Van Dijck - Mediated Memories in The Digital Age

mediated memories in the digital age
Cultural Memory
in
the
Present
Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

MEDIATED MEMORIES IN THE
DIGITAL AGE
José van Dijck
stanford university press

stanford, california
2007
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of
Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dijck, José van.

Mediated memories in the digital age / José van Dijck.
p. cm. — (Cultural memory in the present)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-5623-5 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-8047-5624-2 (paper)
1. Image processing—Digital techniques 2. Multimedia systems.
3. Memory. I. Title.
TA1637.D57 2007
153.1'3—dc22
2007008641
Typeset by Westchester Book Group in 11/13.5 Garamond

They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and ex-
iles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no pur-
pose. Even the past, of which they thought incessantly, had a savor
only of regret. . . . Hostile to the past, impatient of the present,
and cheated of the future . . . the only way of escaping from that
intolerable leisure was to set the trains running again in one’s
imagination.
—Albert Camus, The Plague, 1946
Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
1. Mediated Memories as a Conceptual Tool 1

2. Memory Matters in the Digital Age 27
3. Writing the Self 53
4. Record and Hold 77
5. Pictures of Life, Living Pictures 98
6. Projecting the Family’s Future Past 122
7. From Shoebox to Digital Memory Machine 148
8. Epilogue 170
Notes 183
Bibliography 217
Index 229
Preface
In the summer of 2003, I bought myself a digital camera; not exactly

an early adaptor, I had followed the advice of relatives and friends who
lauded its creative potential, assuring it would give a new impulse to my
sluggish career as a snapshot photographer. Within less than a month,
I had taken a couple of hundred pictures, not counting the images I had al-
ready removed from the camera or those I had deleted from my hard disk.
My acquisition sparked new enthusiasm, particularly when I started to sort
out and scan some old laminated pictures that had been tucked away in
unsorted batches in several shoeboxes. Photoshop software enabled me to
doctor, scan, and recombine old pictures into surprising contexts and
opened up new vistas for future camera use. In addition to photographs,
hundreds of music files on my hard disk were testimony to a previous dig-
ital discovery—the file-sharing system Kazaa—that had unlaced a peculiar
craving for old songs, which I then transferred to my MP3 player. These
songs, in turn, led me to dig up my almost-forgotten boxes containing
handwritten letters, diaries, and notes—a discovery that made me wonder
whether I should scan these items into my computer before they were
completely unreadable as a result of fading ink. And finally, I had to face
the hundreds of old videotapes sitting on the shelves of a large closet,
gathering dust after my VCR had broken down, which prompted me to
switch to a DVD recorder. The prospect of having to select and transfer
hundreds of old music albums, photos, (home) videos, and letters caused a
mixture of excitement and weariness. Excitement stirred because of the
potential for uninhibited, nostalgic yearning while sorting through these
analog items and perhaps the chance to recycle some in the creation of
new memorable insights and objects. Weariness set in because I realized
that such a rescue-my-past-operation would not only be time consuming,
xii Preface
but it also would involve agonizing decisions about what items to store and
what to throw away after digitization.
At first, I tackled the problem as a practical one: a mess of objects in
need of systematic sorting and filing. When I sat down to think about it,
the problem was not the mess in my shoebox and by extension on my
desktop; these objects and technologies generated questions concerning
memory and media that were far more intricate than I had initially
thought. The contents of my shoebox indeed posed the challenge of fitting
digital memories into analog frames for storage and retrieval, but beyond
my idiosyncratic dilemmas, it raised poignant concerns about the relation
between material objects and autobiographical memory, between media
technologies and our habits and rituals of remembrance. My collection of
personal items made me reflect on how we present and preserve images of
ourselves to others; it caused me to speculate on how private collections tap
into the much larger phenomenon of communal rites of storing and re-
trieving. I wondered whether my switch from analog to digital memory
objects was the result of a general technological-commercial push or the
desire to be more creatively engaged with my treasured artifacts. The
microuniverse of my shoebox opened up a Pandora’s box of unexpected
philosophical questions pertaining to the nature, culture, and politics of
what I dubbed “mediated memories.” Why and how do we create and save
mediated items for later reminiscence? What is the function of mediated
memories in our personal lives? What is the role of media technologies and
material objects in capturing both individual and collective memory? Are
analog and digital objects interchangeable in the making, storing, and
recalling of memories? Do digital objects change our inscription and re-
membrance of lived experience, and do they affect the memory process in
our brains?
Articulating these questions was a first step toward acknowledging
the complexity of the term I had casually coined. “Mediated memories”
refers to both to the concrete objects in my shoebox and a mental concept—
a concept that encompasses aspects of mind and body as well as of tech-
nology and culture. I also realized that memory and media both comprise
vast and exhaustively mined research subjects, to the extent that the terms
themselves are at risk of becoming empty signifiers. To say that human
memory is a complex problem is an understatement; it is such a daunting,
intricate object of research that generations of scholars can hardly be
Preface xiii
expected to map its mechanisms. Academics from a variety of disciplinary

backgrounds, from the biomedical sciences to cultural theory, examine
how and why we remember and which basic mechanisms scaffold our pro-
cesses of recollection. Neurobiologists delve into the operational physiol-
ogy of memory functions as they relate to human nature. Basic research
into genetic, neurological, and cognitive aspects of the brain helps explain
the effects of injuries and disease on different types of memory. A small
portion of this research targets autobiographical memory and the role of
emotion in personal reminiscing. Autobiographical memory historically
has been the province of psychologists, who examine its working as an as-
pect of human behavior. Cognitive philosophers and social constructivists
point at the importance of materiality and technology—particularly media
technologies and objects—when addressing the issue of memory. Perspec-
tives magnifying memory as a feature of human culture prevail in the hu-
manities, most notably in history and cultural studies. In recent years,
historians have frequently commented upon the role of media in interlink-
ing our past and present, whereas cultural theorists have engaged with
questions of identity and collective memory in the wake of major histori-
cal changes, such as exile, war, or diaspora.
In facing such a complex subject as human memory, it is helpful to
break apart the components of nature, behavior, materiality, and culture
and to scrutinize them in isolation. But it is equally useful, at some point,
to put them back together again and acknowledge their conjunction. The
question of memory ties together the intricacies of the brain with the dy-
namics of social behavior and the multilayered density of material and
social culture. The concrete contents of my shoebox, caught in a limbo be-
tween analog and digital materialization, provides a window onto contem-
porary debates addressing the relation between self and others, material
and virtual, private and public, individual and collective. Mediated Memo-
ries aims to theorize our personal shoeboxes by turning them into a prism—
a conceptual tool through which we can understand larger transformations
currently at work in our culture. These larger transformations include but
are not restricted to the issue of digitization; digitization only partly reveals
the complex interconnections between mind, technology, and culture.
Before taking on specific, concrete examples of shoebox contents,
I will first sketch the theoretical and paradigmatic scope of this book. The
first chapter interrogates the notion of cultural memory and the role of
xiv Preface
media in its formation. Media are pivotal to the construction of individual

and collective identity—creative acts and products through which people
make sense of their lives and the lives of others and connect past to future.
The integration of media in the construction of memory has urged social
scientists and cultural theorists to define the “mediation of memory,” a
concept that is useful but often proves to be inconsistent when deployed to
explain the mutual shaping of individual and collective memory. “Medi-
ated memories,” a modified version of the mediation concept, aims to
mend its conceptual flaws.
Chapter 2 addresses the “matter” memory is made of. The genetic,
cellular, and cognitive dimensions of human memory are favored subjects
for neurobiologists and cognitive scientists; recent research has yielded
groundbreaking insights in the mutability of autobiographical memory.
Philosophers of mind and social constructivists emphasize the importance
of memory’s material and technological dimensions in addition to its
physiological strata. And cultural theorists concentrate on the significance
of sociocultural practices in the manifestation of remembrance. In other
words, mediated memories are concurrently embodied in the human brain
or mind, enabled by technologies and objects, and embedded in social and
cultural contexts of their use. Moving from a culture in which analog
memory objects (photographs, diaries, home videos, etc.) prevail to a situ-
ation where digital objects become the norm, the questions of why and
how memory matters become even more poignant. Dimensions of multi-
disciplinarity and multimediality are etched into the model of mediated
memories introduced in Chapter 1 and expanded in Chapter 2; this model
enables us to analyze cultural memory in transition.
The next four chapters take on specific types of contents filling our
contemporary shoeboxes, each concentrating on a particular sensory mode
privileged by succinct analog media. Words, sounds, still images, and mov-
ing images constitute the dominant ingredients, respectively, of diaries,
audiotapes, photographs, and home movies or videos—analog items that
are presently complemented by digital multimedia forms. Chapter 3 fo-
cuses on diaries and lifelogs—a type of weblog considered the digital vari-
ant of paper diaries. Long regarded as a reflective and strictly private genre,
paper diaries always also had a communicative and public function. These
days, the vastly popular cultural practice of blogging and the numerous
possibilities for publishing lifelogs online bolster the diary’s previously
Preface xv
understated communicative and public functions. The Internet, with its

intrinsic propensity toward sharing and instant communication, seems to
undercut and yet enhance traditional diary features. Seen in this light,
we can trace how new digital technologies are actually transforming our
notions of privacy and openness, but they also cast a different light on the
relation between personal memory and lived experience.
The next chapter, “Record and Hold,” deals with the audio compo-
nent of mediated memories. Recorded popular music is vital to the con-
struction of personal memory and individual identity as well as to the
formation of collective memory and musical heritage, a heritage that has
grown over time and continues to evolve. Chapter 4 examines the role of
popular music in the formation of individual remembering and collective
heritage. Remembering through music is more than just an individual act:
we need public spaces to share narratives and build a creative commons.
Chapters 5 and 6 attend to visual modes of perception, as embodied
by instruments for capturing individual lives in still and moving images.
Photography has probably been the favorite medium for arresting life in
its formative moments—a vain attempt to freeze time as the future un-
folds. Besides its traditional function to confine the past in pictures, digital
cameras are now also deployed to communicate in the language of pho-
tography and transform the act of memory into an act of experience. The
malleability of memory also forms the focus of Chapter 6, but whereas the
previous chapter focuses on still images of individuals, this one highlights
how family life is captured in moving images. Generations of instruments
(8 mm movies, video, digital video, and webcams) have delivered moving
pictures of changing mores in generations of families. While digital equip-
ment allows the skewering of diverse historical home modes, it also divulges
its inherent technological ability to shape and manipulate memory.
Finally, after reviewing four concrete instances of transforming me-
diated memories, I return to the problem of storing and retrieving items
from the shoebox and desktop. The search for an all-encompassing, uni-
versal memory machine is not exactly new; Chapter 7 recounts how memory
machines have been the focus of historical and contemporary endeavors to
tackle the problem of information overload in the context of personal
lives. Computer scientists and engineers have proposed a range of techno-
visionary solutions and also embroider on historical utopias by designing
new fantastic projects that supposedly meet our desire for a comprehensive
xvi Preface
memory apparatus. I conclude by sketching how digitization, multimedia-

tization, and “googlization” may redefine memory, the performance of
which was once consigned to the brain or, in contrast, boarded out to the
machine.
In these seven chapters, I hope to provide a better understanding of
cultural memory, how and why it matters, and what it means in an era of
technological, social, and cultural transformation. What started out as a
practical problem—the reorganization of my private shoebox filled with
memory objects—gradually turned into an academic investigation, spark-
ing profound epistemological, ontological, and pragmatic questions and
resulting in the design of a theoretical model that helps analyze concrete
instances of cultural memory. I have no illusion that this book provides ul-
timate answers to all these questions, but it is a modest proposal to reartic-
ulate the changing meaning of cultural memory at a time of transition and
bring together a number of diverging disciplinary perspectives to open up
new outlooks on this fascinating subject.
Acknowledgments
By the time one writes the acknowledgments, a book has almost be-
come a material artifact, and the writing process is about to become a
memory. But the ultimate memory product is full of traces of collabora-
tion, inspiration, and affection. I would like to extend my gratefulness to
some of the people who have contributed to this book.
Students and colleagues at the Department of Media Studies at the
University of Amsterdam have offered invaluable support and stimuli. My
graduate students always shared my enthusiasm for this topic, and if not,
they never showed it. Thanks to my dear colleagues Thomas Elsaesser,
Frank van Vree, and Eric Ketelaar for co-teaching a seminar on media and
memory. Patricia Pisters subtly mended the Deleuze-gaps in my education
and has proven a wonderful ally. Without the department’s support staff,
life would be half as memorable: Jobien Kuiper; Piet van Wijk, Henny
Bouwmeester, who also provided valuable administrative support; and
Joost Bolten, who is a Word whiz. Being the chair of such a great team of
faculty and staff has been an honor and a total delight; the department’s
growth and flourishing in the past five years was the accomplishment of a
superb group.
Some chapters in this book have been the outcome of or input for
various projects. I thank Karin Bijsterveld for our collaboration in Sound
Technologies and Cultural Practice, a project funded by the Netherlands
Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Sonja Neef’s organizing qual-
ities in our handwriting project cannot be praised enough. American col-
leagues, most notably Richard Grusin, Hugh Crawford, Jonathan Sterne,
Phillip Thurtle, Robert Mitchell, Herman Gray, George Lipsitz, and Lisa
Cartwright offered valuable criticism to early drafts or lectures on this
topic.
xviii Acknowledgments
Some chapters in this book have roots in journal articles or collec-

tions of articles I have written. I have used parts of the following previ-
ously published materials: “Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory
as an Object of Cultural Analysis.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cul-
tural Studies 18 (2004): 261–277; “Memory Matters in the Digital Age.”
Configurations 12 (2006): 349–373; “Composing the Self: Of Diaries and
Lifelogs.” Fibreculture 3 (2004); “Record and Hold: Popular Music be-
tween Personal and Collective Memory.” Critical Studies in Media Com-
munication 25, no 5 (2006): 357–375; “Digitized Memories: The Computer
as Personal Memory Machine.” New Media and Society 7, no. 2 (2005):
291–312; “Future Memories: The Construction of Cinematic Hindsight.”
In Theory, Culture and Society (forthcoming). I thank all anonymous refer-
ees for their constructive comments.
Reviewers and editors at Stanford University Press showed confi-
dence in this project from the beginning; thanks to Norris Pope for his en-
couragement and Deborah Masi for her editorial support. Mieke Bal has
been more than a wonderful series editor; she has also been a longtime role
model and intellectual source of inspiration.
California and Santa Cruz provided the geographical subtext to this
book, the larger part of which was written in Craig Reinarman’s lovely
house, providing a second home; the idyllic surroundings of the University
of California–Santa Cruz campus and the hospitality of the Sociology De-
partment’s faculty in the spring of 2005 substantially contributed to my
happiness.
I have long depleted my vocabulary to express gratitude toward Ton,
so I will keep it simple this time: I owe you. This book is dedicated to my
sister Ria, who witnessed its progress in California but did not live to see it
in print. She will be etched forever in my memory, with immense fondness
and deep respect.
amsterdam, january 2, 2007
1
Mediated Memories as
a Conceptual Tool
Many people nurture a shoebox in which they store a variety of items

signaling their pasts: photos, albums, letters, diaries, clippings, notes, and so
forth. Add audio and video tape recordings to this collection as well as all
digital counterparts of these cherished items, and you have what I call “me-
diated memories.” These items mediate not only remembrances of things
past; they also mediate relationships between individuals and groups of any
kind (such as a family, school classes, and scouting clubs), and they are
made by media technologies (everything from pencils and cassette recorders
to computers and digital cameras). We commonly cherish our mediated
memories as a formative part of our autobiographical and cultural identi-
ties; the accumulated items typically reflect the shaping of an individual in
a historical time frame. But besides their personal value, collections of me-
diated memories raise interesting questions about a person’s identity in a
specific culture at a certain moment in time.
Putting these “shoebox” collections at the center of a theoretical and
analytical inquiry, this chapter investigates two questions and one concept.
First, what is personal cultural memory and how does it relate to collective
identity and memory? We can distinguish—though not separate—the con-
struction of autobiographical memory as it is grounded in individual psy-
ches from the social structures and cultural conventions that inform it.
Personal (re)collections are often subsumed as building blocks of collective
history rather than considered in their own right. Personal cultural memory
2 Mediated Memories as a Conceptual Tool
emphasizes the value of items as “mediators” between individuals and col-

lectivity, while concurrently signifying tensions between private and pub-
lic. The growing importance of media technologies to the construction of
personal remembrance gives rise to a second pertinent question: what ex-
actly is the nature of memory’s mediation? Media technologies and ob-
jects, far from being external instruments for “holding” versions of the
past, help constitute a sense of past—both in terms of our private lives and
of history at large. Memory and media have both been referred to meta-
phorically as reservoirs, holding our past experiences and knowledge for
future use. But neither memories nor media are passive go-betweens: their
mediation intrinsically shapes the way we build up and retain a sense of in-
dividuality and community, of identity and history.
Therefore, I introduce the concept of mediated memories not only
to account for the intricate connection between personal collections and
collectivity but also to help theorize the mutual shaping of memory and
media. By defining and refining this concept into an analytical tool, I hope
to turn the items in our private shoeboxes into valuable objects for cultural
analysis. As private collections, mediated memories form sites where the
personal and the collective meet, interact, and clash; from these encounters
we may derive important cultural knowledge about the construction of
historical and contemporaneous selves in the course of time: How do our
media tools mold our process of remembering and vice versa? How does
remembrance affect the way we deploy media devices?
Personal Cultural Memory
The study of what constitutes personal memory has traditionally

been the domain of neuroscientists, psychologists, and cognitive theorists.
We commonly think of memory as something we have or lack; studies of
memory are concerned with our ability to remember or our proclivity to
forget things. The majority of studies on memory in the area of psychol-
ogy deal with our cognitive abilities for recall, and out of those studies, a
fair number concentrate on autobiographical or personal memory.1 The
interconnection of memory and self, psychologists state, is crucial to any
human being’s development. Autobiographical memories are needed to
build a notion of personhood and identity, and our minds work to create a
consistent set of identity “records,” scaffolding the formation of identity
Mediated Memories as a Conceptual Tool 3
that evolves over the years. The development of an autobiographical self is

partly organized under genomic and biological control, and part of it is
regulated by the environment—ranging from models of individual behav-
ior to cultural rites. Remembering is vital to our well-being, because with-
out autobiographical memories we would have no sense of past or future,
and we would lack any sense of continuity. Our image of who we are,
mentally and physically, is based on long-term remembrance of facts,
emotions, and experiences; that self-image is never stable but is subject to
constant remodeling because our perceptions of who we are change
along with our projections and desires of who we want to be. As cognitive
scientists argue, the key aspect of self-growth is to balance lived past
with anticipated future.2 Without the capability to form autobiograph-
ical memories—a defect that could happen as a result of partial brain
damage—we are basically unable to create a sense of continuity in our
personhood.
Grounded in the discourses of behavioral or social psychology, mem-
ory is also central to constructing a sense of a continuity between our
selves and others. American psychologist Susan Bluck contends that auto-
biographical memory has three main functions: to preserve a sense of be-
ing a coherent person over time, to strengthen social bonds by sharing
personal memories, and to use past experience to construct models to un-
derstand inner worlds of self and others.3 Reminiscence allows people to re-
construct their lives through the looking glass of the present, and “cognitive
editing” basically helps to bring one’s present views into accord with the
past. Of these three functions—self-continuity, communicative function,
and directive function—Bluck regards the second as the most important
one: people share individual experiences to make conversation more truth-
ful, to elicit emphatic responses, or to develop intimacy and social bonds.
In autobiographical memory, the self meets the social, as personal memo-
ries are often articulated by communicating them to others.
Expanding and refining Bluck’s definition of autobiographical mem-
ory, psychologist Katherine Nelson identifies a cultural notion of self, in
addition to the cognitive, social, and other levels of self-understanding psy-
chologists have long recognized.4 A cultural sense of self emerges around
five to seven years of age, a developmental stage where children start to
“make contrasts between the ideal self portrayed by the culture and the
actual self as understood.”5 A child’s autobiographical memory evolves as a
culturally framed consciousness, where personal narratives constantly inter-

