A Collective Memory

One aspect of today's culture that I find tremendously interesting is the creation of history/ truth/ separation of fact from fiction when referring to social, or collective memory. Since I am interested in the Middle East, I decided to pick up a book about the way that the American media portrayed the wars they fought, and what some of the conclusive outcomes were about what had happened.

One important aspect, "unlike personal memory, whose authority fades with time, the authority of collective memories increases as time passes, taking on new complications, nuances and interest" (Hoskins 2). They stressed also the aspect of new memory, which pushes a reliance of media data (5), rather than the real life experience, because this might be (and is) subjective to the individual. What tends to happen, however, is that the social memory collapses as the society is oversaturated with information. And so, personal goals or ambitions to change might get slighted for the majority wants to do.

The author also explained that how in the last quarter century, the mass media has propagated myths around general warfare and the plethora of battles fought be the West, calling them "limited", "surgical" and "clean". I object to this in so many respects. What happens is that the main media channels tend to censor the information so that real tragedies are over looked and under-hyped, and military strategy and tactics as well as foreign policy negotiations tend to be reemphasized. The wars are thus disconnected from the actual tragedies associated to them, and we tend to forget the bloody consequences that are not directly in our visual frame. When we are watching from our sofa, first we classify the victims as the "ENNEMY", or as "unplanned casualties" and this tends to lose the shock value of what we are actually seeing. Does familiarity with a picture, no matter how shocking, prevent its use in further reflection and potentially productive/ alternative interpretations, rather than a trite attempt at making us care?

Works cited:
Televising War from Vietnam to Iraq by Andrew Hoskins NewYork: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004