Collective memory
Encyclopedia
Collective memory refers to the shared pool of information held in the memories of two or more members of a group, and was coined by the philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs
. Collective memory can be shared, passed on and constructed by groups both small (e.g., a board of directors) and large (e.g., American culture). In many ways, collective memory parallels individual memory (e.g., better recall for pictures than for words), but also exhibits some key differences and features (e.g., cross-cueing)
Information Gathering Groups are also able to acquire more information than individuals. As individuals often have widely differing experiences, backgrounds, personalities, etc., each can acquire a unique set of information that can be contributed to a group discussion.
. When group members realize - be it implicitly or explicitly - that others will aid in the recall of information, they will put less effort into processing and storing the information. In some situations, these inadequacies in collective memory may be so great that groups are unable to recall previously-made decisions without the aid of a written record (group minutes).
Cross-cueing Information exchange among group members often helps individuals to remember things that they would not have remembered had they been working alone. In other words, the information provided by Person A may 'cue' memories in Person B. This phenomenon results in enhanced recall.
Transactive memory Members of a group often specialize, to a greater or lesser degree, in different areas. Transactive memory refers to the process by which information that must be remembered is distributed (either explicitly or implicitly) to members of the group who can lter be relied upon to provide the information when it is needed. For example, the weapons expert in a group may remember the specifications of a new semi-automatic rifle, while the scout may remember the layout of trenches at enemy lines.
in Berlin
to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
in Washington DC. Whatever a nation chooses to memorialize in physical monument, or perhaps more significantly, what not to memorialize, is an indicator of the collective memory.
Collective memory is also sustained through a continuous production of representational forms. In our media age - and maybe particularly during the last decade of increasing digitization - this generates a flow of, and production of, second hand memories (see e.g. James E Young). Particular narratives and images are reproduced and reframed, yet also questioned and contested through new images and so forth. Collective memory today differs much from the collective memories of an oral culture, where no printing technique or transportation contributed to the production of imagined communities (see Benedict Anderson) where we come to share a sense of heritage and commonality with many human beings we have never met - as in the manner a citizen may feel a sort of 'kinship' with people of his nation, region or city.
The concept of collective memory, initially developed by Halbwachs, has been explored and expanded from various angles - a few of these are introduced below.
James E. Young has introduced the notion of 'collected memory' (opposed to collective memory), marking memory's inherently fragmented, collected and individual character, while Jan Assmann develops the notion of 'communicative memory', a variety of collective memory based on everyday communication. This form of memory is similar to the exchanges in an oral culture or the memories collected (and made collective) through oral history. As another subform of collective memories Assmann mentions forms detached from the everyday, it can be particular materialized and fixed points as, e.g. texts and monuments.
The theory of collective memory was also discussed by ex-Hiroshima resident and atomic bomb survivor, Kiyoshi Tanimoto in his tour of the United States as an attempt to rally support and funding for the reconstruction of his Memorial Methodist Church in Hiroshima. He theorized that the use of the atomic bomb had forever been added to the world's collective memory and would serve in the future as a warning against such devices. See John Hersey
's Hiroshima
novel.
The idea was also discussed more recently in The Celestine Prophecy
and subsequent novels written by James Redfield
as a continuing process leading to the eventual trancendance of this plane of existence. The idea that a futuristic development of the collective unconscious
and collective memories of society allowing for a medium with which one can transcend ones existence is an idea expressed in certain variations of new age
religions.
in the first half of the 20th century created many images, film scenes, news scenes, photographs, quotes, and songs, which became very familiar to regular moviegoers and remained in their collective memory. Examples could be the films of Charlie Chaplin
and Rudolph Valentino
. During cinema visits, people could watch newsreel
s that brought them news stories from over the world. For the first time in history a mass audience was able to view certain stories, events, and scenes, all at the same time. They could all view how for instance the Hindenburg disaster
was caught on camera and see and remember these scenes all at once.
When television
became a global mass entertainment medium in the 1950s and 1960s the collective memory of former cinema visitors increased when various films could be repeated endlessly and worldwide on television broadcasts. For example old films like The Wizard of Oz
, King Kong
and cartoons like Looney Tunes
and Tom and Jerry
have been shown internationally and almost non stop on television channels. Hereby particular film scenes have become well-known, even to people who had not seen these films on their original cinematic release. The same applies for television shows like I Love Lucy
which have been repeated so often over the decades that certain episodes and scenes have become classics.