mingle with other stories: “Personal memories, which had been encapsu-
lated within the individual, become transformed through verbal narratives
into cultural memory, incorporating a cultural belief system.”6 A culturally
framed autobiographical memory integrates the sociocultural with the per-
sonal, and the self that emerges from this process is explicitly and implicitly
shaped by its environment’s norms and values. As Nelson remarks, the nar-
ratives that confront children—fairy tales told by parents and teachers, or
stories they watch on television—are an important factor in their develop-
ment. Children test their sense of self against the communal narratives they
are exposed to, either through verbal reports or via television or video. Even
though some cognitive and developmental studies on autobiographical
memory touch upon the important intersection of individual psychology
and socializing culture, few psychologists specify the role of culture in rela-
tion to memory. Wang and Brockmeier eminently expound on the interplay
between memory, self, and culture, arguing that autobiographical remem-
bering manifests itself “through narrative forms and models that are cultur-
ally shaped and, in turn, shape the remembering culturally.”7 Even if (social)
psychologists acknowledge the dynamic relationship between memory and
self to be integrated in the larger fabric of a culture, and even if they affirm
that conceptions of self are inscribed in various material and symbolic
ways, the role (media) objects play in the process of remembering remains
largely unexamined. Understandably but regrettably, psychologists seem to
think those questions are the proper domain of anthropologists or media
scholars.
And yet, opening up sociopsychological perspectives on autobio-
graphical memory to insights in cultural theory and media studies may
turn out to be mutually beneficial. Let me elucidate this by elaborating a
simple domestic scene from everyday life. A fifteen-month-old toddler at-
tempts to stand on his own two feet and take his first cautious steps. His
parents are thrilled, and they converse about their relief over this happen-
ing. The delighted father brings out his video camera to capture the tod-
dler’s effort on tape; that same evening, the proud mother verbally reports
the first-step achievement to the grandparents. Snapshots of the child’s de-
velopmental milestone, complemented by a few lines of explanation, sup-
plement the latest update on the family’s website. The parents mark the event
through various activities: telling stories, taking pictures, and composing an
account help to interpret the event and communicate its significance to

others. They concurrently produce material artifacts that may assist
them—and their offspring—to recall the experience at a later moment in
time, perhaps in different circumstances or contexts.
The autobiographical memory at work in this instance consists of
several stages and layers—aspects that can be accentuated or eclipsed in
consonance with respective academic interests. Psychologists center on how
the parents interpret, communicate, and later recall baby’s first steps.
Mental frames and cognitive schemes help parents evaluate the event: they
compare their own baby’s achievement to infants’ development in general.
The average baby starts walking at twelve months, but this one is slower.
Parents relate their experience in a narrative framework that places the
event in the spectrum of their own lives and that of others. (How old was
I when I started to walk? How old was the baby’s sister? How slow or fast
do babies in this family start walking?) Sharing their oral report with
grandparents helps parents determine the significance of what happened,
but it also sets the stage for later reminiscence: interpretation and narration
form the mental frames by which the experience can be retrieved from
memory at a later stage. Memory work thus involves a complex set of re-
cursive activities that shape our inner worlds, reconciling past and present,
allowing us to make sense of the world around us, and constructing an
idea of continuity between self and others—the three functions Bluck de-
scribes, as noted earlier.
Cultural theorists considering this scene may shift the center of
gravity and emphasize the way in which the parents record, share, and later
reminisce about baby’s first steps using various media. Recording the event
through video, pictures, or a written account enhances its actual experi-
ence. Memory work involves the production of objects—in this case
snapshots and video footage—with a double purpose: to document and
communicate what happened. These items also portend future recall: for
the parents to remind them of this occasion and for the baby to form a
picture of what life looked like before his ability to register memories in
the mind’s eye. Later interpretations invariably revise the meaning of
memories, regardless of the presence of hard evidence in the form of pic-
tures or videos. In hindsight, baby’s-first-step video may be viewed as an
early sign of his lazy character, but it may also provide evidence of an
emerging disability that went unnoticed at the time of recording.
Evidently, the same scene gives rise to two sets of inquiries into
memory formation, each highlighting different aspects, and yet, the per-
sonal and cultural can hardly be disentangled because there is a constant
productive tension between our (personal) inclinations to stake out certain
events and the (social) frameworks through which we do so—between the
(individual) activities of remembering and the (cultural) products of auto-
biographical recall. Acts and products of memory are far from arbitrary. In
Western culture, filming and photographing baby’s first steps are consid-
ered common ritualized attempts to freeze and store a milestone in a hu-
man being’s development; hence, the decision of these parents to catch the
event on film and arrest the moment in photographs is in tune with pre-
vailing norms—norms that, naturally, change with every new generation
and also vary culturally. Western European and American practices of
remembering and recording significantly diverge from Asian or African
mores in this area, due to diverging cultural norms and social relation-
ships.8 In general, personal memory stems from the altercation of individ-
ual acts and cultural norms—a tension we can trace in both the activity of
remembering and in the object of memory.
Therefore, I want to define “personal cultural memory” as the acts
and products of remembering in which individuals engage to make sense of
their lives in relation to the lives of others and to their surroundings, situating
themselves in time and place.9 According to my definition, “personal” and
“cultural” are the threads that bind memory’s texture: they can be distin-
guished, but they never can be separated. We usually mark events because
their significance is already ingrained in our conscious: first steps are an
important happening in a child’s life, just as birthdays and first school days
are. The decision to record such events is already, to a large extent, stipu-
lated by conventions prescribing which occurrences are symbolic or ritual
highlights and thus worth flagging. Some events, such as conflicts or de-
pressions, may seem unsuitable for video recording, but they may instead
be amenable subjects for diary entries. Other events, such as household
routines or intense emotions, are perhaps too dull or too poignant for any
kind of inscription, yet that does not mean they cannot be recalled—most
of our life’s experiences, after all, go undocumented, and often deliber-
ately so. Parents who decide not to take out their video camera may do so
because they prefer to enjoy and remember the first-step experience with-
out the camera’s intervention. At various moments, people decide what to
record or what to remember without records, often being unaware of the

cultural frameworks that inform their intentions and prefigure their deci-
sions. These frameworks, in other words, already inherently shape the
functions of self-continuity, communication, and self-direction that mem-
ory work entails. Personal cultural memory entwines individual choice
with common habits and cultural conventions, jointly defining the norms
of what should be remembered.
What holds true for acts of memory also pertains to its ensuing
products, particularly those created through media. Products of memory,
whether they are family photographs, diaries, home videos, or scrapbooks,
are rarely the result of a simple desire to produce a mnemonic aid or cap-
ture a moment for future recall. Instead, we may discern different inten-
tions in the creation of memory products: we can take a picture just for the
sake of photographing or to later share the photographed moment with
friends. While taking a picture, we may yet be unaware of its future mate-
rial form or use. However, any picture—or, for that matter, any diary
entry or video take—even if ordained to end up in a specific format, may
materialize in an unintended or unforeseen arrangement. In spite of the
indeterminacy of a memory object’s final reification—and this may sound
paradoxical—familiar cultural formats always inherently frame or even
generate their production. A range of cultural forms, such as diaries, personal
photographs, and so on, configures people’s choices of what they capture
and how they capture it. For instance, family albums funnel our memories
into particular venues; a rather extreme example may be the preformatted
baby’s first-year book, in which developmental signposts—from prenatal
ultrasounds to first steps–pictures—are prescribed by its layout. These
normative discursive strategies either explicitly or implicitly structure our
agencies; I return to this issue in the next chapter, when discussing the
meaning of digital technologies as memory tools, but suffice it to say here
that existing models often direct our discursive means for communicating
and remembering.
Therefore, it is a fallacy to think of memory products as purely con-
straining or conformist. They do not only enable structured expression but
also invite subversion or parody, alternative or unconventional enuncia-
tions. Products of memory are first and foremost creative products, the
provisional outcomes of confrontations between individual lives and cul-
ture at large. When discussing family albums or diaries, I often encounter
prejudiced assessments that characterize these genres as boring, pre-

dictable, or bourgeois. Yet on closer inspection, it is quite remarkable how
many people gain creative energy out of shaping their own histories
and subjectivities in response to existing cultural frameworks.10 Admit-
tedly, few people record family rows, and though teenagers shooting home
videos of their fathers’ most irritable habits may count as exceptions, they
nevertheless illustrate my point that the very presence of cultural forms
incites individual expressions. It may not be a coincidence that many suc-
cessful commercial productions (feature movies, television series, or
published autobiographies) expound on playful, expansive versions of per-
sonal memory accounts.11 Conventional formats for individual cultural
memory thus both constrain and unfetter people’s proclivity to inscribe
experiences.
The term “personal cultural memory” allows for a conceptualization
of memory that includes dimensions of identity and relationship, time and
materiality. Temporal and material aspects are extensively theorized in the
next chapter; for now, I dwell a bit more on the relational nature of per-
sonal cultural memory. The term emphasizes that some aspects of memory
need to be explained from processes at work in our society that we com-
monly label as culture—mores, practices, traditions, technologies, mechan-
ics, and routines—whereas these same processes contribute to, and derive
from, the formation of individual identities. Yet by advocating a definition
of cultural memory that highlights the significance of personal collections,
I do not mean to disavow the import of collective culture. Quite to the
contrary, if we acknowledge that individual preferences are filtered through
cultural conventions or social frameworks, we are obliged to further ex-
plore the intricate connection between the individual and collective in the
construction of cultural memory.
Individual versus Collective Cultural Memory
Collective memory, like its autobiographical penchant, is commonly

referred to as something we have or lack: it is about our ability to build up
a communal reservoir of relevant stories about our past and future, or
about the human proclivity to forget things—such as amnesia of collective
traumas or shameful episodes in our history. For the purpose of this book,
I prefer the notion of cultural memory over collective memory because
I am less concerned with what these reservoirs do or do not consist of; in-
stead, this book concentrates on how memory works in constructing a
sense of individual identity and collectivity at the same time. To set up this
claim, I first need to sketch how prevailing notions of collective memory
have structured academic thinking, most notably in sociological and his-
torical accounts.
Just as individual or autobiographical memory is almost automati-
cally associated with theory formation in the area of psychology, collec-
tive memory, since the early twentieth century, has been the privileged
domain of sociologists, historians, and cultural theorists. Originated in
late nineteenth-century French and German sociology, the concept of col-
lective memory was most prominently theorized by Maurice Halbwachs, a
critical student of both Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim. In Les cadres
sociaux de la memoire, first published in 1925, Halbwachs sketches the par-
tially overlapping cadres (spheres) of individual and larger communities,
such as family, community, and nation. In contending that memory needs
social frames, he distances himself from more physiological approaches to
memory, particularly those insisting on the isolated enframing capacity of
the human mind. Far from being a cognitive trajectory activated by inter-
nal or external stimuli, human memory “needs constant feeding from col-
lective sources, just as collective memories are always sustained by social
and moral props.”12 Halbwachs thus emphasizes the recursive nature of in-
dividual and collective memory, one always inhabiting the other. Collec-
tivity, he claims, arises in the variable contexts of groups who share an
orientation in time and space. Our memories organize themselves accord-
ing to our actual or perceived participation in a (temporal) collectivity—a
group vacation, a school class, a family, a generation—and recall tends to
lean on a sense of belonging or sharing rather than on a relocation in real
time or space. We may remember events chronologically or spatially, but
quite often we remember in terms of connectivity. As social creatures, hu-
mans experience events in relation to others, whether or not these commu-
nal events affect them personally.
One of Halbwachs’s important observations is that collective memory
is never the plain sum of individual remembrances: every personal memory
is cemented in an idiosyncratic perspective, but these perspectives never cul-
minate into a singular collective view. The memories of both parent and
child participating in the same event are not necessarily the same or even
complementary: each partaker may retain vastly different interpretations of

the occurrence. Yet even if their accounts are antithetical because of the dif-
ferent (social) positions of each member, they still “share” the memory of a
communal event. Collectivity not only evolves around events or shared ex-
perience; it can also advance from objects or environments—anything from
buildings to landscapes—through which people feel connected spatially.
Halbwachs specifically draws attention to auditory expressions, such as mu-
sic, voices, and sounds, to which people are exposed from an early age and
that later serve as triggers for collective recall.13 Each memory derived from
these common resources can be distinctly different, and individual memo-
ries never add up to a collective reservoir.
Ever since Halbwachs coined the concept of collective memory, it
has prominently figured in the accounts of historians, where it was also re-
named “social” or “public” memory.14 The historical meaning of “collec-
tive,” however, differs from its sociological counterpart. In a sociological
sense, “collective memory” means that people must feel they were some-
how part of a communal past, experiencing a connection between what
happened in general and how they were involved as individuals.15 Adjusted
to historiographical explanation, “social memory” constitutes the interface
between individual and collective ordering of the past. Some historians
have chosen collective memory as a central ordering concept for their in-
terpretation of how history can be written. David Gross, who appropriates
Halbwachs’s term for the purpose of historiography, views (collective)
memory as a prism for historical reconstruction: his main thesis concerns
the value societies have placed in either remembering or forgetting as a ba-
sic life-orientation, and from this point of entry he reinterprets history
from antiquity to late modernity.16 Gross agrees that memory is a compli-
cated encoding process and that memories are preserved through elaborate
schemata and shaped by shifting forms, scripts, and social circumstances.17
To properly understand their own existence in the grand scheme of histor-
ical events, people continuously sharpen their own remembered experience
and the testimonies of others against available public versions—official
documents, exhibits, text books, and so forth. Especially since WWII, his-
torians are increasingly intrigued by the way in which personal accounts,
or “small histories,” reflect and refine the complexities of grand historical
narratives. So-called ego-documents are now welcomed by official archives,
museums, and other public “memory institutions.”18
The recent institutionalization of personal memory items can be

seen as a corollary to historians’ designation of a “new” collective memory.
And yet, the elevation of personal memory objects to the status of collec-
tive history’s ingredients paradoxically underscores their distinct hierarchy.
A case in point is the inclusion of numerous individual testimonies in pub-
lic representations of the Holocaust. Especially in the past two decades,
the collective remembrance of the genocide, after a period of relative sup-
pression, has exploded into a plethora of forms: exhibitions, monuments,
films, audio-visual testimonies, books, museums, and so forth. Taking the
Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in England as an ex-
ample, historian Andrew Hoskins explains that its “mixing artifactual rep-
resentations . . . with audio-visual mediation of individuals’ memories of
their experience of the Holocaust in the form of testimony of survivors” is
a relatively recent phenomenon in public exhibitions.19 Apart from the typ-
ically mediated nature of these testimonies—a pivotal aspect of Hoskins’s
characterization of “new” collective memory to which I turn in the next
section—the relationship of innumerable individual accounts to collectiv-
ity seems self-evident and unproblematic. The aspiration to save all re-
maining individual testimonies of survivors to form a grand narrative of
the Holocaust implicitly bolsters quite a few megaprojects such as Steven
Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation.20
However, as Halbwachs already observed, no collective experience—
and certainly not one of this magnitude—can ever be represented in a sin-
gular collective memory. The inclusion in our public memory sites of many
individual testimonies, each presenting a unique prism through which to
make sense of historical events, will never add up to an overall collective
view of the Holocaust. Disputing the view of some of his colleagues, Amer-
ican cultural historian Andreas Huyssen argues that the plethora of personal
memories of the Holocaust may obscure rather than strengthen the notion
of collective memory: “The problem for Holocaust memory in the 1980s
and 1990s is not forgetting, but rather the ubiquitousness, even the excess of
Holocaust imagery in our culture.”21 Huyssen questions the idea that indi-
vidual memory representations serve as building blocks for, or form particu-
lar versions of, collective memory, because such a premise ignores the always
inherent creative tension between individual and collective.22
Although the foregrounding of individual testimonies has undoubt-
edly helped popularize important takes on communal history, the assumed
self-evident relationship between individual and collective memory is in-

deed problematic. Remarkable in both Halbwachs’s sociological discourse
as well as in Gross’s historiographical account is the virtual absence of the
term “culture.” As an explanatory concept, cultural memory inherently ac-
counts for the mutuality of individual and collective. Culture, like mem-
ory, is less interesting as something we have—hold or discount—than as
something we create and through which we shape our personal and collec-
tive selves.23 Like Halbwachs, I see the conjunction of individual and col-
lective memory as dialectic, yet in emphasizing cultural memory, I stress
the recursive dynamic of this ongoing interconnection beyond the level of
cognition or sociality. Culture is more than the encounter of individuals with
mental structures and social schemata, as Gross suggests; discursive and
material artifacts, technologies, and practices are equally infested with cul-
ture, thus forming the interface between self and society.
Cultural memory is a guiding concept in the work of German his-
torians Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann. Building on Halbwachs’s so-
ciological theory, Jan Assmann defines cultural memory as “a collective
concept for all knowledge that directs behavior and experience in the in-
teractive framework of a society and one that obtains through generations
in repeated societal practice and initiation.”24 Aleida Assmann expounds
on this definition by sketching cultural memory as one end of a complex
structure that also involves individual, social, and political memory—
going from a purely private level to the institutionalized and ritualized
level of remembrance.25 She petitions a seamless transformation from in-
dividual to cultural memory, the result of which is never a fixed reservoir
but always a relational vector that connects self to others, private to pub-
lic, and individual to collective.26 Unlike other historians, Assmann
stresses the importance of memory objects’ materiality in texts and im-
ages; the sum of individual objects of memory never add up to one uni-
fied “collective” memory—in fact, Assmann is very suspicious of this
term—but the objects are unique anchors of remembering processes
through which self and others become connected.
My own concept of cultural memory shows clear affinity with Aleida
Assmann’s dynamic definition. Perhaps more specifically, I prefer to think
of cultural memory as an act of negotiation or struggle to define individu-
ality and collectivity. Closely entwined with these two notions are the
spheres of private and public; memory is as much about the privacy to
inscribe memories for oneself and the desire to share them only with desig-
nated recipients as it is about publicness, or the inclination to share experi-
ences with a number of unknown viewers or readers. There is not, nor has
there ever been, a sharp distinction between private and public, but every
act of memory involves a negotiation of these spheres’ boundaries. The in-
tention to inscribe or recall a memory exclusively for private use may change
over time, as personal memory may acquire a larger significance against a
background of evolving social mores or personal growth. Control over one’s
memory may also change in the course of time; one may lose command
over either one’s mental capacities for remembering, as a result of disease or
death, or one may lose ownership over material inscriptions of former ex-
periences, whether voluntary or involuntary. Intentions and control change
along with our revisions of memories in the passage of time, and revisions,
in turn, reset the boundaries for what counts as public or private. Those
boundaries are concurrently the outcome and stakes in the act of cultural
memory.
Let me illustrate this specified concept of cultural memory using an
example—an example I further elaborate in Chapter 3. Anne Frank’s diary
is most commonly typified as the poignant personal lens through which we
experience a collective memory of the Holocaust. From my perspective,
though, Frank’s diary stands for a continuous and ongoing struggle be-
tween individual and collective acts of memory. Defined as personal
cultural memory, it signifies a Dutch teenager’s choice to narrate her expe-
rience in a cultural form—a handwritten daily account, trusted to a note-
book, that she later revised; Otto Frank’s decision to publish selected parts
of his daughter’s journal turned the diary into a public, collective item.
Anne’s aspiration to become a novelist as well as her father’s judgment to
censor the first editions should be understood in the context of the larger
cultural arena in which these mandates were negotiated. Naturally, the en-
suing Anne Frank industry—the museum, the objects in the museum, the
play, the movies, television series—are part of the (collective) cultural act
of remembrance, but they are also products of the memory industry.27 All
past, present, and future choices made in the service of inscribing and pre-
serving Anne Frank’s legacy are in fact collusions of individuality and col-
lectivity. Memory filtered through the prism of culture acknowledges the
idea that individual expressions are articulated as part of, as much as in
spite of, larger collectivities; individuality can be traced in every negotiation
of collectivity—past and present—as it is always a response to all previous

representations.
In the disciplines of the humanities, cultural memory seems to auto-
matically refer to collective remembering, whether or not as a subset of
history, just as autobiographical memory appears to be the realm of the in-
dividual psyche, indeed operating as part of a social collective but always
subordinate to it. By default, the term “cultural” has come to reflect col-
lectiveness, whereas the term “autobiographical” connotes individuality.
My argument that the term “cultural” inherently relates individual and
shared memory should in fact render the preceding qualifiers “personal” or
“collective” to cultural memory redundant. However, use of the modifier
“personal” indexes the impossibility of insulating the individual from cul-
ture at large. Mutatis mutandis, when speaking of collective cultural mem-
ory, the term inherently accounts for those individuals creating collectivity
and through whose experiences and acts culture is constituted. Even if
my choice of terminology seems cumbersome, it is prompted as much
by the genealogy of disciplinary appropriation as by a desire to stress the
relational nature of these terms: cultural memory can only be properly un-
derstood as a result of individual’s and others’ mutual, interdependent re-
lationship.
As much as I appreciate Aleida Assmann’s conceptual clarity, some-
thing is missing from her model of cultural memory that appears to be
highly relevant to further translation of this concept into a usable model
of analysis. Although she stresses the interference of mental and cultural
frameworks in her theory, she clearly does not know how to account for
the role of media and media tools in the formation of cultural memory.
Like other historians, she refers to media as templates or repositories mold-
ing our experiences, and she considers media to be problematic in the way
they profoundly affect memory discourse. As noted earlier, psychologists
also allude to media (or media frames) as collective narrative forms affect-
ing the individual psyche, but few proceed to include this alleged influence
in their theoretical models. It is peculiar to notice how memory scholars
recognize media to play a considerable role in the construction and reten-
tion of experience; and yet, media and memory are often considered two
distinct—sometimes even antagonistic—domains. Therefore, I now shift
attention to the mediation of memory to find out how we can render me-
dia an integral element of our new analytical tool.
The Mediation of Memory
In recent years, cultural theorists have observed an irreversible trend

