Preserving Our Memory of the First Draft of History

Rio de Janeiro.
The next keynote speaker at SBPJor is Marcos Palacios (whose speech I hear in live translation, so we’ll see how this liveblog goes…). Marcos suggests that there are hurrahs as well as uh-ohs in the transformation of journalism for the digital media environment: in the first place, as we venture into a digital environment, we learn that media have memory – that there are more uses for yesterday’s newspaper than to wrap today’s fish.

News has been called the first draft of history, of course – journalism has an input into both historiography, and into the formation of the collective memory of societies. Such journalistic memory was only able to be used in a limited fashion during the pre-digital age; today, it is much more widely and permanently available. The place of memory in journalism production is growing, therefore; memory becomes the fabric that builds the journalism we are coming to know today, and is embodied in it. This enables historical analogies and nostalgia, for example, but also has many other uses.

Memory provides context – it enables a journalism that contextualises, and one that is contextualised. The first element in journalism which enables this is the hypertextual form – it enables the creation of links between different chunks of information. This does not mean that print and other older forms of journalism have been overcome; such forms remain strongly present, but they are embedded into a new media ecology containing various journalistic media, and used to distribute this new media memory.

What is known is that journalistic activity mediates; it does not simply bear witness. This now takes place in three key ways: first, the freeing of communication through new media means that the past is made present to the reader, and combined with current journalistic activity; second, personal archives are added to and combined with the memory banks of the media themselves, and readers are able to create such archives from media content as well (they are no longer reliant on institutional archives); finally, reader commentary are able to be combined with journalistic content, and this combination extends to the archives of journalistic content as well (this is similar to notes in the margins of library books, which become part of library archives by stealth rather than design). This means that the media agenda is combined with the public agenda as expressed in readers’ comments.

But who reads all those comments? For the purpose of public memory, this does not matter; whether comments are read or responded to does not affect the fact that these comments become part of the archive, and this matters: what is created is a memory of the Zeitgeist of the time, much as marginal comments in ancient documents provide us with an insight into the Zeitgeist at the time of their creation and use.

But there are also problematic consequences of these changes. The first of these is fragmentation: a long tail of memory emerges, and the question becomes where collective memory exists in this fragmented environment. How are memories assembled – do they become a matter of ‘elective affinity’, as Arjun Appadurai has put it? Further, do we see a cannibalisation of local memories by global memory, as Barbie Zelitzer has said – does the general global perspective overpower and replace specific local views?

And on the other hand, what about the problem of the persistence of memory? Does it become impossible in a digital environment to forget information, to forget memories, so that we are forever confronted with old, out-of-date, erroneous information which may be accidentally misunderstood or deliberately misconstrued? Will we be able to correct such misinformation, and to delete its traces?

The greatest problem of all, in fact, is storage, however: where do all of these archives go? Where are they stored and preserved? Who are the gatekeepers of these memories, selecting and using this journalistic memory? Where do these materials go; who looks after it; how can we retrieve it in the future; who maintains its context; does it all just disappear in the black hole of ‘the cloud’? There is a lot of RAM memory available to us, but not a lot of ROM memory – how can we maintain this huge library of memory?

We feel compelled to store the images of present times for the future, well beyond the few landmarks left by our distant ancestors, but we have a hard time doing so – as much as it is part of our nature to remember things, so is it also part of our nature to forget.