When newsreels in the cinema gradually made place for television news broadcasting
, it became a habit for mass audiences to watch the daily news on television. Worldwide this led to a new kind of collective memory where various news events could be shown much quicker than with the cinema News Reels
. Therefore certain filmed news stories could be shown on the same day they happened and even live during the broadcast itself. Millions of people have viewed the assassination of John F. Kennedy
in 1963, the landing of Apollo 11
in 1969, the Wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana (1981) and the September 2001 attacks on their television. In fact, certain questions like "What were you doing when.... happened?", usually referring to a large, heavily mediatized event, have become a very important question in the history of the development of the collective memory.
Many people can remember what they were doing when certain internationally big media events occurred and these type of questions are usually used as a sort of milestone
in individual people's life. For example, "What were you doing when you heard that John Lennon
was shot?". Due to television repeats, these moments could be relived even long after the actual event happened. The introduction of video stores and video recorder
s in the 1980s, the Internet
in the 1990s and the DVD player
and Youtube
in the 2000s even increased the opportunity to view and check out famous and infamous movie and TV scenes.
Thanks to all these innovations certain scenes have become part of audiences' collective memory. This makes it easy for journalists, comedians, advertisers, politicians, etc. to make references to these scenes, knowing that a large audience will recognise and understand them without further explanation. For example, when president Ronald Reagan
concluded a speech on March 13, 1985 against the increase of taxes he said "Make my day". Most people in the audience and TV viewers understood the reference to the Clint Eastwood
film Sudden Impact
and laughed and cheered as a consequence of that. The dance moves from Michael Jackson
's music video for "Thriller"
have been repeatedly shown on TV so much that they are instantly recognizable and therefore imitated frequently for comedic effect in films, TV shows, commercials, etc.
Whenever a comedy show or film features a scene where someone is killed or threatened in a shower
, most people understand it as a parody of Psycho. Various cartoons from Bugs Bunny
to Shrek
have spoofed famous fairy tale
s, knowing that everybody is familiar with the original stories and will immediately laugh at every deviation. The roar of movie monster Godzilla
and Johnny Weissmuller
's Tarzan yell
have become instantly recognizable and easy to put into a context, even without the images.
Numerous TV shows and films such as The Simpsons
, Family Guy
, Scary Movie
, the Shrek
films, and the films of Mel Brooks
, have referenced, parodied, imitated and recreated these famous scenes, often to the point of overkill
. Certain observers, like Kenneth Tynan
in a quote from his diaries from October 19, 1975 have noted that due to the heavy rotation and repeats of all these famous film scenes, often even without their original context, they have become of the cultural consciousness. He wrote: "Nobody took into account the tremendous impact that would be made by the fact that films are permanent and easily accessible from childhood onward. As the sheer number of films piles up, their influence will increase, until we have a civilization entirely molded by cinematic values and behavior patterns." (Quoted from TYNAN, Kenneth, The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, Bloomsbury, 2001, page 66).
The influence of television scenes on collective memory has been noticeable with children who are able to quote lines and songs from commercials, films and television shows they have watched regularly. Some young children who have watched a large amount of television have been known to react in an unnatural way to certain situations, comparable with overacting
, because they recreate scenes they remember seeing in similar situations on television. There have been cases reported of people who've compared their own life too much with the romanticized, idealized life depicted in films and television series. They try to recreate the happy families, perfect love relationships, they remember seeing on television or in movies.
Not all scenes who were once collective memory are remembered as well today. Certain shows, commercials and films that were popular in one decade are shown less frequently on television in the next. Thus, certain scenes do not rest in the collective memory of the next generation. Many references in old Bugs Bunny
cartoons to Hollywood stars and radio shows who were famous in the 1940s, are almost obscure now to modern viewers. On the other hand certain scenes have remained in the collective memory, due to being so constantly repeated in other media and are well known even for people not familiar with the original film. For example, even people who never saw the film King Kong know that there is a scene in which the big gorilla climbs the Empire State Building
with a human girl in his hand. This is yet another negative evolution of the multireferential films and television shows.
