A New Memory of War

Bibliographic Data

ID20043058
AuthorsAndrew Hoskins (0000-0002-1207-2728, corresponding author)
Year2014
Pages179-191
Publication date2014-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueJournalism and Memory (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9781137263940_12
OpenAlexW298398543
ISBN9781137263940
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited21

Just as personal memory functions through matching the here-and-now with an intelligible there-and-then, by shifting context, re-framing meaning and massive selectivity, journalism has long held — and imagined — a larger aperture of social memory. This relationship — between journalism and social memory — is riven with the news values of rupture and catastrophe, paradoxically tinting the journalistic lens by framing incoming uncertainties with the historical certainties of the survival of societies and the continuities of the past. In this way the journalistic churning of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century history is particularly entangled with the contemporary memory boom(s) or ‘turn to memory,’ with an increasing premium being placed on historical discourses and memories of warfare in modern societies (Huyssen, 2003; Winter, 2006). At the same time, the salience of journalistic schemas — premised on the scarcity of journalists, their experience and their embodiment of the ‘matching of context’ — has suddenly been devalued. The ‘connective turn’ (Hoskins, 2011a and b) — the massively increased pervasiveness and accessibility of digital technologies, devices and media — has ushered in a ‘post-scarcity culture’ and charged a wholesale reappraisal of the nature and the value of journalism

Aesthetics · Art · Journalism · Media studies · Scarcity · Sociology · History · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Media Studies and Communication · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration