Collective Memory

From the Media History Project

Collective Memory

Collective memory is the set of ideas -- derived from literature in literacy, psychology, history, and cultural studies -- that our own memories are not entirely personal.

Experimental and ethnographic evidence indicates that recall improves when two or more people are asked to recall together a particular memory. That is, a single person attempting to recall an event will be able to retrieve less information less accurately than two or more persons working on the same retrieval task. Thus, there's some indication that actual memory storage is, at least in part, a social, not purely psychological, phenomenon.

We also know from history that certain "traditions" of cultural heritage or shared cultural events have been invented and then naturalized as "historical". For example, George Lipsitz (1990) argues that 1950s television helped to invent a fictional past in which the nuclear family and its emphasis on consumerism was indicative of family health, wealth, and virtue; thus the new collective memory engineered on television played a key role in the promotion of consumption, in the disruption of longer-standing non-nuclear familial structures, and in the naturalization of a women's sphere.

Finally, there is the argument that the role of the media in stabilizing or fabricating partial (even entirely fictional) "memories" of a shared past (particularly evident in mainstream media) is paradoxical.

On the one hand, such shared notions often form the fabric of our beliefs about ourselves as a collective society -- about our past, our goals, our ideals, and our future. In this sense, collective memory can be seen as fundamental to national identity and unity.

On the other hand, however, such shared notions are inherently selective and, consequently, inherently exclusionary of actual events, ideas, and memories of sets of persons who do not easily fit the alleged mainstream narrative of "who we were." Women, minorities, gays and lesbians, the disabled, the elderly, and the poor have, historically, been rendered invisible by many familiar narratives of the past. In this sense, collective memory also forms the basis for what Gramsci calls "hegemony" -- in which certain ideas that are beneficial to a particular group of people are naturalized as the ways things ought to be (and have always been).

One of the more recent efforts at stabilizing a collective memory has been aimed at defining generational identities -- particular the identities of both Baby Boomers and the generation following them, which has been labelled "Generation X," "the MTV Generation," "the Twentysomething" generation, among others. A brief essay on the topic of GenX is available here.

For further reading:
Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Princeton University Press, 1989.
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were. Basic Books, 1992.
George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

Link to Definition