toward what is generally called the “mediation of memory,” the idea that
media and memory increasingly coil beyond distinction.28 Although the
mediation of memory is an important concept, it also carries some internal
contradictions. Before proposing my modified concept, I first need to ar-
gue what exactly is wrong with the models that pass in review. Many the-
ories acknowledge the intimate relationship between memory and media,
but that union is often contingent on a set of fallacious binary oppositions.
First, there is the tendency to discern memory as an internal, physiological
human capacity and media as external tools to which part of this human
capability is outsourced. Adjunct to this distinction is the implicit or
explicit separation of real (corporeal) and artificial (technological) mem-
ory. Third, media are qualified either in terms of their private use or of
their public deployment, as mediators of respectively personal or collec-
tive memory.
Over the years, both negative and positive appreciations of media
and memory’s alliance reveal such binary thinking. From the days of Plato,
who viewed the invention of writing and script as a degeneration of pure
memory (meaning: untainted by technology), every new means of outsourc-
ing our physical capacity to remember has generated resentment.29 Most
scholars acknowledge the continuation of memory’s “technologization”—
a term powerfully argued by Walter Ong—from manual and mechanical
means of inscription, such as pencils and printing presses, all the way to
modern electronic and digital tools; and yet, they often only refer to the
more recent stages as “technologically mediated.”30 With the advent of
photography, and later film and television, writing tacitly transformed into
an interior means of consciousness and remembrance, whereupon elec-
tronic forms of media received the artificiality label. Due to the rise of elec-
tronic images, often held responsible for the decline of the printed word,
writing gained status as a more authentic container of past recollection—an
irony likely to recur with each new generation of technologies.31 Besides
generating resentment, the emergence of electronic (external) memory has
also been applauded, an appreciation that often has been based on the very
same bifurcated models. In the influential theories of Marshall McLuhan,
electronic media, as “extensions of men,” signaled the unprecedented
enhancement of human perceptual capacities: photography and television

were augmentations of the eye whereas audio technologies and radio ex-
tended the ear’s function.32
Similar dualities can be traced in more recent debates, particularly
those discussing how mass media infiltrate collective memory. Adding to
the disjunction is the tendency to define memory in ambiguous terms of
media: either as tools for inscribing the past or as an archival resource. For
instance, when French historian Pierre Nora laments the enormous weight
of media versions of the past on our historiography, he basically regards
collective memory as a giant storehouse, archive, or library.33 Contrasting
this conceptualization is Jacques Le Goff’s concern that media representa-
tions form a filter through which the past is artificially ordered and
edited—manufactured rather than registered.34 At once a means of inscrip-
tion and an external repository, media are seen as apparatuses for produc-
tion and storage, modeled after the mind’s alleged capacity to register and
hold experiences or impressions. Visions of printed and electronic media as
replacements of human memory notably echo in phrases like this one from
the late British historian Raphael Samuel: “Memory-keeping is a function
increasingly assigned to the electronic media, while a new awareness of the
artifice of representation casts a cloud of suspicion over the documentation
of the past.”35 Even if unarticulated, pervasive dichotomies inform schol-
arly assessments of the media’s role in the process of remembrance. On the
one hand, media are considered aids to human memory, but on the other
hand, they are conceived as a threat to the purity of remembrance. As an ar-
tificial prosthesis, they can free the brain of unnecessary burdens and allow
more space for creative activity; as a replacement, they can corrupt memory.
Media are thus paradoxically defined as invaluable yet insidious tools for
memory—a paradox that may arise from the tendency to simultaneously
insist on the division between memory and media and yet conflate their
meanings.36
Media and memory, however, are not separate entities—the first en-
hancing, corrupting, extending, replacing the second—but media invariably
and inherently shape our personal memories, warranting the term “media-
tion.” Psychologists point at the inextricable interconnections between acts
of remembrance and the specific mediated objects through which these acts
materialize. As Annette Kuhn claims, photographic images, “far from being
transparent renderings of a pre-existing reality, embody coded references to,
and even help construct, realities.”37 Mediated memory objects never repre-
sent a fixed moment; they serve to fix temporal notions and relations be-
tween past and present. Steven Rose, a British scientist who discusses the
physiological complexity of human memory and consciousness at length,
makes the case that mnemonic aids, such as photos or videos, are con-
founded with our individual memories to such extent that we can hardly dis-
tinguish between the two.38 And anthropologist Richard Chalfen, in his
study of how home media help communicate individuals’ perceptions of
self to others, argues that our “snapshots are us.”39 Personal cultural memory
seems to be predatory on media technologies’ and media objects’ shaping
power.
A similar notion of mediation can be found among historians dis-
cussing the infiltration of mass media in collective memory. British sociol-
ogist John Urry explains in his essay “How Societies Remember the Past”
that electronic media intrinsically change the way we create images of the
past in the present.40 Mass media, according to historian of popular cul-
ture George Lipsitz, embody some of our deepest hopes and engage some
of our most profound sympathies; films, records, or other cultural expres-
sions constitute “a repository of collective memory that places immediate
experience in the context of change over time.”41 Media like television
and, more recently, computers are devices that produce, store, and reshape
earlier versions of history. With the recent explosion of electronic and dig-
ital devices, the tools for memory have shifted in nature and function—a
subject I return to in the next chapter.
We can witness this contrived interlocking most poignantly at the
metaphorical level; the term “mediation of memory” refers equally to our
understanding of media in terms of memory (as illustrated by historians’
accounts above) as well as to our comprehension of physiological memory
in terms of media, evidenced by the many metaphors explaining certain
features of human memory. Ever since the invention of writing tools, but
most noticeably since the emergence of photography in the nineteenth
century, the human capacity to remember has been indexed in daily lan-
guage by referring to technical tools for reproduction. Dutch psychologist
Douwe Draaisma, who extensively researched the historical evolution of
memory metaphors, notes that media are a special conceptual category
for envisioning memory’s mechanics.42 For instance, the term “flashbulb
memory”—the proclivity to remember an impacting moment in full
detail, including the circumstances, time, and place in which the mes-
sage was received—derived its signifier from the realm of photography.
In the twentieth century, the terminology of film and video started to in-
vade the discourse of memory and memory research: life is said to be re-
played like a film in the seconds before death, and psychologists have
extensively examined the phenomenon known as “deathbed flash.” By the
same token, we are now firmly grilled by the media’s convention to visu-
alize a character’s recall of past experience as a slow-motion replay or
flashback. Metaphors are not simply means of expression, but are concep-
tual images that structure and give meaning to our lives.43 As media have
become our foremost tools for memory, metaphorical reciprocity signals
their constitutive quality.
However compelling and valid, most mediation of memory theories
still hinge on a few premises that funnel the scope of this concept, restrict-
ing its explanatory range. First, an exclusive focus on either home media or
mass media often presume a symbiotic union of home media with individ-
ual memory and of mass media with its collective counterpart; such rigid
distinctions hamper a fuller understanding of how individual and collec-
tive memory are shaped in conjunction, with media serving as relational
means connecting self to others. Second, even though most theories ac-
knowledge the convergence of memory and media, the “mediation” con-
cept frequently favors a single vector: media shape our memories, but we
seldom find testimony of media being shaped by memory, indicating an
implicit hierarchy. Let me address each of these conceptual deficiencies in
more detail.
It is practical to assume that personal cultural memory is generated
by what we call home media (family photography, home videos, tape
recorders) whereas collective cultural memory is produced by mass media
(television, music records, professional photography), implying that the
first type of media is confined to the private sphere, whereas the latter per-
tains to the public realm. But that simple division, even if functional, is
also conceptually flawed: it obscures the fact that people derive their auto-
biographical memories from both personal and collective media sources.
Media sociologist John Thompson, who highlights the role of individual
agency in media reception, explains the hermeneutic nature of this rela-
tionship.44 He argues that “lived experience,” in our contemporary cul-
ture, is interlaced with “mediated experience”; mediation, then, comprises
not only the media tools we wield in the private sphere but also the active
choices of individuals to incorporate parts of culture into their lives. Expe-
rience is neither completely lived nor entirely mediated, as the encounter
between the two is a continuously evolving life-project to define the self
in a larger cultural context. What makes mediated experience today differ
from lived experience two hundred years ago is the fact that individuals
need no longer share a common locale to pursue commonality; the grow-
ing availability of mediated experience creates “new opportunities, new
options, new arenas for self-experimentation.”45 If we accept a prelimi-
nary distinction between home and mass media, we not only fail to ac-
count for media shaping our sense of individuality and collectivity in
conjunction, but we equally obscure how individuals actively contribute to
the collective media that shape their individuality.
A strict delineation of home and mass media has also become im-
practicable because each type informs the other. For instance, America’s
Funniest Home Videos (AFHV ), a program format that has been success-
fully franchised to television stations around the globe for over two de-
cades, is made up entirely of home media footage, woven into a glitzy
commercial production; by the same token, many home video enthusiasts
have taken AFV ’s narrative structure (or its announced themes) as direc-
tive models to film their cute children and pets. Amateur videos of the
tsunami hitting the shores of Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia in De-
cember 2004 made the news worldwide; the power of amateur footage
probably motivates individuals who buy and carry a camera to create news
and offer it to television stations. There are many examples of documen-
taries based largely on compilations of amateur or home movies, and this
trend is likely to increase with the growing availability of affordable digital
cameras, computers, and editing equipment. In the next chapter, I further
elaborate on the meaning of media technologies (digital and analog) as
tools that mediate between personal and collective cultural memory.
The second conceptual deficiency in the mediation of memory con-
cerns the implied hierarchy between external and internal memory, or in
plain terms, between technology and the human mind. Understandably,
our metaphors often explain the invisible in terms of the visible and know-
able; that is why the mysteries of mental processing are often elucidated in
terms of media technology—technology that is at once transparent and
mechanically predictable. But how about turning the vector back on its
arrow: could our development and use of various media technologies be

informed by the perceptual mechanisms, the sensory motor actions that
underlie memory formation?46 An intricate aspect of remembering is that
mental perceptions (ideas, impressions, insights, feelings) manifest them-
selves through specific sensory modes (sounds, images, smells). The media
we have invented and nursed to maturity over the years incorporate a sim-
ilar tendency to capture ideas or experiences in sensory inscriptions, such
as spoken or written words, still or moving images, recorded sounds or
music. One memory rarely encompasses all sensory modes, because we tend
to remember by selecting particular ones. For instance, we may recall a
mood, locale, or era through a particular smell (such as the smell of apple
pie in the oven triggering the image of your mother’s kitchen on Saturday
afternoons), or we may remember a person by his nasal voice or her twin-
kling eyes.47 The same holds true for memories captured through media
technologies: rather than wanting exhaustive recordings, we commonly
select a specific evocative frame in which to store a particular aspect of
memory—a still photograph to store visual aspects, a diary entry to retain
interpretative details and subjective reflection, or a video to capture the
movement of baby’s first steps. We have a gamut of preferred sensory and
medial modes at our disposal to inscribe specific memories, but the in-
triguing question is: do available media technologies dictate which sensory
aspects of an event we inscribe in our memory, or do sensory perceptions
dictate which medium we choose to record the experience?
Although most of our media technologies privilege a particular sense
(e.g., photography singles out sight, tape recorders sound) that does not
mean there is a one-to-one relationship between specific sensorial aspects
of memory and the preferred instrument of recording. On the contrary, a
still picture may invoke the sound of a child’s laughter long after the child
has grown into adulthood. Nevertheless, instruments of memory inscrip-
tion, privileging particular sensorial perceptions over others, always to some
extent define the shape of our future recall. Most people have unconscious
preferences for a particular mode of inscription; for instance, they favor
moving images over still pictures, or oral accounts over written. Although
part of that propensity is undoubtedly rooted in individual mindsets, an-
other part is inevitably defined by the cultural apparatus available and
socially accepted at that time. But this apparatus is far from static: each
time frame redefines the mutual shaping of mind and technology as one is
always implied in the other. The brain steers and stimulates the camera
as much as the camera stimulates the brain. Mediated experience, as film
scholar Thomas Elsaesser remarks, is subjected to a generalized cultural
condition:
In our mobility, we are “tour”ists of life: we use the camcorder in our hand or of-
ten merely in our head, to reassure ourselves that this is “me, now, here.” Our ex-
perience of the present is always already (media) memory, and this memory
represents the recaptured attempt at self-presence: possessing the experience in or-
der to possess the memory, in order to possess the self.48
In other words, memory is not mediated by media, but media and
memory transform each other. In the next chapter, I further elaborate
on how changing (digital) technologies and objects embody changing
memories.
A revised concept of memory’s mediation thus needs to avoid the
pitfalls of fallacious binary and hierarchical structures. Media are not con-
fined to private or public areas, and neither do they store or distort the past
in relation to the present or future. Like memories, media’s dynamic na-
ture constitutes constantly evolving relations between self and others, pri-
vate and public, past and future. The term “mediation of memory,” if we
attend to its conceptual flaws, may be rearticulated as “mediated memo-
ries,” a concept that may add to a better understanding of the mutual
shaping of memory and media.
Mediated Memories as Objects of Cultural Analysis
Mediated memories are the activities and objects we produce and appro-
priate by means of media technologies, for creating and re-creating a sense of
past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others. Mediated memory
objects and acts are crucial sites for negotiating the relationship between
self and culture at large, between what counts as private and what as pub-
lic, and how individuality relates to collectivity. As stilled moments in the
present, mediated memories reflect and construct intersections between
past and future—remembering and projecting lived experience. Mediated
memories are not static objects or repositories but dynamic relationships
that evolve along two axes: a horizontal axis expressing relational identity
and a vertical axis articulating time. Neither axis is immobile: memories
Future
Self Others
Private Mediated Memories Public
Individual Collective
Past
figure 1
move back and forth between the personal and collective, and they travel
up and down between past and future. The commingling of both axes sig-
nals memories should be understood as processes—mediating self to cul-
ture to past to future. The dynamic nature of this analytical model shows
in Figure 1.
Mediated memories refers both to acts of memory (construing a re-
lational identity etched in dimensions of time) and to memory products
(personal memory objects as sites where individual minds and collective
cultures meet). The term is neither a displacement of a psychological def-
inition of (personal) cultural memory, nor is it a dislodgment of the histo-
rian’s notion of (collective) cultural memory. Instead, it offers a tool for
analyzing complex cases of memory formation and transformation, taking
personal shoebox items as culturally relevant objects.
Taken at face value, my mediated memories concept appears quite
similar to the term “tangled memories” coined by American media theorist
Marita Sturken. Sturken deploys a concept of cultural memory that comes
close to Aleida Assmann’s, but unlike the German historian, she includes
media (objects) in her theoretical model, even turning them into a central
focus of analysis.49 Sturken explains how items of popular culture—from
the Vietnam Memorial to the AIDS Memorial Quilt—are compiled from
personal acts of commemoration out of which arises a collective statement
about a shared trauma. Media play a principal role in this process, both as
personal instruments (e.g., private photos or videos) and as mass conveyors
of social narratives (e.g., news coverage or documentaries). Individuals
root their personal memories in cultural objects and activities that at once
give meaning to their own experience and attribute historical or political
significance to the larger events of which they are part. Sturken correctly
observes that personal memory, cultural memory, and history do not exist
within neatly defined boundaries: “Memories and memory objects can
move from one realm to another, shifting meaning and context. Thus per-
sonal memories can sometimes be subsumed into history and elements of
cultural memory can exist in concert with historical narratives.”50 If we
compare Sturken’s concept of tangled memories to my concept of mediated
memories figured in the diagram, they differ on two accounts. As figure 1
shows, it is possible to advance mediated memories from both the right and
the left angle. Sturken approaches manifestations of cultural memory from
the (right) angle of collectivity. What is more, she explicitly excludes “shoe-
box contents” insofar as they remain private possessions, not having gained
any cultural or political relevance in the public, collective realm.51 Sturken’s
approach is similar to Alison Landsberg’s who proposes the term “pros-
thetic memory” to argue that memories are not so much socially con-
structed or individual occurrences but emerge at the interface of individual
and collective experience; she states that prosthetic memory is “less inter-
ested in large-scale social implications and dialectics than in the experiential
quality of prosthetic memory and in the ramifications of these memories
for individual subjectivity and political consciousness.”52
Both Sturken and Landsberg approach cultural memory from the
right angle of collectivity, showing how memories have the ability to alter
a person’s (political) outlook or action. In contrast, this book approaches
memories from the opposite direction, privileging private memory objects,
regardless of whether they have gained recognition in the public realm. By
emphasizing the left angle, we acknowledge cognitive or psychosocial di-
mensions of remembering as complementary to historical, political or
cultural dimensions of memory. My thesis that we cannot separate the in-
dividual psyche from culture is articulated in the relational (mediating)
nature of the diagram, hence prompting the integration of psychological
and cognitive perspectives into cultural theory.
There is one more aspect in my proposed concept that I wish to

push to the fore: the term “mediated memories” is intended as a concep-
tual tool for the analysis of dynamic, continuously changing memory ar-
tifacts and items of mediated culture. People wield photo and video
cameras, computers, pens and pencils, audio technologies and so on to
record moments in which lived experience intermingles with mediated
experience. During later stages of recall, they may alter the mediation
of their records so as to relive, adjust, change, revise, or even erase previ-
ously inscribed moments as part of a continuous project of self-formation.
Films or photos are not “memory”; they are mediated building blocks
that we mold in the process of remembering. Concrete objects stand for
relational acts of memory; collections of mediated objects, stored in shoe-
boxes, often become the material and symbolic connection between gen-
erations whose perception of family or self changes over time, partly due
to larger social and cultural transformations, partly depending on the in-
tergenerational continuity each family member brings into this heritage.
Beyond immediate family circles, material inscriptions may become part
of a more public project—for instance a documentary—and thus add to
a shared collective remembrance. In any case, mediated memories never
remain the same in the course of time but are constantly prone to the
vagaries of time and changing relations between self and others.
As stated in the introduction to this chapter, a shoebox may contain
both self-made media objects and pieces of mediated culture. We increas-
ingly wield technologies to record selected pieces of culture, items con-
sidered worthwhile additions to our personal collections. In fact, every
decision to buy a book or record, or to tape a television program, situates a
person in his or her contemporary culture. Engaging in commercial trans-
actions, like buying music CDs or television series in DVD boxes, differs
from deploying the same equipment (tape and cassette recorders, CD
players and recorders, VCRs, MP3 players, and computers) to create one’s
own content, but both acts are immanent to the construction of cultural
memory.53 By selecting, recording, rerecording, and sharing assorted items
of mediated culture, people build up their personal collections as an evolv-
ing project of self-formation. Since the 1950s, we no longer need to derive
our personal tastes or cultural preferences mainly from social circles close
to us, because media have expanded the potential reservoir for cultural ex-
change to much larger, even global, proportions. Whether with friends or
family or with complete strangers, exchanging self-recorded items is also a

way of creating collectivity—the “distanced commonality” that Thomp-
son considers a pivotal feature of mediated experience. As a result, our per-
sonal collections of taped music, videos, and so forth can be considered
markers of cultural agency; it is through these creative rerecordings and re-
collections that cultural heritage becomes established.
Through the looking glass of cultural analysis, mediated memories
magnify the intersections between personal and collective, past and future;
as acts and objects of memory, they involve individuals carving out their
places in history, defining personal remembrance in the face of larger cul-
tural frameworks. Individuals make selections from a culture surrounding
them, yet they concurrently shape that collectivity we call culture. Cultural
memory, hence, is not an epistemological category—something we can have,
lack, or lose—and neither is mediation the inevitable effacement, distor-
tion, or enhancement of human memory. Rather, cultural memory can be
viewed as a process and performance, the understanding of which is indis-
pensable to the perennial human activity of building social systems for
cultural connectivity. Mediated memories reflect this cultural process
played out by various agents—individuals, technologies, conventions, in-
stitutions, and so forth—whose acts and products we should examine as
confrontations between individuality and collectivity. Counteracting the
overwhelming emphasis on collective cultural memory, I aim to restore at-
tention to the mediated items in our shoeboxes as collections worthy of ac-
ademic scrutiny. Personal memory can only exist in relation to collective
memory: in order to remember ourselves, we have to constantly align and
gauge the individual with the collective, but the sum of individual memories
never equals collectivity. Moreover, I refute the presumption that shoe-
boxes are only interesting in hindsight, after history has decided whether
they contain material worthwhile of illustrating particular strands of the
grand narrative. Our private shoeboxes are interesting on their own de-
vices, as stilled cultural acts and artifacts, teaching us about the ways we
deploy media technologies to situate ourselves in contemporary and past
cultures and how we store and reshape our images of self, family, and
community in the course of living.
In the next chapter, I turn to the so far underexposed aspect of me-
diated memories’ materiality and technology, further exploring the two-
axes model in light of recent cultural and technological transformations.
Because we are currently in the midst of a transition from analog to digital

