat, the kinds of cars we like to drive, the types of leisure activities we enjoy, the music we listen to, and even our attitudes towards sex are strongly influenced by our mnemonic communities and our mnemonic socialization.

Here’s one last example of mnemonic communities and mnemonic socialization: I attended the University of Colorado at the same time as Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the co-creators of South Park. During the first few seasons of the show, when I’d talk to friends about it, I came to realize that there were jokes in the show that my friends didn’t get or didn’t get in the same way I did. I quickly realized this was the case because Stone and Parker would add inside jokes into the show, some of which could only be gotten by people familiar with Colorado culture and politics, and some of which could only be gotten by people familiar with the University of Colorado, Boulder campus life in the early 1990s. Even though Parker and Stone have largely moved away from the very specific inside jokes, they still show their colors in ways most people wouldn’t recognize, jokes I do recognize because Parker, Stone, and I share a set of experiences, social and cultural events, etc. that most people who watch the show don’t have.

So, in this context, Colorado serves as a mnemonic community that Matt Stone, Trey Parker and I share. Likewise, attending the University of Colorado Boulder during the early 1990s also serves as a mnemonic community that binds us together. The references to Star Trek in the early episodes of South Park are not just a reference to Star Trek itself but to elements of the original Star Trek series that a local newspaper cartoonist, also a student at CU, regularly made fun of in his cartoon strip. When I watch the episode “Die Hippie, Die,” I don’t just see generic hippies but a particular subset of neo-hippie we had on and around campus. And when I see an illogical “rabble, rabble, rabble” crowd on the show, I’m seeing any number of student protest/activist groups that held such rallies on campus.

Okay, one last thought. I don’t want to belabor this point, but if we go back to South Park‘s Star Trek references, we can see a complex set of mnemonic communities and mnemonic socialization going on. First, there’s the mnemonic community of people who have seen enough Star Trek to get the jokes. Matt Stone, Trey Parker, Hans Bjordall (the newspaper cartoonist who wrote and drew Where the Buffalo Roam which is the comic strip that ocassionally made fun of Star Trek), and I all fit into this group. And there’s the mnemonic community who read Where the Buffalo Roam, which was largely limited to people in Boulder during the early 1990s and, for the most part, were affiliated with CU. And then there’s the mnemonic community of South Park watchers. Friends whom I’ve talked to who watch South Park and watched Star Trek but didn’t attend CU and, therefore, didn’t read Where the Buffalo Roam, have a very different understanding of South Park‘s Star Trek jokes than those friends of mine who did read Where the Buffalo Roam.