Younger audiences, unfamiliar with the original subject being referenced in a contemporary film or TV series, do not recognize the reference and assume that, for instance a Twilight Zone
plot reference in The Simpsons
has been thought up by the creators of The Simpsons instead of the other way around. In some cases, references or parodies of older movies in contemporary films and TV shows are almost comparable to plagiarism
since they just mimic or imitate a famous scene frame-by-frame instead of adding a funny new element.
Maurice Halbwachs
Maurice Halbwachs was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory.Born in Reims, Halbwachs attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There he studied philosophy with Henri Bergson, who influenced him greatly. He aggregated in Philosophy in 1901...
. Collective memory can be shared, passed on and constructed by groups both small (e.g., a board of directors) and large (e.g., American culture). In many ways, collective memory parallels individual memory (e.g., better recall for pictures than for words), but also exhibits some key differences and features (e.g., cross-cueing)
Performance
Memory Groups remember more than individuals, as groups are able to draw on the knowledge and experience (i.e., memories) of all individuals present. For example, members of a group planning a tactical strike against another country are likely to come to a better decision when they work together, rather than alone. One member may be knowledgeable about the terrain and morale of the troops in the country where the strike is planned, while another may be knowledgeable about the home country's weaponry, and another may be knowledgeable about the home country's military morale. Akin to this example, when students are permitted to take examinations as a group, they usually outperform individuals, as each member of the group is knowledgeable in different areas.Information Gathering Groups are also able to acquire more information than individuals. As individuals often have widely differing experiences, backgrounds, personalities, etc., each can acquire a unique set of information that can be contributed to a group discussion.
Features of collective memory
Free-riding and Social loafing Group members do not remember as much as they have the capacity to remember, as group members engage in free-riding and social loafingSocial loafing
In the social psychology of groups, social loafing is the phenomenon of people exerting less effort to achieve a goal when they work in a group than when they work alone...
. When group members realize - be it implicitly or explicitly - that others will aid in the recall of information, they will put less effort into processing and storing the information. In some situations, these inadequacies in collective memory may be so great that groups are unable to recall previously-made decisions without the aid of a written record (group minutes).
Cross-cueing Information exchange among group members often helps individuals to remember things that they would not have remembered had they been working alone. In other words, the information provided by Person A may 'cue' memories in Person B. This phenomenon results in enhanced recall.
Transactive memory Members of a group often specialize, to a greater or lesser degree, in different areas. Transactive memory refers to the process by which information that must be remembered is distributed (either explicitly or implicitly) to members of the group who can lter be relied upon to provide the information when it is needed. For example, the weapons expert in a group may remember the specifications of a new semi-automatic rifle, while the scout may remember the layout of trenches at enemy lines.
Collective memory and memorialization
The collective memory of a nation is represented in part by the memorials it chooses to erect. Public memory is enshrined in memorials from the newly opened Holocaust memorialMemorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe , also known as the Holocaust Memorial , is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae", arranged in a...
in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a national memorial in Washington, D.C. It honors U.S. service members of the U.S. armed forces who fought in the Vietnam War, service members who died in service in Vietnam/South East Asia, and those service members who were unaccounted for during the War.Its...
in Washington DC. Whatever a nation chooses to memorialize in physical monument, or perhaps more significantly, what not to memorialize, is an indicator of the collective memory.
Collective memory is also sustained through a continuous production of representational forms. In our media age - and maybe particularly during the last decade of increasing digitization - this generates a flow of, and production of, second hand memories (see e.g. James E Young). Particular narratives and images are reproduced and reframed, yet also questioned and contested through new images and so forth. Collective memory today differs much from the collective memories of an oral culture, where no printing technique or transportation contributed to the production of imagined communities (see Benedict Anderson) where we come to share a sense of heritage and commonality with many human beings we have never met - as in the manner a citizen may feel a sort of 'kinship' with people of his nation, region or city.
The concept of collective memory, initially developed by Halbwachs, has been explored and expanded from various angles - a few of these are introduced below.
James E. Young has introduced the notion of 'collected memory' (opposed to collective memory), marking memory's inherently fragmented, collected and individual character, while Jan Assmann develops the notion of 'communicative memory', a variety of collective memory based on everyday communication. This form of memory is similar to the exchanges in an oral culture or the memories collected (and made collective) through oral history. As another subform of collective memories Assmann mentions forms detached from the everyday, it can be particular materialized and fixed points as, e.g. texts and monuments.