media, we need to pay even more attention to mediated objects as sites of
cultural contestation. In order to succeed, we may need to further entwine
perspectives of the biological and cognitive sciences with the insights of
social sciences and humanities.
2
Memory Matters in the Digital Age
In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the company La-
cuna Inc. advertises its method for focused memory removal with the fol-
lowing slogan: “Why remember a destructive love affair if you can erase
it?”1 When Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) incidentally finds out that his ex-
girlfriend Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) has undergone the
Lacuna procedure to wipe their bitterly ended relationship from her mem-
ory, he requests Dr. Howard Mierzwiak to perform the same procedure on
his brain. Joel is instructed to go home and collect any objects or memen-
tos that have any ties to Clementine (“photos, gifts, CDs you bought to-
gether, journal pages”) and to bring them to the doctor’s office. Upon his
return, Lacuna-technician Stan wires Joel’s brain to a computerized head-
set; the doctor holds up each separate object (drawings from his diary, a
mug with Clementine’s picture, etc.) and tells Joel to let each object trigger
spontaneous memories. Stan subsequently tags each object-related mem-
ory and punches it into a computer, apparently recording Joel’s mental as-
sociations on a digital map of Clementine. That same night, Stan and his
assistant come to Joel’s house, hook up their drug-induced sleeping client
to a machine that looks like a hairdryer but generates images similar to
those produced by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and
start the erasure process. As the Lacuna Inc. website explains: “The proce-
dure works on a reverse timeline, which means it begins with the most re-
cent memories and goes backward in time. This approach is designed to
28 Memory Matters in the Digital Age
target the emotional core that every memory builds on. By eradicating the
core, Dr. Mierzwiak is able to make the entire memory dissolve.”2 One by
one, Joel’s memories of Clementine are erased—a fairly automatic process
that would have been finished by early morning if not for Joel’s realization,
halfway through the procedure, that he wants to keep the good memories
of his love affair, so he actively starts to resist the erasure guys. Incapaci-
tated by drugs, he embarks on a dreamlike, psychic journey with a remem-
bered Clementine, creatively hiding her in unconscious, untargeted corners
of his memory where she does not belong, in an attempt to escape the
high-tech apparatus that is slowly stripping away Joel’s recollection of his
former girlfriend.
Michel Gondry’s and Charlie Kaufman’s fictional treatise of modern
science’s struggle to erase undesirable autobiographical memories raises im-
portant questions: First, what is the “matter” of personal memories? Mem-
ory is obviously embodied, but neurobiologists, cognitive philosophers,
and cultural theorists hold different—even if complementary—views on
what “substance” memories are made of. Scientific concepts of memory
have evolved significantly in recent decades, and the movie actually reflects
on some recent neurocognitive theories on memory formation and re-
trieval. Second, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind presents an ambigu-
ous answer to the issue of where memory is located. On the one hand,
personal memory is situated inside the brain—the deepest, most intimate
physical space of the human body. On the other hand, personal memories
seem to be located in the many objects Joel and Clementine (like most of
us) create to serve as reminders of lived experiences. Most of these items
are what, in the previous chapter, I dubbed “mediated memory objects,”
such as pictures, videos, recorded music, diaries, and so on; people have a
vested interest in them because they come to serve as material triggers of
personal memories. Mediated memory objects, however, are not simply
prostheses of the mind, as the movie wants us to believe. Mediated mem-
ories, as I argue in this chapter, can be located neither strictly in the brain
nor wholly outside in (material) culture but exist in both concurrently, for
they are manifestations of a complex interaction between brain, material
objects, and the cultural matrix from which they arise.
After exploring how mediated memories are concurrently embodied
through the mind and brain, enabled by media technologies, and embed-
ded in a cultural context, the question arises, what happens when memory
Memory Matters in the Digital Age 29
production enters the digital era? What makes the movie Eternal Sunshine
interesting in this respect is the conversion of Joel’s painful memories into
digital brain scans. The technology deployed by Lacuna’s technicians tran-
scribes memories triggered by material objects onto a digital map that looks
like a series of brain scans. Like ordinary computer files, the Clementine
files can be erased and thus be made to disappear from the place in Joel’s
brain where they are stored. The proposed translations from experiences
into memory objects, back into actual memories, and then into information
files—files that can subsequently be stored or deleted—propel sophisticated
perspectives on the (de)materialization and (dis)embodiment of memory.
In contrast, the movie’s depiction of memory objects in the digital age is
rather simplistic: photographs, scrapbooks, and cassette tapes still seem to
dominate Joel’s and Clementine’s mutual recollections in a period when
digital pictures, weblogs, compact disks and MP3 files are rapidly replacing
their analog precursors. In light of recent revisionist theory on memory for-
mation, the question arises how digital technologies may accommodate the
“matter” of both mind and media. Even if memory in the digital age is just
as embodied and mediated through artifacts as before, the very notions of
embodiment and materiality need upgrading, in order to account for mem-
ory’s morphing nature. Upon entering the digital era, the question of where
mediated memories are located or produced—how they are embodied, en-
abled, and embedded—becomes even more poignant.
Embodied Memory: “Personal Memory Is in the Brain”
Ever since memory entered scientific discussions, it has been caught in

the brain-mind dichotomy and appropriated by scholars from various disci-
plines. Whereas philosophers tend to confine acts of memory to the mind,
(neuro) scientists concentrate on the brain as the locus of memory’s origin.
Until the early twentieth century, the location of memory was generally con-
signed to the mind, and the stuff that memories were thought to be made
of—an indefinable, immaterial set of thoughts and mental productivity—
was considered the province of philosophers. From John Sutton’s rather im-
pressive historiography of how philosophers from Augustine to Descartes
and from Hume to Bergson have conceptualized memory, it transpires that
former spatial concepts of thinking about memory have gradually given way
to connectionist concepts.3 Metaphors such as the library and the archive

were commonly used to explain the retention of information or the preser-
vation of experience in an enclosed space, from where it can be retrieved on
command.4 When trying to remember something, the mind, triggered by a
material object or image, searches through the stacks from which stored and
unchanged information can be retrieved and reread. Research paradigms
based on these metaphors assumed memories to be static data from some-
one’s past, and this assumption still often exists in popular representations
of memory.
In his important work Matter and Memory (1896), the French
philosopher Henri Bergson already refuted a one-to-one correspondence
between physical stimuli and mental images to account for human con-
sciousness, instead proposing a recursive relationship between material trig-
gers and the images formed by our minds.5 Bergson’s view that memory is
not exclusively a cognitive process but also an action-oriented response
of a living subject to stimuli in his or her external environment prohibits
the idea of a pure memory preceding its materialization in a mental image.
According to Bergson, “to picture is not to remember,” meaning that the
present summons action whereas the past is essentially powerless; recollec-
tion images are never re-livings of past experiences, but they are actions of
the contemporary brain through which past sensations are evoked and fil-
tered. In chapter 3 of Matter and Memory, Bergson discusses the relation-
ship between pure memory, memory image, and perception. In order to
analyze memory, he states, we have to follow the movement of memory at
work. In that movement, the present dictates memories of the past: mem-
ory always has one foot in the present and another one in the future. The
brain does not store memories but re-creates the past each time it is in-
voked: “The bodily memory, made up of the sum of the sensori-motor
systems organized by habit is a quasi-instantaneous memory to which the
true memory of the past serves as a base.”6 In other words, rather than ac-
cepting the existence of a reservoir of pure memory from which the sub-
ject derives its remembrances, Bergson theorizes that the image invoked is
a construction of the present subject. The brain is less a reservoir than a
telephone system: its function is to (dis)connect the body, to put the body
to action or make it move.
This shift toward a connectionist model of understanding the matter
that memory is made of definitely transpires from recent research by sci-
entists studying its neurological and genetic workings; they point at the
brain as the nucleus of all our mental activity and consciousness.7 Genes,
neurons, and living cells all constitute the bodily apparatus needed to carry
out mental functions, for instance cognitive tasks such as factual recall, or
affective tasks such as emotions or feelings. In spite of putting the center
for memory activity in the brain, scientists assert there is no such thing as
a single location for memory. Even though some parts of the brain are spe-
cialized in specific memory tasks—such as the hippocampus for retaining
short- and long-term memory, the amygdala for emotional learning—there
is no single vector between one brain system and one type of memory. Au-
tobiographical memory is usually associated with emotional matters that
are in turn sheltered by the two amygdalae, yet this does not mean they are
solely confined to this part of the brain. Instead, the establishment of mem-
ories depends on the working of the entire brain network, consisting in
turn of several memory systems, including semantic and episodic memory,
declarative or procedural memory.8 The hunt for the location of memory,
undertaken by scientists of various disciplines, has come up with a stagger-
ing distributed answer to that question, in fact defying the very possibility
of pinning down one type of memory to a single place in the brain. Facili-
tated by neurological circuits, the brain sets the mind to work, stimulating
a perception or a mode of thinking—a mental image, a feeling—that in
turn affects our bodily state. The brain is thus the generator of reflexes, re-
sponses, drives, emotions and, ultimately, feelings; memory involves both
(the perception of) a certain body state and a certain mind state.
In more recent philosophies of mind, connectionist metaphors tend
to conceive of memory as a distributed agency that leaves traces of an on-
going process. Of all connectionist metaphors that philosophers and neu-
roscientists have introduced over the years, the networked computer is
probably the most prominent one, but it is not necessarily the best one.9
Perhaps the symphony orchestra is a more appropriate metaphor than the
computer when it comes to explaining the function of memory and how
the brain’s matter is responsible for the personal memories it produces.10
Like a performance of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony by an orchestra re-
quires a brass section, a string section, and a percussion section, memory is
a function of the brain that manifests itself through the mind and directs
our consciousness or conscious acts, such as self-reflection or autobio-
graphical reminiscence; it is a consortium of concerted efforts resulting in
a momentary performance. Each member of the orchestra plays his or her

part, following the prescribed score as well as the conductor’s instructions—
their individual performances contributing to the overall sense of har-
mony. The composer’s notational score may be adjusted under the influence
of some single parts or as a result of the audience’s interpretation or ap-
preciation. Even the hardware of musical instruments may be tweaked to
accommodate the performance; material changes in musical instruments
inevitably result in subtle performative changes. And, as every music afi-
cionado knows, a symphony’s performance changes over time, as each per-
former tends to interpret the score as well as previous performances through
a contemporary ear.
The extended symphony metaphor may also account for why mem-
ories change each time they are “performed” by the brain. From recent
neuroscientific research, we learn that the brain stores emotional memories
very differently from unemotional ones. Negative emotional memories are
retained in much more detail than positive emotional memories. In the
case of traumatic memories, they tend to be captured by two separate parts
of the brain: the hippocampus, the normal seat of (cognitive) memory;
and the amygdala, one of the brain’s emotional centers. Hippocampal
damage can affect one’s capability to form long-term memories, but some-
one suffering from this condition may still be able to recall vague pleasant
memories if the amygdala is left intact. Memories effectively are rewritten
each time they are activated; instead of recalling a memory that has been
stored some time ago, the brain is forging it all over again in a new asso-
ciative context. Every memory, therefore, is a new memory because it is
shaped (or reconsolidated) by the changes that have happened to our brain
since the memory last occurred to us. Neuroscientists’ findings are corrob-
orated by clinical psychologists whose research demonstrates that memo-
ries of personal experience are never direct and unalterable copies of past
experiences but are partially reconstructed; self and memory work in tan-
dem to allow us the ability to use our own past as a present resource.11
In more than one respect, the movie Eternal Sunshine appears in sync
with current neuroscientific research, as it demonstrates a nuanced under-
standing of how the brain forms memories. Scientist Steven Johnson states
in his review of the film that whereas older movies like Memento still re-
flect the idea of memory as a kind of information retrieval system, the
“emphasis on feeling over data processing puts Eternal Sunshine squarely
in the mainstream of the brain sciences today.”12 In Memento, the main

character, Leonard, suffers from complete amnesia after a major trauma;
he fervently tries to reconstruct his past by taking snapshots, which he
instantly annotates with words—sometimes tattooed on his body—in a
desperate attempt to counter the constant loss of information about his
own identity and past experiences from his brain.13 Lost information or
memories seem to be fixed in the past and are fixated in the annotated
photographs Leonard keeps producing. In contrast, Eternal Sunshine re-
flects a more complex model of memory and how it is stored in different
centers of the brain. Joel’s memories partly consist of information that can
be erased, yet their emotional core persists. Moreover, his memories are
not fixed but morph into new ones. When Joel realizes he needs to stop
the erasure procedure, he consciously manipulates the process by taking
Clementine to memory spaces where she does not belong—kidnapping
her away from the probing scanner, ushering her into scenes from his
childhood that he remembers as being humiliating, painful, or very happy.
These intense emotional memories are not so much reexperienced as they
are rewritten through his recollection. Without the slightest science bab-
ble, the movie’s assumptions on autobiographical memory are broadly com-
patible with the reconsolidation theory.14
If memory is made of molecular and cellular substance, and it is
transported through the wired systems of its neurological and sensory ap-
paratus, what, then, is the matter of the mental images produced by the
mind that we conjure up when reminiscing? The most basic answer com-
ing from a neurobiologist would be that each mindset derived from the
brain is made of the same substances: cells, tissues, organs. Due to the me-
diation of the brain, the mind and its images are grounded in the body
proper. The more sophisticated answer, however, includes a refined de-
scription of how the mind and consciousness are functions of the brain.
Autobiographical memory involves most parts of that well-woven appara-
tus and comes in various shapes: the recall of facts (where was I born?
What is my age?) is as much part of personal remembrance than is the in-
vocation of a familiar mood or event (Do you remember the day your
brother was born? How sad I felt when she died!) or the conscious reflec-
tion on an earlier stage in life (Have I really changed since the age of 18?).
In some instances, memory is an affective feeling that accompanies our
seeing a picture or a mental picture we have formed in our minds. To the
extent that emotions inform our memories, the stuff of memory may be
partly derived from the external object itself (a scenic landscape or a pic-
ture thereof) and partly from the construction the brain makes of it (the
auditory, visual, tactile, or olfactory perceptions in our minds). Neurosci-
entist Antonio Damasio calls the latter an “emotionally competent object,”
referring to the event or object (e.g., seeing a painting, a landscape; hearing
a song) that is at the origin of a brain map and elicits a certain feeling:
“this picture makes me feel happy” or “this music makes me sad.” Invok-
ing a scene or scenery through one’s memory may not change the actual
object (the painting, the photograph, the record), but it certainly changes
the internalized “map” of the initial trigger.15 Recall and permanent re-
arrangement of our personal experiences, according to Damasio, play a
role in the unfolding of desire. The very desire to re-create an original
emotion may be the motivation for changing the brain map: “There is a
rich interplay between the object of desire and a wealth of personal mem-
ories pertinent to the object—past occasions of desire, past aspirations,
and past pleasures, real or imagined.”16
As neuroscientific research indicates, memory and imagination are
not the distant cousins they once seemed: both derive from the same cel-
lular and neurological processes and are intricately intertwined in the
matter memories are made of. Memory can be creative in reconstructing
the past, just as imagination can be reconstructive in memorizing the
present—think only of the many visual tricks people play to perform the
cognitive task of factual recall. The function of personal memory, even if
restricted to studying its “mindware,” is not simply about re-creating an
accurate picture of one’s past, but it is about creating a mental map of
one’s past through the lens of the present. The contents of memory are
configurations of body states represented in somatosensing maps. Living
cells producing this mindware are all but indifferent to the processes they
condition, and thus, we could conclude, memory is only the trick the
mind plays on the brain. As humans, we even tinker with these processes,
for instance by inserting chemical substances (drugs) that alter the body’s
emotional state. Or, as in the science fiction of Eternal Sunshine, techni-
cians artificially remove unpleasant memories by deactivating those neu-
rological circuits responsible for undesirable responses conditioned in
brain maps. The erasure of the mental image of an experience in Joel’s
brain activates a desire to thwart the procedure, which in turn causes the
neurological circuits in his brain as well as the circuits in the technician’s

laptop to go haywire.
Assuming the intrinsic mutability and morphing quality of personal
memories laid out by neuroscientists and tested in experimental clinical
settings, I now shift the searchlight of this inquiry to a different aspect of
memory’s matter. In Damasio’s as well as most other neuroscientific theo-
ries, the nature and materiality of the external object or memory trigger is
typically taken for granted.17 It is obviously not the tangible object they are
interested in—the painting, the photograph, the landscape that triggers an
emotion or memory—but the contents it represents. Neuroscientists argue
the actual pictures become part of the mental maps the brain creates in
response to the object, so the materiality of the item does not really mat-
ter. But is memory indeed indifferent to the shape and matter of external
stimuli and piqued solely by its contents, particularly when it comes to me-
diated personal memory objects? Is the material artifact that invokes mem-
ory irrelevant to mental processes, or does its (changing) materiality have
reciprocal effects on the mindware that perceives it? In order to understand
personal memory as a complex of physical-mental, material-technological,
and sociocultural forces, we may need to understand its distributed matter
beyond its embodied nature.
Enabled Memory: “Personal Memory

Is in the Mediated Object”
Consider for a moment this all too familiar hypothetical question:

What objects would you try to rescue from your house if it were on fire?
When confronted with this unwanted yet potential situation, many people
rate their shoeboxes filled with pictures, diaries, and similar mediated mem-
ory objects over, or on par with, valuable jewelry and identity papers.18
Whereas the latter two are expendable, the first is considered unique and ir-
replaceable: memory objects apparently carry an intense material precious-
ness, although their nominal economic value is negligible. The loss of these
items is often equated to the loss of identity, of personal history inscribed
in treasured shoebox contents. If you pose the burning house question, ask-
ing people whether a mere copy of their original mediated memory objects
would suffice, there is a fair chance the answers would be largely negative.
Many of us appreciate these items for more than contents only: we treasure
the fading colors on yellowed paper, the fumes of tobacco attached to old
diaries, the irritating scratches on self-compiled tapes. Apparently, physical
appearances—including smell, looks, taste, and feel—render mediated
memory objects somehow precious.
Some cultural theorists have located the matter of memory precisely—
and often exclusively—in the tangibility of mediated objects. Walter Ben-
jamin, writing on reproducible memorabilia like personal photographs,
called them the “modern relics of nostalgia,” the meaning of which lies
hidden in the layers of time affecting their appearance.19 Some contempo-
rary scholars argue that memory materializes primarily through the tech-
nology used to produce mediated objects. Media theorist Belinda Barnet,
for instance, prefers technology as the main focus for memory research
when she writes: “There is no lived memory, no originary, internal experi-
ence stored somewhere that corresponds to a certain event in our lives.
Memory is entirely reconstructed by the machine of memory, by the pro-
cess of writing; it retreats into a prosthetic experience, and this experience
in turn retreats as we try to locate it. But the important point is this: our
perception, and our perception of the past, is merely an experience of the
technical substrate.”20 Whereas both Benjamin and Barnet acknowledge
that memories actually change over time—one in terms of the object get-
ting older, taking on a sheen of authenticity and invoking nostalgia, the
other in terms of technology defining and replacing the very experience of
memory—they are adamant in restricting their focus on memory to its ma-
terial and technical strata only. Barnet argues the primacy of technologies
in our production and reproduction of memories. Quite a few mediated
memory objects require the original technological apparatus upon later re-
call because that equipment is indispensable for viewing their contents.
Think, for instance, about the projector and roll-down screen needed to
show your old slides, an 8-track recorder for playing these antique tapes, or,
to stay closer to the present, the hardware and software to read the large
floppy disks on which you diligently continued writing your diary after
buying your first word processor.
Clearly, the inscription and invocation of personal memory is often
contingent on technologies and objects, but unlike Barnet, I locate mem-
ory not in the matter of items per se but rather in the items’ agency, the
way they interact with the mind. Paradoxically, the real value of mediated
objects and their enabling technologies is often thought to lie in their sup-
posedly static meaning, despite their obvious physical decay, and in their
supposed fixity as triggers, despite our constant intervention in their mate-
riality. Memory objects serve as representations of a past or former self,
and their robust materiality seems to guarantee a stable anchor of memory
retrieval—an index to lived experience. But the hypothesis that mediated
memory objects remain constant each time we use them as triggers is
equally fallacious as the outdated theory that memories remain unaffected
upon retrieval—a theory meticulously refuted by neuroscientists. After all,
photo chemicals and ink on paper tend to fade, and home videos lose qual-
ity as a result of frequent replay (and even if left unused, their quality de-
teriorates). In fact, it is exactly this material transformation—its decay or
decomposing—that becomes part of a mutating memory: the growing im-
perfect state of these items connotes continuity between past and present.
Their materiality alters as time passes, but could it be the very combina-
tion of material aging and supposed representational inertia that accounts
for their growing emotional value?
Besides a sort of natural physical decay, there is a decisive human
factor in the modification of (external) memory objects. Like human
brains tend to select, reconfigure, and reorder memories upon recall, peo-
ple also consciously manipulate their memory deposits over time: they de-
stroy pictures, burn their diaries, or simply change the order of pictures in
their photo books. Memory deposits are prone to revision as their owners
continue to dictate their reinterpretation: a grown-up woman ashamed of
her teenage scribbles revises details in her diary; a bitter man erases videos
of his ex-wife; a grandmother takes apart her carefully composed photo al-
bum to divide its pictures among her numerous grandchildren.
The double paradox of a stable yet changing external object trigger-
ing a stable yet retouched mental image appears all too persistent in our
cultural imagination. In Eternal Sunshine, Joel’s and Clementine’s desire
to destroy their reminders testifies to the human inclination to constantly
revise our past. An endearing scene in Dr. Mierzwiak’s waiting room, show-
ing tearful clients holding their bags filled with treasured items to be de-
stroyed, signals the intrinsic modifiability of objects as they are constantly
prone to manipulation and reinterpretation. People have always used ma-
terial objects not just to store memories but also to alter them, annihilate
them, or reassign meaning to them. Mediated memory objects never stay
put for once and for all: on the contrary, the deposits themselves are agents
in an ongoing process of memory (re)construction, motivated by desire.
Memory allows for both preservation and erasure, and media objects can be
manipulated to facilitate and substantiate (new) versions of past experience.
The parallel between neuroscientific theories of memory formation
and cultural conjectures of memory is far from coincidental; I dare to ar-
gue the two processes intersect. For neuroscientists, the mediation of
memory happens in the brain where various interacting neurosensory ap-
paratuses account for their inherent mutability. Cognitive philosophers
add to this theory that memories are mediated not only by the intricate
brain-mind orchestration but also by the interaction between the brain
with physical, external objects it encounters, including the technologies
that help make them manifest. Australian philosopher John Sutton, for in-
stance, defines the locus of memory in the hermeneutics of mind and mat-
ter; the biggest challenge in analyzing the cognitive life of memory objects
is “to acknowledge the diversity of feedback relations between objects and
embodied brain.”21 This view is corroborated by Andy Clark, who argues
that memory and its enabling technologies are mutually constitutive; he pro-
poses a cognitive science that includes “body and brains” as well as “props
and aids (pens, papers, PCs) in which our biological brains learn, mature,
and operate.”22 Both Sutton and Clark regard a mutual shaping of the
brain/mind and object/technology the inescapable consequence of new neu-
roscientific insights, and they advocate a concerted interdisciplinary research
effort to face the challenge of new paradigms created by these findings.
Indeed, I agree with both philosophers’ view that memory is not sim-
ply triggered by objects but happens through these objects; brain, mind,
technology, and materiality are inextricably intertwined in producing and
revising a coherent picture of one’s past. However, this double-edged con-
cept can still not fully account for the matter of memory. Memories, in my
view, are not only embodied by the brain/mind and enabled by the
object/technology, but they are also mediated by the sociocultural practices
and forms through which they manifest themselves. Although practices and
forms are commonly squarely located in the realm of culture, they cannot
be studied separately from the other two conceptual pairs. But before we
take that layer further apart into its cultural components, let us first look at
how media technologies and objects “matter” as instruments for inscribing
personal memory and identity.
Embedded Memory: Personal Memory

