Reviews

Ingrid Volkmer (ed.) (2006) News in Public Memory: An International Study of Media Memories Across Generations

New York: Peter Lang. 307 pages. ISBN 0-8204-6194-6. £19.30 paperback.

Memory studies is a fledging field within social sciences which is beginning to coalesce around the key themes of representation, the relationship between public and private remembering and the technologies of memory. News in Public Memory sits squarely at the intersection of these concerns and synthesises them in an innovative manner, bringing together the issues of generational remembering and the mediation of the past in global context. The processes of globalisation and the impact of these on public memory have been largely neglected in memory studies to date, making this research a useful and timely waypoint for future work in memory studies.

The book is based on the findings of the 'Global Media Generation's project' launched in 1998, which was primarily concerned with the media memories of three generations in nine different countries. The central aim of the book is to compare the media and news related memories of different generations who have lived through specific phases of colonisation of their life worlds by the news media in various countries. The study comprised of three focus groups, one for each generation, replicated in each of the nine national groups selected. This relatively modest data set was amply justified given the explicit aim of the study to be exploratory rather than more widely generalised (p.14). The generations were defined according to the media technology central to their formative years of experience, resulting in three cohorts labelled the 'radio generation', the 'Black and White television generation' and the 'internet generation'. This was a broadly successful mechanism for organising the focus groups, but differences between the development of, and access to, technologies in particular national contexts ran the risk of being elided in places as a result of such a broad application of this organisational framework.

The book is arranged in two halves. The first contains nine chapters based on the focus group conducted in each of the nine national groups. The second is four analytical chapters comparing and contrasting the experiences of each focus group on a thematic basis. The focus groups were in part based around memories of ten international media events which were discussed in each focus group and used in the analytical process for the purposes of comparison. It would perhaps have been prudent to include a more transparent evaluation of the ways in which these events were selected and their global relevance in order to help illuminate and contextualise the responses made to them in the focus groups.

The use of memory as a research method outside of oral history is a relatively recent development in media studies. As a result, the difficulties and concerns of using memory in this way are still being assessed. This kind of reflection on the epistemological and practical issues of using memory required further consideration. As a result the way the talk of participants was being used was a little unclear at times. In places it appeared that the talk was treated as a neutral record of behaviours and past experience, whilst in others it was more critically deconstructed and read through the prism of social, cultural and economic positioning of the participants. Annette Kuhn has developed a useful and comprehensive framework for the methodological application of memory (Kuhn, 2002) which could have been drawn on to remedy some of these problems.

Despite limited attention to the difficulties in using memory in research, memory is sensitively theorised in News in Public Memory as a faculty which is engaged in the construction of the 'lifeworld'. Importantly the reciprocal relationship between individual and social memory is recognised and emphasised from the outset of the book. The concept of 'entelechies' derived from Mannheim's theory of generations is also particularly helpful in articulating the relationship between the media and generational memory. It refers to the 'underlying structure of common experiences of each generation' and is effectively used to identify the key mediated experiences which are central to contemporary global public memory. It also provides a framework for comparing generational and national experiences and enables their similarities and differences to be clearly identified.

The book is particularly suitable for media scholars new to the field of memory studies. It includes important theoretical foundations for the study of memory, such as the introduction to the work of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory and an appraisal of the importance of this work in relation to more individualistic notions of memory in Teer-Tomaselli's chapter on 'Memory and Markers'. Those working in the area of memory studies already may find the treatment of collective memory and subsequent work on social and cultural memory, in this chapter and throughout, a little limited given that the contributions of key scholars in the area such as Annette Kuhn, Andreas Huyssen, Richard Terdiman and Susannah Radstone are given cursory treatment or are omitted entirely. A more detailed theoretical consideration of social and cultural memory in the introductory chapter of the book, and an analysis more closely attuned to existing work in the area in the second part, would undoubtedly widen this books appeal.

The studies main findings were robustly illustrated in the four analytical chapters and centre on the claim that formative news stories have particular significance in contemporary perception of the world. In 'Perceptions and memories of the media context' Christina Slade highlights both generational commonalities and differences across the various national cohorts. The shifting role of media in all of the national contexts, from the appropriation of a technology to its incorporation into family life, a common process of integration experienced by all generations. This was characterised in one instance the similarity between the highly individualised usages of 'trannies' by young people in the 1970s and the uses TV for contemporary youth. The shift in the time-space frameworks across the generational cohorts was also a key theme in this chapter. Memories were identified as moving from being place-specific in the older generations to being characterised by simultaneity and the collapse of traditional frameworks of place in the younger cohorts. The following chapter, concerned with the construction of memory, usefully highlights the different levels at which memory is constructed and emphasises the impossibility of remembering outside of collective frames of reference. This provided a useful opportunity to explore, in detail, the reciprocal relations between individual and collective memory, but this was only performed in a cursory manner. A more detailed examination of this relationship may have enabled a more sensitive analysis of the focus group data. The opportunity to explore the relationship of memory to truth, fiction and fantasy was also raised, but again this was not fully taken up and in places traditional distinctions between truth and falsity in memory were reinforced instead of reconsidered.

The memory and markers chapter considers why particular events are remembered and why they are remembered in such specific ways. The summary of collective memory literature was certainly informative for entrants to the field, but more recent critiques of Halbwachs work were not included. As a result, in places the analysis became rather functionalist in appearance, if not in intention. A connection between memory and issues of power, control and agency would enable a more sensitive and holistic analysis to have been presented. In the concluding chapter Volkmer synthesises the analytical themes to suggest that the drastic expansion of the media environment has meant that generations across national contexts are experiencing similar entelechies' of media perception. She considers this new media experience and suggests that its broader implications are that world knowledge and world perception have become particularly crucial aspects for defining the meaning of the news and this has unbalanced the conventional national public space. The news media's colonisation of the lifeworld means that the parameters for the construction of meaning have changed.

News in public memory presents a new way of looking at memory through the prism of the global media and provides a sound, if in places limited, analysis. It usefully identifies cross generational similarities in the integration of new media technologies into everyday life, and also tracks the shifts across generations of the meaning and relevance of particular forms of news. Although cross generational studies are nothing new in the social sciences (for instance, see Bertaux and Thompson, 1993), utilising generational perspectives on the news in a global context is an important departure for media studies and memory studies. However, the scale of the study lends itself to a much larger book if the full range of analytical possibilities is to be adequately explored. For instance social and cultural factors are flagged up as central to the content and modes of remembering the media, but are rarely applied in to the data generated in the research project. Issues of gender, class and ethnicity in remembering the media require more sustained attention. A more considered engagement with memory studies literature is also required if this book is to be seen as the serious contribution to the field that it has the potential to be.

References

Bertaux, D. and Thompson, P. (1993) Between Generations: Family Models, Myths and Memories. New Brunswick and London: Transaction.

Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London and New York: I. B. Tauris.

Emily Keightley, Loughborough University.