The theory of collective memory was also discussed by ex-Hiroshima resident and atomic bomb survivor, Kiyoshi Tanimoto in his tour of the United States as an attempt to rally support and funding for the reconstruction of his Memorial Methodist Church in Hiroshima. He theorized that the use of the atomic bomb had forever been added to the world's collective memory and would serve in the future as a warning against such devices. See John Hersey
John Hersey
John Richard Hersey was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and journalist considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling devices of the novel are fused with non-fiction reportage...
's Hiroshima
Hiroshima
is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu, the largest island of Japan. It became best known as the first city in history to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon when the United States Army Air Forces dropped an atomic bomb on it at 8:15 A.M...
novel.
The idea was also discussed more recently in The Celestine Prophecy
The Celestine Prophecy
The Celestine Prophecy is a 1993 novel by James Redfield that discusses various psychological and spiritual ideas which are rooted in many ancient Eastern Traditions and New Age spirituality. The main character of the novel undertakes a journey to find and understand a series of nine spiritual...
and subsequent novels written by James Redfield
James Redfield
James Redfield is an American author, lecturer, screenwriter and film producer. He is notable for his novel The Celestine Prophecy .-Biography:...
as a continuing process leading to the eventual trancendance of this plane of existence. The idea that a futuristic development of the collective unconscious
Collective unconscious
Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology, coined by Carl Jung. It is proposed to be a part of the unconscious mind, expressed in humanity and all life forms with nervous systems, and describes how the structure of the psyche autonomously organizes experience...
and collective memories of society allowing for a medium with which one can transcend ones existence is an idea expressed in certain variations of new age
New Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
religions.
Collective memory in mass media
The arrival of filmFilm
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
in the first half of the 20th century created many images, film scenes, news scenes, photographs, quotes, and songs, which became very familiar to regular moviegoers and remained in their collective memory. Examples could be the films of Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
and Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino was an Italian actor, and early pop icon. A sex symbol of the 1920s, Valentino was known as the "Latin Lover". He starred in several well-known silent films including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle and Son of the Sheik...
. During cinema visits, people could watch newsreel
Newsreel
A newsreel was a form of short documentary film prevalent in the first half of the 20th century, regularly released in a public presentation place and containing filmed news stories and items of topical interest. It was a source of news, current affairs and entertainment for millions of moviegoers...
s that brought them news stories from over the world. For the first time in history a mass audience was able to view certain stories, events, and scenes, all at the same time. They could all view how for instance the Hindenburg disaster
Hindenburg disaster
The Hindenburg disaster took place on Thursday, May 6, 1937, as the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, which is located adjacent to the borough of Lakehurst, New Jersey...
was caught on camera and see and remember these scenes all at once.
When television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
became a global mass entertainment medium in the 1950s and 1960s the collective memory of former cinema visitors increased when various films could be repeated endlessly and worldwide on television broadcasts. For example old films like The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)
The Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was directed primarily by Victor Fleming. Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf received credit for the screenplay, but there were uncredited contributions by others. The lyrics for the songs...
, King Kong
King Kong (1933 film)
King Kong is a Pre-Code 1933 fantasy monster adventure film co-directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, and written by Ruth Rose and James Ashmore Creelman after a story by Cooper and Edgar Wallace. The film tells of a gigantic island-dwelling apeman creature called Kong who dies in...
and cartoons like Looney Tunes
Looney Tunes
Looney Tunes is a Warner Bros. animated cartoon series. It preceded the Merrie Melodies series and was Warner Bros.'s first animated theatrical series. Since its first official release, 1930's Sinkin' in the Bathtub, the series has become a worldwide media franchise, spawning several television...
and Tom and Jerry
Tom and Jerry
Tom and Jerry are the cat and mouse cartoon characters that were evolved starting in 1939.Tom and Jerry also may refer to:Cartoon works featuring the cat and mouse so named:* The Tom and Jerry Show...
have been shown internationally and almost non stop on television channels. Hereby particular film scenes have become well-known, even to people who had not seen these films on their original cinematic release. The same applies for television shows like I Love Lucy
I Love Lucy
I Love Lucy is an American television sitcom starring Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance, and William Frawley. The black-and-white series originally ran from October 15, 1951, to May 6, 1957, on the Columbia Broadcasting System...
which have been repeated so often over the decades that certain episodes and scenes have become classics.