as Part of Culture
Mediated memories are material triggers for future recall—produced

through media technologies, whether pencil or camera. At the same time
and by the same means, however, they are instruments and objects of in-
scription and communication: devices by which humans seek to establish
their own identities in the face of their immediate and larger surroundings.
Every historical time frame, as Michel Foucault states, is marked by its
idiosyncratic regime of “technologies of truth and self,” technologies that
“permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others
a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts,
conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain
a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”23
Instead of attaching technologies of self to the brain, Foucault argues they
are always in and of themselves cultural. In Stoic culture, for instance, stu-
dents wrote letters to friends disclosing and examining their conscientious
self in order to establish and test their individual independence with re-
gard to the external world. Contemporary variants of former epistolary
practices, such as e-mails or weblogs, also help construct a sense of self in
connection to an outside world. People (and, one could argue, especially
young people) wield media technologies to save lived experiences for
future recall and at the same time shape their identities in ritualized pro-
cesses. We take pictures on vacation for later remembrance but also to con-
vince our friends at home of our relaxed and happy sojourning state; we
may want to capture our Thanksgiving dinners on video to document
some happy family moments, but a home video concurrently serves to re-
inforce our notion of belonging to a family. Technologies of self are thus
in and of themselves social and cultural tools; they are means of reflection
and self-representation as well as of communication.
Foucault’s concept may erroneously suggest that media technologies
can be regarded apart from their habitual and quotidian use. Naturally,
our inclination to take photographs or to write a diary is as much induced
by the availability of technologies as by our knowledge of how to use
them. As members of a society in a particular historical time frame, indi-
viduals deploy a set of practices in common response to their shared social
environment and material conditions.24 Taking pictures, shooting a home
movie, or taping recorded music are practices shaped by an internalized

cultural logic, unquestioned by one’s social surroundings, and performed
through seemingly automatic skills. Mediated memory objects provide
clues to their social and cultural function, thus divulging how people use
technologies to produce their own material and representational deposits;
these deposits, in turn, betray sociocultural practices.25 Concretely, a pho-
tograph concurrently shows an image and relays information about the
habit of taking pictures; a home movie may also reveal something about
familial power structures by looking at how various relatives and siblings
(often males) take charge of the camera. Some anthropologists even argue
that sociocultural practices have their own cognitive properties, which in
turn affect (the memory of) individuals.26
Besides signifying sociocultural practices, memory objects come in
shapes that are often mediated by individual invention in response to cul-
tural convention. Letters or family photographs do not arise out of the
blue: we write letters because it is an accepted cultural form. Family al-
bums may literally predispose the kind of photographs we take of our
children. Looking at a 1868 photograph of our great-grandfather, we may
be touched or puzzled by the stern look of a posing figure eyeing the cam-
era. It is important to acknowledge this memory object to be the result of
a historical practice and form: the late-nineteenth-century habit to have a
young adult’s picture taken by a professional photographer, resulting in a
studio portrait. Cultural frameworks are never stable moulds into which
we pour our raw experiences to come out as polished products; they are
frames through which we structure our thinking and against which we in-
vent new forms of expression.
The significance of sociocultural practice and forms for memory for-
mation poignantly surfaces in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. For in-
stance, Joel is asked to bring pictures, CDs he bought with Clementine, or
tapes they made for each other into Dr. Mierzwiak’s office in order to de-
stroy them, because confrontations with these items after his memory’s
erasure might compromise the procedure’s success. Many viewers undoubt-
edly understand Joel’s embarrassment when the technician holds up a mug
with Clementine’s picture—a commodified form of nostalgia—and em-
pathize with his agony upon seeing him tear up pages filled with sketches
and words. When relationships fail, as Joel and Clementine’s did, the pain
derived from dividing music collections often appears to be inversely
proportional to the pleasure of building up communal preferences. More

often than not, the collection and consumption of recorded music is a
matter of sharing, and the resulting objects are residues of an intensely so-
cial process. Compiling tapes with mutually liked music can be an impor-
tant part of building up a relationship, just as sharing recorded music with
others may be a ticket into peer-group culture. Technologies of self are
concomitantly technologies of sharing: they help form bonds across pri-
vate boundaries, tapping into a communal or collective culture that in turn
reshapes personal memory and identity.
At this point, adherents of social-economic theory may downplay
the relevance of cultural aspects, arguing that memory objects are nothing
but products of a commercially induced technology push, promoting new
generations of media technologies, forms, and practices for the do-it-
yourself memorabilia market (think of the kitsch mug personalized with a
picture of your loved one). Following this line of thought would put re-
search squarely into the realm of economics. However, as some sociologists
have claimed, the cultural meaning of mediated memory objects and tech-
nologies is complex because of their inherent linking of private life to pub-
lic culture. Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch, and David Morley, for instance,
consider the use of media technologies to be grounded in the very creation
of home and “home-ness.”27 A family unit (or household, to use a more
economic term) makes a decision about which technologies or media ob-
jects enter its private sphere. Studying how these items are appropriated,
objectified, and incorporated in the home, the British sociologists try to
understand how interrelationships of technology and culture define no-
tions of self and family vis-à-vis society at large.28 Commercial forces should
not be underestimated, but neither should they be singled out as determi-
nant factors in the construction of memory objects.
To summarize my argument so far, scholars from various disciplines
have refuted the truism that memories are images of lived experiences
stored in the brain that can be recalled without affecting their content.
The cliché of (mediated) objects as immutable deposits triggering fixed
memories from a mental reservoir is as outdated as the idea of enduring
single memories being stored in particular sections of the brain. Scientists
and philosophers agree material environments influence the structure and
contents of the mind; objects and technology inform memory instead of
transmitting it. Memory is not exclusively located inside the brain, and
hence limited to the interior body, and it cannot be “disembodied,” because

external bodies and technologies are part of the same mutual affect. To this
doubled-edged concept of brain/mind and object/technology I have added
a third layer of sociocultural practices/forms that, in my view, complements
the other two. Mediated memories perform acts of remembrance and com-
munication at the crossroads of body, matter, and culture.
The Digitization of Personal Memory
Up to this point, I have deliberately focused on cultural memory in

the context of analog media technologies. Now that we are entering a dig-
ital age, the questions arise: How does digitization change the stuff that
memory is made of? Will it modify the “nature” of our brain maps? Does
it affect the epistemological or ontological status of digitized media ob-
jects? Or will it alter the cultural practices and forms through which we
shape our remembrance of things past? Questions like these suggest a de-
ceptive primacy of technology as the impetus for change. History has taught
us time and again that a transition from one technological regime to an-
other implies more than the replacement of tools or machineries; it involves
a fundamental epistemic overhaul, revising our instruments of living along
with our ways of understanding life. Digitization, rather than being a re-
placement of analog by digital instruments, encompasses everything from
redesigning our scientific paradigms probing the mind to readjusting our
habitual use of media technologies, and from redefining our notion of
memory all the way to substantially revising our concepts of self and soci-
ety. Obviously, the digital evolution has not changed the “matter” of
memory—the mindware enabling conceptions of who we were, are, and
want to be—but it certainly affects the way scientists understand the brain
performing various functions of memory. And ultimately, I argue, it may
change the brain itself, for digitization may impact the brain’s constitution
just like chemical and genetic evolutions did before.
For one thing, digitization is definitely changing the way neurobiol-
ogists envisage and conceptualize memory functions. Activities of the liv-
ing brain are increasingly visualized with the help of digitized imaging
technologies, such as fMRI or positron-emission tomography (PET).29 An
fMRI scanner typically registers specific changes in brain activity: while
the person performs a cognitive task, the machine measures the metabolic
changes that are linked up with neural activity. In this way, emotions such
as fear, aggression, or sexual urge—emotions essential to survival—can be
shown to emerge through the paleocortex, the middle brain, whereas the
“higher” cognitive and behavioral functions, including reason, are regu-
lated in the neocortex, the outer brain layer.
But what do these scans exactly figure? Do they visualize the matter
of memory? Not really. What these machines do is to measure increases in
blood flows through the brain; if the brain is more active, it needs more
blood and oxygen, resulting in more intensive blood circulation. This ac-
tivity shows up as red and yellow blots on the screen; representations of the
brain at work can subsequently be translated into knowledge about mental
processes—that is, by those properly trained in reading them. Medical im-
aging involves a series of translations in which the body, technology, and
expert scientists each play a constitutive role; the beautiful graphics of
fMRI, like many techniques heretofore developed in medical diagnostics,
imply much more precision, interpretative clarity, and transparency than
there actually is.30 Although the development of fMRI is still in its in-
fancy, the apparatus could theoretically be employed to trace memories as
physiological activities in the brain; “trace” is the word here, not “locate,”
because what neuroscientists actually capture in these images are the
changes in neural activity resulting from a specific cognitive, emotive, or
conscious task encoded in colored signals. However, most fMRI studies
use univariate processing—highlighting only one variable in the brain—a
method that shortchanges the distributed nature of neurodynamics. The
apparatus tends to confine activity to a specific location in the brain, thus
favoring the legitimacy of linking complex mental functions to particular
brain regions.
If powerful imaging technologies sway professionals to design re-
search questions supportive of simplified paradigms, it is easy to see how
nonexperts are persuaded by the machine’s potential to appear like a trans-
parent diagnostic apparatus, linking diseases to exact locations in the brain.
Ever since the emergence of X-ray technology, photography has been the
dominant model for all kinds of medical imaging—what you see is what
you get. It is an increasingly popular tenet—especially in court circles—
that complex phenomena like schizophrenia, drug addiction, criminality,
or for that matter, “traumatic” personal memories, can show up on digital
scans as pieces of irrefutable evidence.31 In popular discourse, like maga-

zines and in medical television series, these images often come to stand as
visual proof of a certain diagnosis, be it brain damage or mental abnor-
mality.32 The movie Eternal Sunshine is a case in point: in this Hollywood
fantasy, new digital tools diagnose “ailments” such as traumatic memories
of botched relationships. As said before, the film attests to the latest neu-
roscientific findings on memory formation; it also plays up to the popular
expectation that personal memories show up in precise spots on the fMRI
scans (“the Clementine files”). Indeed, even if few researchers seriously
believe that brain functions are compartmentalized, the alleged potential
of fMRI machines to visualize “disease” or concrete memories reflects a
strong desire for visual transparency and technological prowess, but is still
far from being a reality.
The diagnostic promise of fMRI, however, is not the real science fic-
tion in Eternal Sunshine; the same technologies that help diagnose mental
processes are actually projected to also help doctors intervene in the brain
and thus remedy ailments. Michel Gondry’s extrapolation of techno-
experts erasing the Clementine files from the brain in a sort of backward
intervention through the computer may seem a projection on par with
H. G. Wells’s time machine. And yet, the image of Joel’s head wired and
plugged into the computer—an automatic software pilot deleting memo-
ries from his brain—does not look as alien as it should. Why is that?
A couple of explanations may be plausible. First, we have come so used to
technologies depicting our interior body and making it visible on the screen
and translating it into digital code that we begin to understand corporeal
processes as disembodied information.33 Second, we are rapidly becoming
accustomed to treatments of bodily defects via computers. Computer-
assisted surgery (particularly neurosurgery) is no longer a fictional trope; it
is a fast-developing branch of medicine. Actual bodies are treated from
outside the physiological realm, as surgical interventions mediated through
computers and steered by human hands and brains. And third, already
successful experiments with chemical interventions in the blockage of
traumatic memories in human brains make “informational” interventions
appear far more feasible. However far-fetched it may appear, manipulation
of the mind as a result of computer processing is theoretically feasible. In
fact, brain modification by means of information processing does occur,
albeit more subtly and attenuated than this movie would have us believe.
In many respects, digital imaging technologies turn the brain into a

seemingly disembodied, informational entity, and yet it is an illusion to
think that memory could be severed from the body, because biology and
technology—body and media—have merged beyond distinction. Philoso-
pher of science Eugene Thacker illuminates this process by introducing
the concept of “biomedia,” defined as the continuous transformation of
bodies through the practices of encoding, recoding, and decoding bio-
information.34 Bodies, as Thacker contends, are “both material and imma-
terial, both biological and informatic.”35 When digitizing the body, the
biological is rearticulated as informatic in order to be enhanced or re-
designed. Both body and machine are considered platforms through which
activities are mediated, yet the materiality of that platform profoundly
matters: information is embodied as much as flesh is computed. In the
long run, the computations carried out by computers will inevitably retool
our mindware if only because certain interventions in the body’s physiol-
ogy can not be designed or executed without digital machinery.36 Of course,
it is still a long stretch to prove how this theory applies to memory research
in neuroscience, but it is inevitable that digital technologies will impact
not only our knowledge of how the brain works but its actual workings.
What we witness in the movie Eternal Sunshine is an almost allegorical
illustration of Thacker’s biomedia, spelled out in a step-by-step encoding,
recoding, and decoding sequence. First, Joel’s memories of Clementine are
translated into digital data—information visualized in fMRI scans. Subse-
quently, the Clementine files are uploaded into a laptop and “recoded” to
be deleted; and finally, Joel’s brain is rewired to accept the cleansed “data”
into his memory. Joel’s resistance of the erasure guys affirms Thacker’s
contention that informational processes never leave the body untouched
and vice versa; the mindware of the brain is not simply retooled by the
hardware and software of the computer, but data and flesh are mutually
implied in the spiraling process of transformation. The movie delicately—
even if awkwardly, in an accelerated compression of time—suggests the
inseparability of brain and informatics in its fictional depiction of “digi-
tized memory.”
The subtle message behind this movie that computers are both diag-
nostic imaging tools and instruments of intervention should not be mis-
taken. Functional MRI scans never take the mind outside the body, just as
ultrasounds do not sever a fetus from the maternal womb, and yet they
definitely affect the body.37 If we accept the premise that memory is not lo-
cated either inside the body or outside it in culture but is an embodied ex-
perience in which mind, computer, and object form the distributed agency,
then the idea of intervention in the brain’s function by means of informa-
tion technology becomes much more realistic. In the long run, not one com-
ponent in the chain lacing mind, machine, and memory will be left
untouched. In fact, brain modification by means of information processing
does occur, albeit more slowly and weakly than this movie makes us believe.
Technologies of memory are in and of themselves technologies of affect.
Digital Memory Objects and Media Technologies
Similar to the myth of disembodiment, digitization often promotes

the erroneous presumption of dematerialization. In the first decade of a
new millennium, our “technologies of self” are being rapidly replaced by
digital instruments, and we are still in the midst of finding out how to
adapt to the cultural forms and practices that inevitably come along with
this retooling of memory artifacts. What does it mean for personal cultural
memory when our tools and objects for producing memories become digi-
tal (a term often equated with “immaterial”)? What are the consequences
of “digitized” objects for our habits of inscribing, storing, and re-creating
personal memories? Obviously, digitization carries substantial epistemo-
logical and ontological implications, not only with regard to our memory
objects and the technologies we use to create them but also with regard to
our very concepts of memory and experience. Let me briefly elaborate on
several of these implications.
In Eternal Sunshine, analog mediated memory objects—cassette tapes,
framed and laminated pictures, handwritten diary pages—serve as imprints
for lost moments; they are the reified items through which we come to know
and hold the past, and which need to be destroyed in order to get rid of
unwanted memories. The absence of modern digital memory objects (such
as digital photographs, weblogs or MP3s) in this movie is rather conspicuous
in the face of the fancied digital erasure procedure wielded by the doctor
and his technicians.38 As said before, the supposed fixity of mediated objects
has always been illusionary because the very corrosion of analog objects is
partial to the “memory sensation.” Digital objects, such as photographs, are
considered by many to be immaterial because digits are invisible and they

can be endlessly manipulated until a final format (printed photograph,
music CD) “materializes.” However, to understand the digital as immaterial
is as erroneous as the idea of analogue mediated objects being static re-
minders of past experience. Layers of code are definitely material, even if
this materiality is different from the analog objects that we are used to and
that are still very much part of our personal cultural memory.
Indeed, digital technologies necessitate an adjustment of epistemo-
logical horizons: we can no longer assume—if we ever could—a digital
photo to accurately represent reality as caught by the camera eye. In many
ways, computer memory perfectly suits the morphing nature of human
memory over time. Computers are bound to obliterate even the illusion of
fixity: a collection of digital data is capable of being reworked to yield end-
less potentialities of a past. An intermediate layer of coding enables infi-
nite reshaping of pictorial representations of the past before they become
manifest in the present.39 Perhaps not coincidentally, the reconsolidation
theory recently adhered by neuroscientists finds its technological and ma-
terial counterpart in digital media technologies that boost our ability to re-
design one’s past on the conditions of one’s present. The ease of digital
manipulation, compared to analog photography, may not just facilitate the
airbrushing of images to be stored in our repositories but may also actually
augment the role desire has always played in the mental articulation of im-
ages, as pointed out by neuroscientists. Personal memories, at the moment
of inscription, are prone to wishful thinking, just as memories upon re-
trieval are vulnerable to reconsolidation. Imagination and memory, in the
age of digital technologies, may become even closer relatives.
In addition, the digital condition likely affects the ontological status
of memory objects. Memory objects were never immutable items but were
always constitutive agents in the act of memory. What changes with the
advent of digital cameras, webcams, and blogs in our personal lives is that
computerized tools infuse our memory at various stages of the process, and
their digital nature (again) probes the boundaries between what consti-
tutes memory and object. The coded layer of digital data is an additional
type of materiality, one that is endlessly pliable and can easily be “remedi-
ated” into different physical formats. But this new type of materiality is
equally vulnerable to decay—a degenerative process that is part and parcel
of human memory. The world’s computers are brimming over with personal
treasures of every genre (music, pictures, texts), but no one guarantees the
preservation of electronic materials for generations to come. Machines and
software formats may become obsolete, hard drives are anything but ro-
bust, and digital files may start to degrade or become indecipherable. Iron-
ically, problems of preservation and access to personal memories, as a
result of their digital condition, could become even more complex than
before. Even digital memories can fade—their fate determined by their in
silico conception—as the durability of hard drives, compact disks, and
memory sticks has yet to be proven.40 Memory does matter, perhaps even
more so in the digital age.
The Digitization of Culture
Not only does the digital transform brain-imaging techniques and

