This clip introduces Microsoft's 'MyLifeBits' project, including project leader Gordon Bell. MyLifeBits offers multimedia tools that allow users to record events from their lives and then retrieve them at will. In this way, personal memory is transformed into a fully searchable digital archive.
Amy Holdsworth (2010) argues, in opposition to the prevailing critical consensus, that TV is not an amnesiac medium. Discussing three types of television montage (the news montage, the 'necrology' and the dramatic montage), she suggests that these can function as a type of 'memory text' (to use Annette Kuhn's term), in which fragmentation and collage techniques echo the unpredictable workings of human memory itself. Here are examples from each of Holdsworth's three types of memory montage:
Andrew Hoskins (2001, 2004) argues that television is a key site for the production of 'new memory': a type of collective memory that is highly mediated, subject to manipulation, and continually reshaped to meet the needs of the present. He focuses in particular on the way that news coverage of wars (such as the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War) provides examples of this 'new memory'.
As an example, here's a retrospective item based on the recollections of CBS news correspondents who were embedded with US troops in Iraq. These accounts represent a highly partial version of events in Iraq, constrained by the fact that the reporters were not independent from the military (highlighted by the intertitle showing how many 'tours' were undertaken by each reporter), and shaped by the mediated memories already generated by previous reports on the war.
These clips from the BBC satirical show Broken News reflect common criticisms leveled at television news: that it is perennially obsessed with the present and lacks any genuine engagement with the past. Broken News switches abruptly between different news formats, as if a bored and easily distracted viewer has been given the remote control. Based upon these (exaggerated and comical) examples, we might be persuaded that TV is truly a medium without a memory.
As we prepare to talk more directly about the relationships between mediated memory and history, here's a relevant (and very funny) example of history mediated by memory. In this clip from the ongoing 'Drunk History' series, inebriated comedian Duncan Trussell recounts the life story of Nikola Tesla, famous inventor...
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 generated an excess of mediated depictions of the events and their aftermath: from live coverage across global news networks, to dramatisations such as United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006) and World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006), to the official September 11 Museum and online memory-sites such as 9/11 Memorial, which archives images and stories from members of the public.
The following clip shows a virtual flyover of the planned 9/11 memorial site. In a sense, it is an image of the projected future that points back towards a memorialised past...
This clip contains the final scene from the original 1982 release of Blade Runner (the version you should have seen this week is the 'Director's Cut', which was released in 1992). See if you can recognise the landscape shots, which consist of unused footage from another famous film of the early 1980s...