When newsreels in the cinema gradually made place for television news broadcasting
News broadcasting
News broadcasting is the broadcasting of various news events and other information via television, radio or internet in the field of broadcast journalism. The content is usually either produced locally in a radio studio or television studio newsroom, or by a broadcast network...
, it became a habit for mass audiences to watch the daily news on television. Worldwide this led to a new kind of collective memory where various news events could be shown much quicker than with the cinema News Reels
Newsreel
A newsreel was a form of short documentary film prevalent in the first half of the 20th century, regularly released in a public presentation place and containing filmed news stories and items of topical interest. It was a source of news, current affairs and entertainment for millions of moviegoers...
. Therefore certain filmed news stories could be shown on the same day they happened and even live during the broadcast itself. Millions of people have viewed the assassination of John F. Kennedy
Assassination of John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, was assassinated at 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas...
in 1963, the landing of Apollo 11
Apollo 11
In early 1969, Bill Anders accepted a job with the National Space Council effective in August 1969 and announced his retirement as an astronaut. At that point Ken Mattingly was moved from the support crew into parallel training with Anders as backup Command Module Pilot in case Apollo 11 was...
in 1969, the Wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana (1981) and the September 2001 attacks on their television. In fact, certain questions like "What were you doing when.... happened?", usually referring to a large, heavily mediatized event, have become a very important question in the history of the development of the collective memory.
Many people can remember what they were doing when certain internationally big media events occurred and these type of questions are usually used as a sort of milestone
Milestone
A milestone is one of a series of numbered markers placed along a road or boundary at intervals of one mile or occasionally, parts of a mile. They are typically located at the side of the road or in a median. They are alternatively known as mile markers, mileposts or mile posts...
in individual people's life. For example, "What were you doing when you heard that John Lennon
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...
was shot?". Due to television repeats, these moments could be relived even long after the actual event happened. The introduction of video stores and video recorder
Video recorder
A video recorder may be any of several related devices:*Digital video recorder ; Personal video recorder *DVD recorder*Videocassette recorder *Video tape recorder...
s in the 1980s, the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
in the 1990s and the DVD player
DVD player
A DVD player is a device that plays discs produced under both the DVD-Video and DVD-Audio technical standards, two different and incompatible standards. These devices were invented in 1997 and continue to thrive...
and Youtube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
in the 2000s even increased the opportunity to view and check out famous and infamous movie and TV scenes.
Thanks to all these innovations certain scenes have become part of audiences' collective memory. This makes it easy for journalists, comedians, advertisers, politicians, etc. to make references to these scenes, knowing that a large audience will recognise and understand them without further explanation. For example, when president Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
concluded a speech on March 13, 1985 against the increase of taxes he said "Make my day". Most people in the audience and TV viewers understood the reference to the Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood
Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide...
film Sudden Impact
Sudden Impact
Sudden Impact is a 1983 American crime thriller and the fourth film in the Dirty Harry series, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood...
and laughed and cheered as a consequence of that. The dance moves from Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson
Michael Joseph Jackson was an American recording artist, entertainer, and businessman. Referred to as the King of Pop, or by his initials MJ, Jackson is recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records...
's music video for "Thriller"
Thriller (music video)
Michael Jackson's Thriller is a 14-minute music video for the song of the same name released on December 2, 1983 and directed by John Landis, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jackson....
have been repeatedly shown on TV so much that they are instantly recognizable and therefore imitated frequently for comedic effect in films, TV shows, commercials, etc.
Whenever a comedy show or film features a scene where someone is killed or threatened in a shower
Shower
A shower is an area in which one bathes underneath a spray of water.- History :...
, most people understand it as a parody of Psycho. Various cartoons from Bugs Bunny
Bugs Bunny
Bugs Bunny is a animated character created in 1938 at Leon Schlesinger Productions, later Warner Bros. Cartoons. Bugs is an anthropomorphic gray rabbit and is famous for his flippant, insouciant personality and his portrayal as a trickster. He has primarily appeared in animated cartoons, most...
to Shrek
Shrek
Shrek is a 2001 American computer-animated fantasy comedy film directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, featuring the voices of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, and John Lithgow. Loosely based on William Steig's 1990 fairy tale picture book Shrek!...
have spoofed famous fairy tale
Fairy tale
A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...
s, knowing that everybody is familiar with the original stories and will immediately laugh at every deviation. The roar of movie monster Godzilla
Godzilla
is a daikaijū, a Japanese movie monster, first appearing in Ishirō Honda's 1954 film Godzilla. Since then, Godzilla has gone on to become a worldwide pop culture icon starring in 28 films produced by Toho Co., Ltd. The monster has appeared in numerous other media incarnations including video games,...
and Johnny Weissmuller
Johnny Weissmuller
Johnny Weissmuller was an Austro-Hungarian-born American swimmer and actor best known for playing Tarzan in movies. Weissmuller was one of the world's best swimmers in the 1920s, winning five Olympic gold medals and one bronze medal. He won fifty-two US National Championships and set sixty-seven...