memory objects, but there is also an iterative relationship with the socio-
cultural practices that inform their use. Whereas in the analog age, photos,
cassette tapes, or slides were primarily intended to be shared or stored in
the private sphere—a slide show with the neighbors, a forgotten shoebox
in Grandpa’s attic—the emergence of digital networked tools may reform
our habits of presentation and preservation. By nature of their creation,
many digital memory items are becoming networked objects, constructed
in the commonality of the World Wide Web in constant interaction with
other people, even anonymous audiences. Technologies of self are—even
more so than before—technologies of sharing. However, the moment of
sharing, as a result of the networked condition, may arise much earlier in
the memory process; for instance, a photo or diary entry may be sent
through the Internet only seconds after it has been made, and it can be dis-
tributed among a potentially worldwide audience by a click on the mouse.
When it comes to weblogs or MP3 file exchanges, it becomes difficult to
describe new sociocultural practices in terms of the old: diary writing or
compiling cassette tapes for a friend are succinctly different activities than
weblogging or downloading music. Interestingly, people deploy several
technologies concurrently when amassing their personal collections; each
mediated artifact, whether a cassette tape or MP3 file, not only represents
the contents favored at one time in life but also makes a statement about
one’s preferred mode of recollecting.
Digital cultural forms do not simply replace old forms of analog
culture; weblogs only partly overlap with the conventional use of paper di-
aries, laminated pictures are still printed despite the rise of digital photog-
raphy, and MP3 files are not exactly replacing our tangible music
collections. New practices gradually transform the way we collect, read,
look at, or listen to our cherished personal items. The word “gradually” is
important to emphasize here, because the ongoing digitization of memory
tools and objects all but annihilates analog forms and practices. On the
contrary, various theorists emphasize the dynamics of remediation: the way
in which new technologies tend to absorb and revamp older forms or genres
without completely replacing the old.41 Photography “remediated” paint-
ing, but never took its place, even though both cultural practices repeatedly
had to adjust their ontological and epistemological claims in the face of new
technologies. Diaries and photo albums are currently undergoing a meta-
morphosis, although it is hard to predict which status and function familiar
paper forms will adopt in conjunction with lifelogs and various kinds of
web-based pictorial repositories. In fact, it is likely that analog and digital
forms and practices will always coexist, albeit in varying configurations.
New hybrid forms and fused practices are likely to inform the larger cul-
tural tendencies that propel their use.
Can we conclude from the above that digitization is, ultimately, a cul-
tural process that is slowly changing the way we remember our selves? The
problem with this thesis, as stated earlier, is its deceptive primacy of tech-
nology as the cause for change. The matter, nature, and function of memory
never changes as a result of technology; rather, the concomitant transition of
mind, technology, practices, and forms gradually impinge on our very acts
of memory. The first chapter explained how mediated memories manifest
themselves along two axes: a horizontal axis expressing relational identities
and a vertical axis articulating time. Being active producers and collectors of
mediated memories, we carve out our personal niches in the vast sea of cul-
ture surrounding us, thus creating a continuum between past and present.
In this chapter, I have argued to add a third (diagonal) axis to this model,
configuring how memories are mediated through functions of body and
mind, technology and materiality, and practices and forms (see Figure 2).
Tied in with the horizontal relational axis, it emphasizes how acts and ob-
jects of memory are concurrently embodied in individual brains and minds,
enabled by instruments and embedded in cultural dynamics. And offset
against a vector of time, the model builds in a reflection on transformation.
Projection Future Creation

Embedded
Self Others
Mediated Memories
Private (enabling technologies)
Public
Individual Collective
Embodied
Recollection Past Preservation
figure 2
Moments of media transition are so interesting because they are pe-

riods in which social practices and cultural forms are unsettled and
renegotiated—a negotiation that concerns the materiality and embodiment
of media technologies as well as the meanings arising from their use. It is at
the nexus of mind, technology, and perceptual and semiotic habits that me-
diated memories are shaped. An insidious process, digitization—conceived
as concurrently a technological and sociocultural transformation—is likely
to affect our very concepts of memory and remembering.
First of all, the digitization of media may affect physiological and
mental functions of memory, as much as mind mechanisms inform our de-
velopment and use of digital, networked media technologies. Multimedia
computers increasingly encompass a divergent variety of personal memory
objects and concurrently connect us to a vast network of instantly available
visual, auditory, and textual resources. Search engines and digital cut-
and-paste techniques allow easy access to, and use of, numerous produc-
tions of others—known or unknown, private or public expressions that
may or may not invite reciprocity. Memory, as a result, may become less a
process of recalling than a topological skill, the ability to locate and identify
pieces of culture that identify the place of self in relation to others. The
old-fashioned model of the computer as a model for the brain as a means
for storage and retrieval may be up for renewal; the computer supports
the inherent inclination of memory to store and revise, to download and
upload, to recollect and project or invent. Of course, memory was always a

creative act that involved communication as much as reflection, and yet it
remains challenging to analyze and identify concrete instances of how men-
tal processes are implicated in a larger pattern of transformation.
Another profound change in the transformation from analog to digital
lies in the emergence of multimedial, multimodal technologies, objects,
forms, and practices. If we look at our analog mediated memory objects,
they commonly fit single categories of media and perceptual modes. For in-
stance, a diary used to be a paper object that favored writing (despite the oc-
casional drawing or illustration); a photo album contains laminated pictures
(although occasionally annotated by handwritten comments); and a com-
piled cassette tape caters to our auditory dimensions of memory. In the dig-
ital era, it becomes easier to tie in a single memory object with multiple
modes and media. The weblog is no longer strictly a piece of (hand)writing,
as the incorporation of music and picture files expands the possibilities of
computer-mediated reflection. Digital cameras carry standard options of
adding verbal tags and allow the shooting of moving images, and the MP3
player appears to smooth the revival of audiobooks. The multimedial and
multimodal potential of digitization is not merely an interesting side effect
of technology but may ultimately redefine the sensory ways in which we
catch and store memories. Visual, auditory, and verbal memory objects are
not confined by the sensory mode inscribed in their enabling media; instead,
mediated memories may become an intrinsically multimodal reservoir for
creative inventions. Hence, diary writing may no longer be “a matter of
script”—an utterance contained by its material and technological
parameters—but could yield innovative ways of expressing the multimodal
self.
Finally, science imaging and technological imagineering are insepara-
ble from the forces of cultural imagination. While we are reinventing the
tools for remembering, fantasies of digitized memories enter our popular
culture. Technologies of self are intimately interwoven with cultural prod-
ucts: home movies, for instance, surface in Hollywood blockbusters, family
albums become online multimedia productions, and tape collections inspire
grand-scale schemes of music swapping. Future memory objects and acts of
memory may be produced digitally, but they will be inevitably shaped by de-
sires and concepts previously developed in the era of chemical, magnetic,
and mechanical reproduction. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, released
at a moment in history when personal memory finds itself caught between

analog and digital materiality, helps us reinvent the meaning and function of
personal memory: What do we expect and want from our new tools? How
do we envision the role of memory in our lives and how would we like to
change it? The invention of every new technology—whether photography,
video, or the Internet—revises our methods of personal remembrance, and
each of these same tools influences the way we imagine and inscribe our
selves in relation to the culture at large. In fact, this may answer the question
why memories matter: humans have a vested interest in surviving, and there-
fore they invest in creating and preserving imprints of themselves—their
thoughts, appearances, voices, feelings, and ideas. They may want these im-
ages to be truthful or ideal, realistic or endearing, but most of all, they want
to be remembered.
The proposed model is intended as an analytical tool; it serves as a
model for understanding complexity, reminding us of the intricate multifac-
eted, interdisciplinary, and dynamic nature of memory. Mediated memo-
ries, in their conceptual and material dimensions, are always in transition;
they are infused with technology and yet always also embodied and encul-
turated. The remainder of this book puts the analytical power of this model
to a test. In each of the next four chapters, concrete mediated memories (di-
aries, sound recordings, photographs, and videos) form the lens through
which to examine a specific aggregate of minds, objects, technologies, forms,
and practices at this transitional stage between analog and digital. Acknowl-
edging the changing epistemological and ontological status of mediated
memories, I explore how digital culture is revamping our very concepts of
memory and experience, of individuality and collectivity, unsettling the
boundaries between private and public culture in the process. Digital tech-
nologies, which are part of a culture whose cognitive and epistemic para-
digms are under construction, are as much reflections as they are agents of
change. Personal cultural memory is coming out of the shoebox and becom-
ing part of a global digital culture—a wireless world that appears dense with
invisible threads connecting mind, matter, and imagination.
3
Writing the Self
When I was a teenager, I kept a diary in which I occasionally used to

express outbursts of intense anger or passion—the kind of emotions aver-
age teens typically want to get off their chests. One day, I remember writ-
ing a disgruntled poem about my parents who allegedly policed my
freedom by setting unreasonable curfews; I wrote several drafts before
trusting the final words to my personal notebook, which I then, quasi-
casually, left open on my desk for my mother to read. The next day after
school, I found a subtle note stating that gutsy teens may one day grow up
to become worried parents. Obviously, my words had resonated with their
intended reader, who had responded in kind. But when my older brother,
later that evening, teasingly joked about a new poet in our family, I was to-
tally embarrassed and indignantly accused him of privacy violation. His
defense that thoughts meant to be kept to oneself should be locked up and
words intended to be read by one specific person should be properly ad-
dressed appeared difficult to rebut. After all, I had been the one who had
intentionally left my scribbles open for another pair of eyes, even if I never
meant those eyes to be my brother’s.
This memory occurred to me when recently stumbling upon a news-
paper story about two female students who found themselves exposed after
their written evaluations of some boys’ sexual prowess had been distributed
to their classmates (and beyond that circle). The two young women had
communicated their intimate thoughts via a so-called lifelog, but they had
54 Writing the Self
apparently misjudged or neglected the fact that their diary entries were also
accessible to other readers. It did not take long for their peers to trace their
revelations and the male students’ revenge was more than a little awkward
for the authors, who presumed their readership to be limited to one friend
only. Like my own diary, the teenagers’ lifelog was directed to one other
pair of eyes but it was unwittingly exposed to the public eye.
The paper diary and the electronic weblog have much in common in
terms of function and use. For many centuries, the diary has been charac-
terized as a (hand)written document that chronicles the experiences, obser-
vations, and reflections of a single person at the moment of inscription.
The diary as a cultural form is varied and heterogeneous, yet it is typically
thought to represent the record of a single person constructing an autobi-
ographical account. Inviting the translation of thoughts into words via the
technologies of pen and paper, the diary symbolizes a haven for a person’s
most private thoughts, even if published in print later on. Diary writing,
as a quotidian cultural practice, involves both reflection and expression,
but it is also a peculiarly hybrid act of remembrance and communication,
always intended for private use, yet often betraying an awareness of its po-
tential to be read by others.
A similar ambiguity can be found in what is considered the diary’s
digital equivalent. Since 1995, weblogs have become a popular genre on the
Internet, as millions of people are now heavily engaged in blogging—
expressing and exchanging their personal accounts through the technolo-
gies of hardware and software.1 The term “weblog” or “blog” is a rather
general label for a variety of interactive forms; of all weblog variations, the
so-called lifelog seems to come closest to the traditional diary genre.2 Life-
logs are multimedial online experiments in self-expression, but they are
often cross-linked to other lifelogs, creating blog communities.3 Searching
on the Internet today, one can find a plethora of digital diaries, everything
from travel blogs chronicling the climbing of Mount Everest to personal
blogs documenting the spiritual journey of a born-again Christian, and
from the intimate exchange of sexual experiences between teenagers to the
shared stories of earthquake victims.
How do old-fashioned paper diaries compare with digital lifelogs?
My own experience and the experience of the two female students appear
strikingly similar in showing how diary writing and blogging are both am-
biguous acts, rife with ambiguities concerning privacy and publicness. And
Writing the Self 55
yet, the lifelog is not simply a contemporary replacement of the diary. As

mediated memories, diaries and lifelogs move along the axes of relational
identity and time: they are instruments of self-formation as well as vehicles
of connection. They are also tools to record and update the past that si-
multaneously steer future memory and identity. In order to understand
how diary writing and blogging have evolved, we need to look at them as
acts involving mind and body that are enabled through technology and in-
scribed in social practices and cultural forms.
In the next section, I look at how diaries and lifelogs are deployed to
scaffold individual memory, funnel emotion, and create affect. The Internet-
based tool has recently been mobilized in Alzheimer’s disease patients’
struggles against forgetting—to preserve a sense of self in the face of a har-
rowing degenerative disease and connect to fellow patients. The third sec-
tion shows how the digital materiality of the Internet engenders a new
type of discursive awareness that is both a continuation and a substantial
change from the days of pen and paper.4 In their lifelogs, teenagers play
with material limitations and technological potentials: privacy and inti-
macy are not so much social conditions as they are rhetorical and commu-
nicative effects. Therefore, it is critical to also consider diary writing and
blogging as sociocultural practices and explore how preferred ways of ex-
pressing the evolving self change in conjunction with cultural conditions.
Tracing diary writing at a time of cultural and technological transition
prompts us to reflect on the epistemologies of private versus public and of
recollection versus projection.
Diaries, Lifelogs, and Affective Subjectivity
Diary writing is often considered the discursive resonance of a per-

son’s subjective emotions, channeled by the mere jackets of words and
grammar and trusted to a piece of paper or a screen that has no other func-
tion than to mirror its contents to the writer. However, this interpretation
is too simple as it ignores the mental complexity involved in diary writing.
A person’s subjectivity, neuroscientists contend, develops through articu-
lating one’s intimate feelings in image maps and through language; the
mind constitutes a notion of self, and subjective experience is shaped by
various means of expression—a process in which memory and imagina-
tion play equally large roles.5 The mind and its consciousness are of course
56 Writing the Self
private phenomena, and as much as they offer public signs of their exis-
tence, these utterances should not be equated to subjective experiences
processed by the mind. When individuals express their intimate thoughts,
these verbal articulations are interlaced with behavioral, social, and cul-
tural aspects of what we call enunciation. Written records of personal ex-
perience are always mitigated by the tools and conventions of writing. In
order to deconstruct the myth of diaries forming a verbal template for the
outpour of reflections and feelings, we need to look more closely at the
mental process involving subjectivity and affectivity.
American psychologist Silvan Tomkins has argued that the emo-
tional formation of the subject occurs not in isolation but happens in
complex interactions or “affects” with others and with thought; affects, ac-
cording to Tomkins, are “neuro-physiological events” that are part of a
larger cognitive system operating as a series of distributed functions, in-
cluding sensory perception and memory.6 The affective constitution of
personal memories is well recognized by psychologists: when people read
or hear reminiscences narrated by others, they often feel triggered or in-
vited to contribute their own memories. Based on Tomkins’ theory, Aus-
tralian psychologist Anna Gibbs labels this phenomenon “contagious
feelings,” which she describes as a process of “neural firing,” eliciting a
positive feedback loop “in which more of the same affect will be evoked
in both the person experiencing the affect and in the observer (a phenom-
enon known as ‘affective resonance’).”7 In other words, subjectivity and
affectivity constitute each other in a constant feedback loop between self
and others, where the narration of experiences, memories, and feelings of
others contribute to the formation of self. Media, as Gibbs contends, in-
troduce a powerful new element in this state of affairs: they literally and
metaphorically act as amplifiers of affect while dramatically increasing ra-
pidity of communication and audience reach. Mediated affect may thus
at any point add to the feedback loop of affective subjectivity: personal
stories told on camera and broadcast by television may trigger associated
feelings and memories in individual viewers, contributing to that subject’s
emotional formation.
Gibbs implicitly transfers the notion of affective subjectivity from
autobiographical memory onto cultural memory by appointing contempo-
rary electronic media as the amplifiers of affect: stories told on television,
radio, or the Internet encourage public exchange of intimate feelings and
Writing the Self 57
emotions. But the mediated affect she describes did not originate with the
advent of electronic media such as television; for centuries, paper diaries
have provided this function. Diaries or personal notebooks, as the material
signifier of subjective reflection, never have been simply expressions of the
individual’s emotional state or psyche but are themselves cultural forms
that trigger affective response. Needless to say, there is no single, uniform
definition of what a diary is, and over the past centuries, its classification
has been anything but homogeneous.8 The diary obviously finds its roots
in the daily recording of events, transactions, feelings, and reflections; in
contrast to the journal, the diary is commonly referred to as a private kind
of reflective writing produced by a single author and closed to public
scrutiny. In general, the taxonomy of the old-fashioned paper diary tends
to be based either on its contents (personal, intimate self-expressions as op-
posed to daily records of fact) or on its directionality (intended for private
reading versus public use).9 However, this opposition is fallacious.
If we closely look at how paper diaries have been used in the past,
the characterization of diaries as enunciations written strictly for oneself is
hardly tenable. Keeping a diary is at once a creative and a communicative
act, and it also serves as a memory tool: writing the self constructs continuity
between past and present while keeping an eye on the future. Reading one’s
own scribbles at a later moment understandably elicits a tendency to rework
hindsight experiences into one’s personal reflection and to edit the original
entries not only for grammar and punctuation but also for content. The di-
ary’s contents, when reread at a later stage in life, may either yield nostalgic
yearning or retroactive embarrassment, in some cases even leading to a de-
finitive destruction of the object. Anne Frank’s famous diary is a case in
point: she began revising the first version of her personal account in March
of 1944, several months before she was deported to a concentration camp,
inspired by a government’s official radio address, urging Dutch citizens suf-
fering under Nazi occupation to keep personal notebooks for later publica-
tion. The various drafts have now become an essential part of her legacy:
they show how keen she was to revise her diary to include hindsight observa-
tions just a year after writing her first draft, as evidence of her evolving or
growing self. Equally important in this regard is the fact that Anne never in-
tended to keep the diary strictly to her (future) self: she wanted to become a
published author. Anne Frank’s desire to share experiences and evoke affects
with (potential) others was very much at the heart of her effort. Affective
58 Writing the Self
subjectivity is thus embodied in the Diary of Anne Frank, the published ver-
sion whose mediated affect has inspired many teenagers and young adults to
articulate their own personal struggles of coming of age in the face of op-
pression or diaspora.
A similar amalgamation of subjectivity and affectivity can be dis-
cerned in online blogging, although in a distinctly different form. Specify-
ing the mediated affect of contemporary blogs, I turn to a specific type of
lifelogs produced by patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (AD).10
By means of therapy, patients suffering from dementia and AD have long
been encouraged to try to retain a sense of self by looking at old photo-
graphs and rereading old notebooks and letters. Supported by relatives and
friends who want them to remember their (shared) pasts, one of the most
frustrating problems these patients face is their growing inability to recog-
nize themselves and their loved ones as depicted in pictures or described in
words. Adding to this frustration is the increasing distance, due to mem-
ory loss, between a patient’s mental world and the (social) world surround-
ing them. To an AD patient, the past is disconnected from the present,
and often relatives inevitably lose track of the patient’s mindset, thus sev-
ering ties between the worlds of self and others. Some patients, particu-
larly those coping with an early onset of the disease, have begun to explore
lifelogs as a new means to express themselves and share their experience
with others. Upon his own confrontation with the disease, Morris Friedell,
a retired professor from California, cofounded the Dementia and
Alzheimer’s Support Network International (DASNI) and initiated a blog
community of AD patients in 1999.11
Looking at various AD patients’ lifelogs, their most observable role is
in the sustenance of subjectivity. Some patients poignantly describe their
first symbolic confrontation with their “new self”: they find themselves
staring at the evidence of cerebral atrophy in the diagnostic scans made in
the hospital, while the doctor explains the signified meanings of the slices
on the screen. The look into the brain often leads to confusion and discus-
sion. As Friedell discovers, brain scans (PET, fMRI) are often indecisive
and ambiguous; a discussion on the Internet forum may help patients un-
derstand what medical images mean in terms of diagnosis and prospects.12
Once the initial shock of their confrontation with a shrinking brain vol-
ume subsides, patients discover the blog as a tool for self-preservation;
as the disease progresses, it becomes vital to document what can still be
Writing the Self 59
remembered and what is lost to oblivion, hence keeping track of a chang-

