Collective Memory in a Post-Broadcast World

Abstract

If journalism plays an important role in the generation and maintenance of social memory, then the current transformation of journalism has important implications for the ways in which society remembers. Earlier research has described journalism’s role in the creation and maintenance of shared memory (for example, Edy, 1999; My, 2006; Lang and Lang, 1989; Zandberg, Meyers and Neiger, 2012; Zelizer, 1992). Other works have described the role of mass media more generally in shared memory processes (for example, Edgerton and Rollins, 2001; Kammen, 1978; Meyers, Zandberg and Neiger, 2009). However, recent scholarship has also documented a media environment, and particularly a journalism environment, that is rapidly changing. The mass media audience of the twentieth century has transmuted into the fragmented media audiences of the twenty-first (Turow, 1997). The commercial model of news production, predominant for over a century, is said to be rapidly collapsing (McChesney and Nichols, 2010; McChesney and Pickard, 2011), and the primacy of journalism as a source of political information is increasingly challenged by alternative information sources (Williams and Delli Carpini, 2011). As journalism’s role in society changes, its role in shared memory processes may be changing as well.