's Tarzan yell
Tarzan yell
The Tarzan yell is the distinctive, ululating yell of the character Tarzan, as portrayed by actor Johnny Weissmuller in the films based on the character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, starting with Tarzan the Ape Man...
have become instantly recognizable and easy to put into a context, even without the images.
Numerous TV shows and films such as The Simpsons
The Simpsons
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...
, Family Guy
Family Guy
Family Guy is an American animated television series created by Seth MacFarlane for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series centers on the Griffins, a dysfunctional family consisting of parents Peter and Lois; their children Meg, Chris, and Stewie; and their anthropomorphic pet dog Brian...
, Scary Movie
Scary Movie
Scary Movie is a 2000 comedy-parody film directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, as part of Warner Bros. Entertainment. It is an American dark comedy which heavily parodies the horror, slasher, and mystery genres...
, the Shrek
Shrek (series)
The Shrek film series from DreamWorks Animation, based on William Steig's picture book, Shrek!, consists of four computer-animated films including: Shrek , Shrek 2 , Shrek the Third , and Shrek Forever After . A short 3D film, Shrek 4-D, which originally was a theme park ride, was released in 2003...
films, and the films of Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. He began his career as a stand-up comic and as a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows...
, have referenced, parodied, imitated and recreated these famous scenes, often to the point of overkill
Overkill
Overkill is the use of excessive force or action that goes further than is necessary to achieve its goal.-Nuclear weapons:Overkill is especially used to refer to a destructive nuclear capacity exceeding the amount needed to destroy an enemy...
. Certain observers, like Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial English theatre critic and writer.-Early life:...
in a quote from his diaries from October 19, 1975 have noted that due to the heavy rotation and repeats of all these famous film scenes, often even without their original context, they have become of the cultural consciousness. He wrote: "Nobody took into account the tremendous impact that would be made by the fact that films are permanent and easily accessible from childhood onward. As the sheer number of films piles up, their influence will increase, until we have a civilization entirely molded by cinematic values and behavior patterns." (Quoted from TYNAN, Kenneth, The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, Bloomsbury, 2001, page 66).
The influence of television scenes on collective memory has been noticeable with children who are able to quote lines and songs from commercials, films and television shows they have watched regularly. Some young children who have watched a large amount of television have been known to react in an unnatural way to certain situations, comparable with overacting
Overacting
Overacting is the exaggeration of gestures and speech when acting. It may be unintentional, particularly in the case of a bad actor, or be required for the role. For the latter, it is commonly used in comical situations or to stress the evil characteristics of a villain...
, because they recreate scenes they remember seeing in similar situations on television. There have been cases reported of people who've compared their own life too much with the romanticized, idealized life depicted in films and television series. They try to recreate the happy families, perfect love relationships, they remember seeing on television or in movies.
Not all scenes who were once collective memory are remembered as well today. Certain shows, commercials and films that were popular in one decade are shown less frequently on television in the next. Thus, certain scenes do not rest in the collective memory of the next generation. Many references in old Bugs Bunny
Bugs Bunny
Bugs Bunny is a animated character created in 1938 at Leon Schlesinger Productions, later Warner Bros. Cartoons. Bugs is an anthropomorphic gray rabbit and is famous for his flippant, insouciant personality and his portrayal as a trickster. He has primarily appeared in animated cartoons, most...
cartoons to Hollywood stars and radio shows who were famous in the 1940s, are almost obscure now to modern viewers. On the other hand certain scenes have remained in the collective memory, due to being so constantly repeated in other media and are well known even for people not familiar with the original film. For example, even people who never saw the film King Kong know that there is a scene in which the big gorilla climbs the Empire State Building
Empire State Building
The Empire State Building is a 102-story landmark skyscraper and American cultural icon in New York City at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street. It has a roof height of 1,250 feet , and with its antenna spire included, it stands a total of 1,454 ft high. Its name is derived...
with a human girl in his hand. This is yet another negative evolution of the multireferential films and television shows.