ing sense of self. To some extent, the lifelog functions as a personal mem-
ory aid in which quotidian chores and events are recorded before they are
literally erased from the mind. But in other ways, the lifelog becomes a
technology of affect: through links included in each lifelog, patients be-
come part of a blog community of fellow AD patients who may just read
about each others’ ordeals or share experiences.13 Most entries in AD pa-
tients’ blogs are written with different readers in mind—fellow patients,
family members, or everyone who is interested in their private struggle
with the disease.
Chip Gerber, an AD patient from Ohio who was confronted with
symptoms a few years before retiring as a social worker, keeps a blog of his
everyday experiences and hopes. He invites everyone to join him on his in-
voluntary journey as he enters “the long good-bye.” In one of his entries,
Gerber relates how he forgot how a toaster works and subsequently burned
himself. He expounds: “Those of us with dementia do some funny things
at times. For me it is a time to laugh and make a joke out of it. It’s going
to happen again in one form or another. It makes a good story to share
with others . . . if I remember what happened, that is. Then others can en-
joy the event with me also. A sense of humor is a gift that I’ve been given
and I highly recommend it to others.”14 The awkwardness of such mo-
ments of forgetting comes across as particularly striking, not only because
they are apparently shared with friends and family—the intended effect of
intimacy—but also because the author directs his entries to other patients,
encouraging them to remain positive in the face of their unnerving mental
deterioration.
As they keep their blogs and link entries to those of fellow patients, a
community emerges that embraces the blog as its connecting medium.
This affect is powerfully amplified when outside readers like me realize the
blog serves as a personal marker of cognitive abilities the patient will in-
evitably lose at a later stage. It is thus the prolific, yet ambiguous combina-
tion of writing to oneself and to others that constitutes the affective
subjectivity in Gerber’s lifelog.
Most of the weblogs of AD patients are interlinked and connected,
and so it is clear that the patients regularly take notice of other’s contribu-
tions to the blog community. Affective subjectivity appears to be conta-
gious, to use Anna Gibbs’ term, as one articulation of emotion triggers the
60 Writing the Self
next one, which in turn adds to the communal effort. From this perspec-
tive, blogging becomes a sort of feedback loop in which subjectivity and
affect work reciprocally to constitute the formation of self in constant in-
teraction with others. And yet, the need to express oneself as an individual
and train the brain’s cognitive functions never appears to be at odds with
the need to connect and communicate. Consider, for instance, the blog of
Mary Lockhardt, an Oklahoma woman who ran a licensed day-care home
for infants until she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at age 55. She had to
give up working and started her blog in addition to opening a chat room
for patients like her. These online activities, according to Lockhart, helped
redirect her purpose in life: “This is a very lonely disease. I don’t want any-
one to feel as lonely as I did when I was diagnosed (I thought I was the
only one over 50 that had Alzheimer’s). If I can help one person with my
blog it will all be worth it.”15 Bound together by the same ordeal—people
“who are in the same leaky boat,” as AD-patient Morris Friedell phrases
it—each blogger trusts personal emotions to this novel medium and shares
his or her experience with relative strangers who are held captive by the
same neurological conditions. Yet the fact that this is a shared weblog does
not keep Mary Lockhart, or other bloggers, from listing the birthdays of
relatives and friends and reporting how she celebrated each of them. These
comments read like a typical boring diary entry—until you realize, as an
outside reader, that remembering birthdays is a great struggle in the life of
a person coping with dementia or Alzheimer’s.
The hybrid notion of the individual yet collective nature of remem-
brance is crucial to the understanding of why and how lifelogs work the
way they do. Australian media theorist Robert Payne argues how the on-
line dynamics of collective recollection stimulates the articulation and
rearticulation of the self. Analyzing an Internet-based collective project
named Random Access Memory, Payne relates how reading through other
people’s assorted memories—organized by themes or years—activated him
to trust his own personal memories to the screen, thus contributing to
the overall project and in turn stimulating others to revise or reenact their
memories in narrated form.16 Random Access Memory, according to
Payne, forms the online materialization of “interaffectivity”: an exchange
of individual stories making a community of records.17 Of course, Ran-
dom Access Memory entries do not have the same function as the entries
posted by Alzheimer’s patients in their lifelogs, but they equally enhance
Writing the Self 61
people’s inclination to (re)construct the self in the light of experiences

posted by others.
For Alzheimer’s patients, blogs appear to be the ultimate tool to com-
prehend and preserve their unique sense of self, if only because they can go
back to what they wrote previously; patients constantly fine-tune their own
mental and cognitive perceptions of self in the wake of ordeals described by
others. The most debilitating aspect of AD and dementia is that patients
lose their sense of time, blurring past and future. Each day in the present
can confront them with a different persona that strikes them as self, but a
self that has lost a substantial part of his or her long-term and even working
memory. The most touching parts of these blogs have to do with patient’s
idea of continuity—how past and future connect in the present under-
standing of their fate. In Gerber’s weblog, for instance, he describes how he
and his wife have prepared for the final good-bye: “It is so easy to put off
unpleasant tasks, such as doing one’s will, getting a durable power of attor-
ney, making funeral arrangements, living wills, visiting an elder law attor-
ney, making one’s final wishes known and putting them in writing. The
death of a person is not something individuals like to dwell on.”18 Or, as
Friedell phrases it, the ultimate goal of his digital effort to record his chang-
ing personality is less to guarantee his own continuity as a person than to be
a sort of discursive continuity in his family: “Ultimately, I want to leave be-
hind a message for my descendents that when life pitches them a curve they
don’t have to curl up and fade away. They can get back on their feet and
continue being the persons the Source of Life meant them to be.”19 Besides
countering the loss of memory, the purpose of these and many other lifel-
ogs kept by Alzheimer’s patients is to retain a sense of continuity in present
and future—a notion crucial to autobiographical memory. If they relied
solely on old photographs, letters, or stories told by others about their pasts,
AD patients would hang on to a static notion of self. By keeping a lifelog,
they recognize how the disease influences subjective judgments, bearing
witness to this change by writing about it in their logs. The strategies of af-
fective subjectivity and interaffectivity help them to share a very individual
mental experience and at the same time let other people in on their lonely
journeys. Mediated strategies of effect and affect are deployed to keep con-
tinuity between their past and current environment.
The similarities between paper diaries and electronic lifelogs, when it
comes to the double focus of expressing individual emotion and evoking
62 Writing the Self
affect, are striking; their historical continuity is also palpable in their func-
tions to mediate between past and future. And yet, networked lifelogs are
distinctly different in that their default mode seems to be connectivity and
communication, as opposed to the default mode of diaries, which is isola-
tion and reflection. Notions of subjectivity and connectivity are equally im-
portant in AD patients’ fight against memory fading and isolation. In
addition, the Internet-based tool appears to diffuse the boundaries between
privacy and publicness. Whereas Anne Frank’s intimate reflections took a
long time to move from private diary to public memory object, the built-in
potential of lifelogs to open up one’s writings to selected audiences changes
their intent and impact. To further explore these changes, we need to turn to
the technological and material aspects of diaries and lifelogs.
The Technology and Materiality of

Diary Writing versus Blogging
Diaries are commonly valued for their contents rather than for their
look or feel. But the materiality of diaries and the technologies by which
they have come into being are crucial factors in their signification. When
referring to paper diaries, two typical concepts spring to mind: the empty
diary, preformatted for daily use, which we can buy at stationary stores;
and the original, handwritten manuscripts of diaries that have later ap-
peared in print and became widely read. The physical appearance of a pre-
fab diary prefigures the functions of its intended use: empty pages, with or
without lines, bound or unbound, dated or undated, offer the author stim-
uli to fill the more or less blank surface with personal inscriptions and
thoughts. In some cases, the diary is completed by a lock and key—a po-
tent symbol of its private nature. The preformatted diary has always been,
to some extent, a product of contemporary fashion, its design and layout
representing a particular style and catering to a specific age or taste. A di-
ary’s materiality forms an essential part of its content. Over the years,
diarists often grow fond of the look, feel, and smell of their notebooks;
fading paper, youthful handwriting, and ink blobs trigger reminiscences
the way photographs do.
Arguably, diary writing is not necessarily inspired by prefab formats:
many diaries that were discovered many years after they were written and
Writing the Self 63
subsequently published in print had first been scribbled onto single sheets
or in simple notebooks. The actual manuscript of such a diary, its original
inscription, becomes a vital sign of authenticity—often stored in special
places and only accessible to owners or researchers. In the case of Anne
Frank’s diary, written partly in notebooks and partly on single sheets of
paper, the written pages have become the centerpiece of the Dutch
teenager’s legacy. The manuscript, stored in Amsterdam, appeared in such
demand that the Anne Frank Foundation had two exact duplicates made:
one to replace the original on display at the museum, the other to satisfy
the many requests from film media directors, researchers, and documen-
tary makers for pictures of the original. The original manuscript was
locked in a safe place to protect it from further deterioration. Its faithful
copies concurrently underscored the idea of the diary as a public commod-
ity and withdrew the original’s unique materiality from the media’s or
public’s eye. The manuscript’s materiality constitutes an intricate part of
the diary’s genesis and forms the stake in controversial claims to its au-
thenticity, (uncensored) originality, and completeness.20
Pivotal to the materiality of diaries, up to the age of computers, has
been the notion of script: the concept of the diary is commonly associated
with (hand)writing, signifying not just authenticity but also personality.
Handwriting has historically been believed to betray the corporeality of its
producer—graphology being the study that yields clues to the writer’s char-
acter, such as age and even personality traits. Regarded as the first technol-
ogizing of the word, the availability of pen and paper facilitated the need to
make oneself legible to the other or to the future self. Writing is often tied
in with a stage in one’s personal development: a teenager’s scrawls betray his
or her inexperience with the prime tool of literacy—the immaturity of
body or mind.21 Sonja Neef, a German media scholar, claims handwriting is
an embodied practice enabled by technology: moving a pen onto paper in-
volves a direct connection between body and script, an act in which the eye
and hand are intimately interwoven with the technology of paper and pen
and the techniques of deploying them; the hand—a body part instrumen-
tal to the “Verkörperung” (embodiment) of thoughts—fixes the inner self
to the outside world.22
As our technologies for writing change, so do our ways of creating
self-reflective records; memory, in other words, is always implicated in the
act and technology of writing. Handwritten diaries as material artifacts are
64 Writing the Self
themselves memorials—traces of a past self. When Sigmund Freud wrote

his essay “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’ ” in 1925, he regarded
writing and technology as external aids or supplements to memory. Freud
described memory in terms of writing, comparing it to the surface of a
writing pad that allowed the scribbling of endless notes that could subse-
quently be erased and yet remain stored in the subconscious layers of the
pad, below its material surface. Jacques Derrida, commenting upon Freud’s
essay, dismisses his notion of writing as an external memory and empha-
sizes instead technology’s instrumental relationship to language and repre-
sentation.23 Technologies, including writing utensils, are machines that
engender representations while infiltrating agency; pen and paper, there-
fore, produce different modes of writing than the typewriter or the word
processor. Handwriting never simply structures reflections or thoughts but
literally creates them; by the same token, a typewriter constitutes a differ-
ent relation between author, words, and representation. It may not be a co-
incidence that typewriters never became popular in connection to diary
writing; unlike handwriting, the noise of fingers pounding on a machine
severed the physical intimacy between body and word.24
The advent of the stand-alone word processor, as the successor of
the (electronic) typewriter, further disembodied the production of written
language, because not only the keyboard but also the screen interfered
with the continuity between hand and words. Yet two essential features of
word processing may have restored some of the intimacy lost with the
typewriter. First, the relative silence of word processors refurbished part of
the quietude inherent to solitary writing, and the technology sped up the
production of text and maintained standardized letter output. Even more
profound has been the ability of word processors to produce tentative
texts, provisional versions of thoughts, forever amenable to changes of
mind; the editing of visualized words does not leave a trace in the ultimate
print. Words on the screen, stored in digital memory, thus formed a new
stage in the trajectory between immaterial thoughts and textual products,
allowing for invisible revisionist interferences in one’s memory. On top of
that, digital files may never materialize into print, and they can remain
stored in the black box of a personal computer without ever being erased
or retrieved (by the writer or by others). Diaries produced by a word pro-
cessor, therefore, are fundamentally different from diaries produced by
means of handwriting or typewriters: the personal computer provides a
Writing the Self 65
textual paintbrush that allows editing of one’s personal records without

leaving a trace. The potential of digital editing at a later stage dilutes the
concept of the diary as a material, authentic artifact, inscribed in time and
on paper.25
In the late 1990s, when stand-alone word processors gradually gave
way to networked computers and the Internet became a popular medium
for interaction, the physical artifact of the diary seemed incommensurable
with the prime demands of instant, ubiquitous connection rooted in digi-
tal materiality; mutatis mutandis, the evanescence of the Internet appears
at odds with the diary genre’s preference for a fixed material output. More-
over, the time lapse between the writing and potential publishing of the
diary in print contrasts the immediacy and connectedness of the electronic
superhighway. Between the body and the printed word there is no longer
just a piece of paper but an intricate technological network of connected
individuals and communities; between private thoughts and published
words there are only a few seconds before the inscriptions enter the virtual
realm. And yet, perhaps surprisingly, we still consider the lifelog to be a
digital descendant of the paper diary, except that there is no printed out-
put, only a screen-based one. How, then, should we consider the new ma-
teriality of the lifelog? Since computers do not emit odors, and the screen
has no particular feel, how can we define what the digital matter of lifelogs
actually consists of?
Analogous to the preformatted paper diary and the diarist’s handwrit-
ing, we can locate the materiality of lifelogs—apart from the obvious hard-
ware of the computer—in two different areas: weblog software and the
signature of its users. The first weblogs were operated mostly by digirati,
but as specially developed software made blogging technically easy, more
people without any specific technological skills joined the various kinds of
blogging groups. Since the year 2000, a large number of software packages
have flooded the market, enabling even the clumsiest person to become a
sophisticated blogger. Software-mediated blogs are overwhelmingly popu-
lar among teenagers between thirteen and seventeen years of age who are
interested in both lifelogs and scrapbooks. They can choose from a variety
of different packages; besides open diaries on the web, such as Opendiary
.com and MyDearDiary.com, there are also weblog services for which you
need to sign up or even be introduced by a member, like LiveJournal,
Blurty, Xanga, DeadJournal, Blogger, and DiaryLand. Although they all
66 Writing the Self
basically serve the same purpose, the formats may differ in layout and digi-
tal possibilities. To some extent, these different designs resemble the prefor-
matted paper diaries for sale at stationary stores. It seems like the various
software formats attract different audiences, catering to heterogeneous
tastes and lifestyles, much like brand names of fashion products. As Emily
Nussbaum points out in her ethnographic, journalistic report of bloggers,
the formats vary only slightly, but users’ choice of software packages may
be based on particular technical features.26 For instance, websites like Xanga
offer the possibility to give “aProps,” a kind of gold star rating for particu-
larly good posts, whereas LiveJournal allows for selecting features such as
“current mood music” and “embedded polls or surveys.” In a way, blog soft-
ware resembles the preference for jeans: nuances in style and brand name are
important to individuals who seek to belong to a group.
Digital weblogs, in terms of their materiality, may not even remotely
resemble their paper precursor, but there is still a distinct continuity in
their personal signature. If handwriting betrays a diary writer’s character
and level of maturity, the typewriter and later the word processor had al-
ready erased that trademark of personality; and yet, through word choice,
style, punctuation, and the use of emoticons it is remarkable how much
lifelog entries give away a person’s character. On top of that, the personal-
ity of a diarist is even more traceable through his or her prolific choices of
cultural contents. A blogger may attach references to (or actually attach)
songs, pictures, movies, books, and so forth. Despite prescriptive software
formats, weblogs offer a relatively high degree of creative freedom; users
can cut and paste from all kinds of media sources, thus exploring their taste
by testing it against the taste of others. Weblog architecture encourages this
type of self-exploration through encoded features such as “my current
mood,” “mini biography,” and “my interests.”
The most profound difference between a paper diary and a blog may
be found in the blog’s networked condition; lifelogs, by default, are tech-
nologies of affect—connecting the individual to others, whether selected
groups or an anonymous audience. Some websites offering lifelog software
(like OpenDiary.com) allow users to search entries by age group, gender,
theme of the week, subject, and cultural preferences; standard features
such as “friend groups,” “syndication,” and “communities” (LiveJournal),
prefigure a connected exploration of a user’s personal life. What the Internet
does best is to create a forum for collective discourses. In this culture of
Writing the Self 67
sharing, the lifelog finds its natural habitat: the digital diary becomes in-
strumental as its multimedial modality equally allows for the creation of
one’s personal entries as well as for the exchange of cultural contents (clip-
pings, files, songs). Blogging software and Internet hardware, in this argu-
ment, are neither neutral technical conduits nor simple commodities, but
they are technological tools facilitating a social process in which exchange
and participation are conditions of enacting citizenship.27 The flipside of the
culture of reciprocity is instant marketability: personal taste and cultural
choices become instantaneously traceable and marketable to commercial
ventures. Whereas many diaries (like OpenDiary.com and DearDiary.com)
started out as small communities of like-minded individuals, many of
these services have been bought by corporations.28 In a networked envi-
ronment, where information is constantly cached, weblogs have become
gold mines for data diggers. Nostalgic notions of personality still persist,
even if new media prompt a keen awareness of technological strategies di-
recting individual taste and community building.
Although the multimedial lifelog appears very different from the
preformatted lock-and-key paper diary, each materiality gives away dis-
tinctive clues to an author’s subjectivity and personality. Just as paper di-
aries reflect someone’s age, taste, and preference at a particular moment in
one’s life, the software and signature of blogs seem to accommodate the
needs of especially contemporary teens and young adults to express and
sort out their identity in an increasingly wired, mediated world. Digital
technologies are imperative to the creation of blogs, but technology does
not tell the whole story; in our focus on technologies, we often tend to un-
derstate the importance of their uses. In conjunction to the technological
script, we hence need to look at how social practices and cultural forms
transpire through the concrete manifestations of diary writing and lifelogs.
Diaries as Cultural Forms and Blogging

as a Social Practice
The myth that the diary is a private object, written strictly for oneself,
contrasting a journal of fact, which is written for others, is as misleading as
it is persistent. As literary scholar Thomas Mallon argues, no one ever kept
a diary just for him- or herself; pointing out the continuity between the
68 Writing the Self
journal and the diary, he concludes that both are directed toward an audi-
ence and “both [are] rooted in the idea of dailiness, but perhaps because of
the journal’s link to the newspaper trade and the diary’s etymological kin-
ship to ‘dear,’ the latter seems more intimate than the former.”29 Of all the
varieties within the diary genre, some are written more with a reader in
mind than others, but an essential feature of all diaries is their (imagined)
addressee. Some authors direct their diaries to God, to an imagined
friend—like Anne Frank’s “Kitty” or André Gide’s mysterious addressee—
or to the world at large; in any case, the notion of addressing is crucial to
the recognition of diary writing as an act of communication.30 Even as a
form of self-expression, diary writing signals the need to connect, either to
someone or something else or to oneself later in life.31
Another misperception we can trace in the genealogy of diaries con-
cerns their authorship. They were commonly ascribed individual voice and
authorship—supposedly written not only for one person but also by one
person. However, there are a number of historical examples in which the
genre was deployed as a communal means of expressing and remembering.
Many religious congregations, for instance, considered the diary a semi-
public record, shared within but never outside a community.32 In the history
of diary writing, the genre as a communal means of expression has found
many practitioners, from South Pole explorers to POWs held in captivity.33
For groups bound together by an adventurous ordeal, a collaborative diary
was often a means to trust one’s personal emotions to a relatively safe medium
and share the experience with mates held captive under the same conditions.
We often encounter preconceived notions of the diary as a private ob-
ject written by a single author when it is contrasted to the lifelog; the digital
networked variant is thought to privilege connection over individual expres-
sion and group formation over private authorship. Indeed, exploring one’s
identity in the various scenarios allowed by online groups is part and parcel
of experimenting with multiple aspects of a personality, specifically among
teenaged bloggers.34 Many young bloggers engage in diary writing to be
seen or to see themselves through the lenses of others—a kind of validating
experience even if no one else ever reads the diary. And as we witnessed in
the blogs fostered by AD patients, they obviously value connectedness: the
potential to address others. Connectivity and sharing apparently form the
default mode of blogging, as opposed to individual expression and mono-
logue, which seem to form the default mode of paper diaries. And yet, as
Writing the Self 69
argued above, neither the historical genre of the diary nor its contemporary
digital variant fits this binary genre frame: the functions of self-expression
and communication have never been at odds but have always been (and still
are) copresent in the genre. Diaries have historically been produced as a sort
of materialized feedback loop—dialogic rather than monologist—in which
subjective emotions trigger responses that contribute to an individual’s for-
mation. Lifelogs continue to espouse this hybridity, which is less a feature of
the genre itself as it is an effect of its cultural use.
From our reading of historical diaries, we may deduce many details
concerning the social practice of diary keeping; by the same token, we can
tell from reading online lifelogs (complemented by ethnographic research)
how contemporary teenagers deploy the new technologies to perform daily
rites. Both diary writing and blogging are ritualized activities that gradu-
ally receive a place in a person’s life. Writing a diary, of course, never hap-
pened in a social vacuum; the ritual occupies its own niche alongside other
acts of communication, such as talking, listening, reading, and so forth.
As a quotidian habit, diary keeping gives meaning and structure to some-
one’s life, and therefore it is important to regard this activity in the context
of everyday activities. In the case of Anne Frank, writing a journal created
a zone of silence and refuge in a small space, densely crowded and heavily
trafficked by human interaction. Her daily ritual was an act of self-
protection as much as of self-expression. By carving out a discursive space,
she was able to articulate her private thoughts and define her position in
relation to others and to the world at large. Diary writers fashion a habit
by choosing a medium; the creation of that mediated habit is always in-
spired by cultural conventions and prevailing fashions.35 Quotidian acts
such as diary writing should thus be regarded not only as stilled reflections
but also as ways of constructing life. They always coexist amid a number
of other communicative habits and culturally determined practices.
Cultural practices have become increasingly mediated in the past
century: watching television, talking on the phone, taking pictures, and
writing letters are only few of many potential communicative acts through
which people articulate themselves. With the introduction of the Internet,
some of these daily rituals are gradually changing, often fusing old prac-
tices with new conventions. For instance, the emergence of e-mail substan-
tially transformed people’s daily rituals of communication and interaction
along with their sense of physical or psychological presence, just as the
70 Writing the Self
telephone changed communicative patterns along with notions of proxim-