Younger audiences, unfamiliar with the original subject being referenced in a contemporary film or TV series, do not recognize the reference and assume that, for instance a Twilight Zone
The Twilight Zone
The Twilight Zone is an American television anthology series created by Rod Serling. Each episode is a mixture of self-contained drama, psychological thriller, fantasy, science fiction, suspense, or horror, often concluding with a macabre or unexpected twist...
plot reference in The Simpsons
The Simpsons
The Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...
has been thought up by the creators of The Simpsons instead of the other way around. In some cases, references or parodies of older movies in contemporary films and TV shows are almost comparable to plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
since they just mimic or imitate a famous scene frame-by-frame instead of adding a funny new element.
See also
- MemeMemeA meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena...
- Collective intelligenceCollective intelligenceCollective intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks....
, Distributed cognitionDistributed cognitionDistributed cognition is a psychological theory developed in the mid 1980s by Edwin Hutchins. Using insights from sociology, cognitive science, and the psychology of Vygotsky it emphasizes the social aspects of cognition. It is a framework that involves the coordination between individuals,... - Collective consciousnessCollective consciousnessCollective consciousness was a term coined by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim to refer to the shared beliefs and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society...
- Selective omissionSelective omissionThe selective omission is a memory bias. In collective memory it's a bias where a group work to forget some traumatic memories. This expressions is often used for post-war rewriting of history in a more coherent way according to local stereotypes and moral values. That's denying war atrocities...
- biaises to taboo some elements of a collective memoryCollective memoryCollective memory refers to the shared pool of information held in the memories of two or more members of a group, and was coined by the philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. Collective memory can be shared, passed on and constructed by groups both small and large...
.
General studies
- Jan AssmannJan AssmannJan Assmann is a German Egyptologist who was born in Langelsheim.-Education and teaching:He went to school in Lübeck and Heidelberg before going on to study Egyptology, Classical Archeology and Greek Studies in Munich, Heidelberg, Paris and Göttingen...
: Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, Stanford UP 2005 - Maurice HalbwachsMaurice HalbwachsMaurice Halbwachs was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory.Born in Reims, Halbwachs attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There he studied philosophy with Henri Bergson, who influenced him greatly. He aggregated in Philosophy in 1901...
: On Collective Memory, Univ of Chicago Press, 1992, ISBN 0226115968 - Pennebaker, James W.James W. PennebakerJames W. Pennebaker is an American social psychologist. He is the Centennial Liberal Arts Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers...
Paez, Dario. Rime, Bernard: Collective memory of political events : social psychological perspectives, Mahwah, New Jersey. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 1997.
Case studies
- Olick, Jeffrey K.: The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility, Routledge, 2007
- Fritsch, Matthias: The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida, State University of New York Press, 2006
- Olick, Jeffrey K.: In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat,1943-1949, University of Chicago Press, 2005.
- Cole, Jennifer: Forget colonialism? : sacrifice and the art of memory in Madagascar, Berkeley [etc.] : Univ. of California Press, 2001 http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9281.php
- Lipsitz, George: Time Passages : Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press: 2001.
- Neal, Arthur G.: National Trauma and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century. Armonk, N.Y. M.E. Sharpe: 1998
Handbooks
- Olick, Jeffrey K., Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds. The Collective Memory Reader. Oxford University Press: 2011.
- Prucha, Francis Paul. Handbook for Research in American History: A Guide to Bibliographies and Other Reference Works. University of Nebraska Press: 1987
- Encyclopedia of American Social History. Ed. Mary Clayton et al. 3 vols. New York: Scribner, 1993.
- Blazek, Ron and Perrault, Anna. United States History: A Selective Guide to Information Sources. Englewood, Colorado. Libraries Unlimited: 1994
External links
- For a Sociology of Collective Memory short discussion with bibliography of French works by Marie-Claire Lavabre, Research Director at CNRS - Centre Marc Bloch (CEVIPOF)
- Interdisciplinary Study of Memory Site by John Sutton, Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney. Links to many bibliographies
- "History in the Public Sphere: Analyzing Collective M emory" course by Harold Marcuse, History Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. With bibliography and links to readings.