ity and presence a hundred years earlier. For the contemporary blogger, the
Internet is just one of a host of media through which to express agency,
and blogging is one of many competing practices, such as speaking (both
face-to-face and phone conversations), writing (letters, Short Message
Services or SMS, e-mail), watching (television, film, photos), and listen-
ing (music, talk). The coexisting practices that fill the mediated lives of to-
day’s youngsters both complement and compete with each other; blogs
offer several amenities that other media lack, such as the ability to combine
extensive written comments with pictures, music, links, and clips, as well
as the possibility to post something online to a large anonymous reader-
ship. Blogging is a combination of both oral and literate practices, such as
diary writing, letter writing, reading, and conversation.36 New hybrid ritu-
als always emerge in connection to (and also in competition with) already
existing practices, as they gradually create a new balance in the ecosystem
of quotidian activities.
The networked computer is instrumental to the way in which blog-
gers simultaneously fashion their identity and create a sense of belonging.
Blogging paradoxically complements and interferes with everyday live com-
munication: blog entries are part of people’s web of social circles through
which they move and shape their lives. Some of these circles overlap; some
do not. The generally reflexive nature of the lifelog has its place in the con-
tact zones of everyday life, usually a mixture of real-life and virtual experi-
ences. Although reciprocation is certainly not a condition for participating
in the blogosphere, connecting and sharing are definitely written into the
technological condition. Of all lifelogs present on the Internet today, some
still resemble conventional paper diaries, whereas others have morphed into
completely new interactive formats, firmly rooted in Internet culture.
Through their LiveJournals or Xangas, teenagers not only express
themselves but also create a communal sense of values and thoughts deemed
worthy of sharing. In a lifelog, one may blurt out confessions of loneliness
and insecurity—behavior inhibited in face-to-face encounters—despite
the fact that everyone in a peer group can potentially read these outbursts.
In her journalistic ethnography, Nussbaum observes that bloggers usually
don’t talk about what they say online, even though in real life they may
speak to each other on a daily basis.37 Online posts may be read and
responded to by immediate friends and relatives, and they may also invoke
Writing the Self 71
reciprocity from complete strangers, adding another dimension to the

small world of immediate peers. Being able to choose the audience is a
typical example of how technology and cultural practice interlock—the
digital version of the lock-and-key diary. For example, the distribution fea-
tures of LiveJournal allow users to decide with each posting to whom they
make the content available—from “just myself” to “friends only” to “any-
one.” Defining one’s readership is bound to define one’s sense of inclusion
in and exclusion from a community, whatever shape that community may
take—actual or virtual, intellectually formative or emotionally supportive.
In contrast to the paper diary, the weblog is part of a mediated continuum,
a lived world in which the individual is always connected. However, just as
the solitary basis of diaries turned out to be a myth, reciprocity is not a
standard feature of blogs: still half of all Internet diaries are nonrecipro-
cal.38 Although the very medium that enacts blogging shifts the techno-
logical condition from isolation to connection, this does not mean that the
cultural practices take on a new, pure default mode; on the contrary, old
habits of diary writing coexist with new connected practices as they are
gradually incorporated by a new medium.
The inclusion and exclusion of (potential) readers from one’s lifelog
constitutes an intricate game, the stakes of which are identity formation
and community construction. Identity, as Australian media theorist Esther
Milne claims, is always, in varying degrees, a performance: “It is the result
of complex cultural, technological, economic and institutional forces
rather than being a natural, somatic or psychological process that is funda-
mentally independent of historical influences.”39 Current complex forces
are geared toward the swift and easy distribution of ideas. In the past, in
order to expose oneself to a wider audience of unknown readers, a paper
diarist was dependent on a publisher to print and distribute the diary, usu-
ally resulting in a considerable time lag between the moment of writing
and of publication. But bloggers can make their own decisions concerning
publication and distribution at the very moment of writing. Sharing inti-
mate narratives with an anonymous readership is no longer a future possi-
bility but an actual choice for webloggers; the effect of this technological
option is immediacy—instant distribution, without intervention from a
publishing institution. A survey held by the MIT Media Lab indicates that
76 percent of bloggers do not limit their readership in any way, and they
have no idea who their readers are, apart from a core audience.40
72 Writing the Self
Perhaps more than paper diaries, lifelogs foreground the intricate

combination of technologies of self with technologies of affect: their
prime function is to synchronize one’s subjective experience with those of
others, to test one’s evaluations against the outside world. Besides being an
act of self-disclosure, blogging is also a ritual of exchange: bloggers expect
to be signaled and perhaps to be responded to. If not, why would they
publish their musings on the Internet instead of letting them sit in their
personal files?41 Opening up one’s secret diary to selected friends and rela-
tives, and expecting them to do the same, is an old practice refurbished by
bloggers. Attaching items of cultural contents is quite similar to swapping
music albums, books, or personal accessories—a system of sharing sym-
bolic meanings with friends that is firmly rooted in the material culture of
gift exchange. But the potential to open up this process to an anonymous
and potentially large readership is new; bloggers are constantly connected
to the world at large, and they are aware of their exposure. By all means,
the choice for privacy versus publicness, intimacy versus openness, appears
to be a rhetorical or discursive effect, whether intentionally pursued, ig-
nored, or simply forgotten.42 As the above examples of lifelogs by AD pa-
tients already showed, intimacy and privacy as well as openness and
publicness are less intrinsic features of the genre than implications of tech-
nological scripts and users’ choices.
Based on their materiality and use, we often contend that whereas pa-
per diaries are meant to fix experiences—freezing one’s thoughts and ideas
in time—blogs help users to synchronize their experiences with others’. Al-
though there is a kernel of truth in this assumption, this distinctive func-
tion is all too easily ascribed to a material fixity of paper diaries as opposed
to the evanescent quality of software or screen content. However, their
ambiguous use as means of communication and storage is present in both
diaries and lifelogs. Even though many consider blogging an ephemeral cul-
tural practice—the equivalence of talking on the phone or sending short text
messages—the desire for storage and retrieval is evident among users. For one
thing, the fact that almost every software program contains an archive
holding selected entries that go back to the very beginning of a person’s
blog signals a desire to build up a personal repository of memories. Al-
though this hypothesis has never been empirically tested, it would be no
surprise to find that bloggers, like teenagers using SMS or cell phones, value
their lifelog’s archival function as much as its communicative function.43
Writing the Self 73
From the contemporary blogger’s perspective, synchronizing experience

and fixing experience in time are not at all contradictory functions, but
they perfectly merge in today’s lifelogs. Taking control of the evolving self,
teenagers seem to take advantage of blogs to mold their living as well as
their lived experience to reflect the kind of person they want to be per-
ceived as being. Most youngsters favor the lifelog as a tool that lets them
preserve their posted entries while concurrently allowing them to revise
former entries.44
Lifelogs as Signifiers of a Cultural Transformation
Looking at the mental constructs, material technologies, and socio-

cultural practices lifelogs engender, we can deduce an interesting reinven-
tion of age-old rituals, newly attuned to the modalities of digitization.
Like the writing of paper diaries, blogging is a process that helps shape
subjective feelings and identity through affective connections, thus defin-
ing a sense of self in relation to others. Diaries and lifelogs are both acts
and artifacts in which materiality and technology are contingent on their
evolving use and users. Some seemingly conflicting genre features that have
always existed converge in the face of hybrid practices, yet other paradoxes
persist. Even though (networked) computers are gradually replacing pen
and paper, multimedial materiality still reflects the kind of individuality
formerly signified by handwriting and paper objects. The binary classifica-
tion of diaries as strictly private documents and of lifelogs as public ac-
counts that tends to inform the taxonomy of blogs in relation to diaries is
equally fallacious. In the cultural practice of blogging, the need to syn-
chronize personal experience easily blends with the desire to fix experience
in time and to revise it over time. But however interesting lifelogs are in the
perspective of their historical paper precursors, they are also momentous in
their own right, signifying a techno-cultural transformation whose impact
moves beyond its traces left on the World Wide Web. Tracking the evolu-
tion of blogging as a new hybrid practice, it is crucial to acknowledge how
blogging strategies sustain old and construct new epistemologies, specifi-
cally paired-off notions such as privacy and publicness, intimacy and open-
ness, and memory and experience.
As the examples of young people’s use of blogs show, privacy and pub-
licness are often assumed an inevitable part of the technological condition.
74 Writing the Self
As pointed out above, though, privacy is a (deliberate or unintended) ef-

fect rather than an intrinsic feature of a blog’s content, often achieved
through one’s (un)familiarity with the consequences of instant publication
and global accessibility. Our norms and laws of privacy protection still rely
on paper-based distinctions between ego-documents and public records;
the boundaries that were often crossed in the past have become increas-
ingly fuzzy for bloggers.45 Obviously, there is no shame in sharing; blog-
gers take pride and find purpose in sharing. Instant publication, achieved
by a simple click on the mouse, changes the rules of the game.46 Especially
youngsters’ notions of privacy and publicness are riddled by contradic-
tions: comments are personal yet readable by everyone. Old and new no-
tions of privacy emerge alongside each other in the blogosphere as courts
and lawyers are currently wrestling with emerging questions such as: Can
entries posted with restricted access be stolen when they are posted on an
open website? Are public officials or state employees free to speak their
minds in the private sphere of restricted blog communities? It will take
a number of years before this hybrid practice stabilizes and becomes
grounded in social and legal norms.
For older bloggers with Alzheimer’s disease, their struggle is less
about issues of privacy versus publicness and more about intimacy versus
openness. Like teenage bloggers, patients with dementia and AD find pur-
pose in sharing their personal experiences as a means to counter the forget-
fulness and loneliness forced upon them by the disease. But rather than
striving for a discursive effect, these bloggers create affect in their attempts
to open up their mental processes to readers, whether relatives or an
anonymous audience. In more than one way, these patients manage to use
the ambiguity inscribed in the technological and material condition of the
lifelog to pair off intimate mental consciousness—a poignant sense of a
changing brain impaired by increasing memory loss—with public aware-
ness: the desire to inform and stay connected to a world that is increasingly
erased from their consciousness. Partially serving as a therapeutic tool, the
lifelog concurrently serves as a mnemonic device that perfectly mixes inti-
macy and candidness—terms that are no longer antonyms in the wired re-
alities of patients’ everyday lives.
Last but not least, lifelogs point at a profound change in contemporary
notions of personal memory versus lived experience. The paper diary gave
the erroneous impression that it was a petrified, unchangeable relic, stored in
Writing the Self 75
its authentic form and retrieved to invoke a past experience. When a diary’s
contents were published through an intermediate process of editing, print-
ing, and distribution, we were mostly concerned with how the original
words—presumably the recordings of experiences—matched the words
published in print. The fusion of old and new technologies results in a hy-
brid tool that seamlessly combines editing and archival functions; blogging
allows for preserving and revising entries at the same time. Blogging itself
becomes a real-life experience, a construction of self that is mediated by
tools for reflection and communication. In the life of bloggers, the medium
is not the message but the medium is the experience. If the meaning of experi-
ence is slowly changing, so is the meaning of memory. As time proceeds,
memories of experiences inevitably evolve; revising one’s past inscriptions is
a natural part of a process of personal growth. Rather than being fixed in
objects, memory mutates through digital materiality. Although the Internet
is often characterized as a transient, evanescent medium, lifelogs have both
the ability to fix and the potential to morph.
It is exactly this hybrid function of the blog that helps Alzheimer’s
patients to sustain a sense of continuity in the face of harrowing mental
changes in their self-consciousness. The lifelog becomes literally a memory
device through which they can speak their minds, even as their states of
mind appear increasingly confused in the eyes of relatives and loved ones.
In the past, Alzheimer’s patients were often recommended to look at old
photographs to regain and retain an idea of past self, but in a way this
meant a constant confrontation with the person they realized they would
never be again, and for relatives these photographs carried the resentment
of their “lost” loved one. Contrastingly, the lifelog is equipped to bespeak
a changing self in the various stages of mental deterioration. Rather than
lamenting the loss of a past persona—a memory to someone who has men-
tally if not yet physically disappeared from our lives—this enunciation at
least refurbishes memory back into a real-life experience. Digital media, as
amplifiers of affect, dramatically increase the rapidity and extent of inter-
affectivity to reach global proportions, and this affect may in turn em-
power patients to keep themselves composed in their regular reports.
Bloggers are retooling the current practice of diary writing, mean-
while creating new types of mental scripts, cultural knowledge, and social
interaction via their tools. The reciprocity inherent in networked systems
points at a profound reorganization in social consciousness. Examining
76 Writing the Self
cognitive processes in relation to technological and material objects and to

sociocultural practices, the analysis of concrete mediated memories may
provide an index to understanding larger transformations—emerging hy-
brid practices that both reflect old conventions and construct new social
norms. In a period of transition, concepts like privacy and publicness, in-
timacy and openness, and memory and experience continue to fluctuate.
Contrasting conventional rituals to emerging practices, I try to unravel some
of the complexities of change, even if they can never fully be grasped. As
a teenager, my awkward attempt to share intimate growing pains with my
mother was successful when she responded to me in kind, but my strategy
backfired when my brother interceded in what I meant to be a targeted act
of personal communication. Surfing on the Internet today, I am touched
by mentally ailing parents who try to share their intimate mental and phys-
ical ordeal with their children, partners, and other loved ones, as well as
with anonymous readers, and I can only hope they are responded to in
kind. I am equally touched by botched attempts of teenagers to hide their
intimate revelations in their Xangas and LiveJournals, and I suspect they
will long remember this painful lesson in their future dealings with the
machinations of privacy and publicity. The digital lifelog helps savor
memories of a changing personality while also transforming notions of
how we compose the self.
4
Record and Hold
In recent decades, recorded popular music has commonly been stud-

ied as either a vital component of people’s personal memory or as a constitu-
tive element in the construction of collective identity and cultural heritage.
Psychologists and (neuro-)cognitive scientists have extensively researched
the role music plays in the relation between emotion, individual identity,
and autobiographical memory.1 Sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural
theorists, from entirely different academic perspectives, have studied
recorded music as a significant part of our collective cultural memory and
identity—a heritage that has grown over time and continues to evolve.2
Engaging in shared listening, exchanging (recorded) songs, and talking
about music create a sense of belonging, and relate a person’s sense of self
to a larger community and generation. In Chapter 1, I theorized a recursive
connection between personal and collective cultural memory, and this
chapter narrows this claim with regard to popular music.3 People nourish
emotional and tangible connections to songs before entrusting them to
their personal (mental and material) reservoirs, but they also need to share
musical preferences with others before songs become part of a collective
repertoire that, in turn, provides new resources for personal engagement
with recorded music. Naturally arising from the main contention of this
book is the question of how personal memory and collective memory in-
termingle: how does recorded popular music stick to our individual minds
and what makes it become part of a shared cultural memory?
78 Record and Hold
Analysis of the interrelation between music and memory is based on

the assumption, elaborated in Chapter 2, that the human’s recovery of the
past is simultaneously embodied, enabled and embedded. Autobiographical
memories are embodied in the brains and minds of individual people, mean-
ing that specific affects and emotions are attached to particular songs, a con-
nection that is literally located in the body/mind because the human process
of remembering is an “active, interpretative process of a conscious mind sit-
uated in the world.”4 Moreover, musical memories are enabled through
instruments for listening. This was true before the advent of recording tech-
nologies, and still holds true in the age of digital reproduction. People
become aware of their emotional and affective memories by means of tech-
nologies, and surprisingly often, the enabling apparatus becomes part of the
recollecting experience. Songs or albums often are interpreted as a sign of
their time not only because they emanate from a cultural-historical time
frame, but also because they emerge from a socio-technological context.5 Re-
membrance is also embedded, meaning that the larger interpersonal and cul-
tural worlds stimulate memories of the past through frames generated in the
present. Specific cultural frames for recollection, such as Internet forums or
radio programs, do not simply invoke but actually help construct memory.
But how can we examine the embodied, enabled, and embedded na-
ture of musical memories as a process and product of the human mind?
This question poses an interesting challenge for neuroscientists and cog-
nitive psychologists, but it requires the perspective of cultural theory to
explore the connections between personal memory and collective heritage,
between individual affect and social effect. Combining these perspectives, I
propose to study the interrelation between personal and collective memo-
ries of popular music as they are constructed through stories of and about
musical memory. Recollective experiences are often articulated in per-
sonal stories, and the analysis of narratives about music and memory are
at the core of this chapter. To analyze the intertwining of personal and
collective memories of recorded music, we turn to a readily available on-
line set of narrative responses generated through a national radio event:
the Dutch Top 2000. Every year, since 1999, a public radio station in The
Netherlands (Radio 2) organizes a widely acclaimed five-day broadcast of
the two thousand most popular songs of all times, a list entirely compiled
by public radio listeners who send in their personal top-five favorite pop
songs.6 During the event, the station solicits comments from listeners—both
Record and Hold 79
aesthetic evaluations and memories attached to songs. Disc jockeys read

those comments aloud during the live broadcast, and the comments are
also posted in their entirety on a website. In addition, the station opens
up a chatbox for exchanging comments. The result is an extensive data-
base of comments and stories, opening an intriguing window into how
recorded music serves as a vehicle for memory.
The first section analyzes these stories, posted in response to individ-
ual songs ranked in the listing, in terms of embodied affect and effect: how
do individuals invest emotion and affect in recorded music? The second
section examines how memory narratives often betray a distinct techno-
logical awareness: how did recording and listening technologies enable
specific recollections? And finally, we turn to the embedded nature of the
Top 2000: how do social practices, such as communal listening and ex-
changing recorded music, and cultural forms, such as the Top 2000, actu-
ally shape collective memories of the past? Remembering through music is
more than just an individual act: we need public spaces to create a com-
mon musical heritage and identity.
Embodiment: Recorded Music, Memory, and Emotion
For a variety of reasons, we invest emotion, money, and time in com-

piling personal reservoirs of auditory culture. Like photographs or diary
entries, music has a mnemonic function; listening to records helps in-
scribe and invoke specific events, emotions, or general moods.7 Recorded
music also has a formative function: young people, in particular, con-
struct their identities while figuring out their musical taste. Building up a
repertoire in one’s memory (an inventory of familiar songs) and accumu-
lating selected items of recorded music (a material collection of sound
items) are considered important parts of one’s coming of age. In Western
countries, recorded pop songs are often signifiers of individually lived ex-
periences; people select items of music to gauge their taste against those of
others, and savor them in order to procure a sense of continuity. Albums
or songs are items of culture that we select and collect, storing them into
our minds or in our private “jukeboxes” and recalling them at a later mo-
ment in time. As American ethnomusicologist Tomas Turino convincingly
argues, recorded music has the power to create emotional responses while
also realizing personal and social identities.8
80 Record and Hold
We often casually remark that certain music “gets stuck” in our

minds and some songs “get under our skin.” Once we start probing what is
behind these clichés, we realize there is no easy answer to the enigma of
how music gets nestled into our personal memories. Different parts and
functions of the brain (cognitive, emotive, somatosensory) are involved in
the remembrance of music. Repeated listening certainly helps; our cogni-
tive memory can even be trained to retain melodic sequences for longer pe-
riods of time. As American cognitivist scholar Patrick Colm Hogan states:
“The tendency of working memory to cyclic repetition combined with the
exaggerated accessibility of a simple and frequently repeated tune gives rise
to a situation in which the song is likely to cycle repeatedly through work-
ing memory. When this continues for a long time, we refer to it as ‘having
a song stuck in our head.’ ”9
The ability of recorded music to be replayed endlessly, repeating ex-
actly the same performance, has aided the buildup of auditory memories
in people’s minds.10 In addition to having a mnemonic function for the in-
dividual mind, repetition of music through media inscribes cultural expe-
riences, literally playing them again and again. As media historian Lisa
Gitelman describes in her concise history of the gramophone in America,
“The phonograph introduced the intensity of true repetition to the perfor-
mance of mass markets.”11 Being exposed to particular songs over and over
again enhances their popularity, both in the private mind and in collective
experience.
We cannot possibly retain all the music we hear in our lifetime, so
there must be a mechanism accounting for why certain melodic rhythms
get stuck in our long-term memory and others do not. In order to last, a
song needs to catch our attention, somehow standing out from other expe-
riences or perceptions.12 In explaining why music gets under the skin, cog-
nitive scientists often refer to somatosensory reflexes and emotions as key
factors in memory formation. We commonly think of intuitive responses to
music as articulations of taste, but besides rationalized judgment, aesthetic
pleasure or dislike also result from simple emotional arousals. A manifesta-
tion of our core consciousness, the perceptions of sounds may elicit direct
physiological responses, such as shudders or body hair standing on end. In
explicit accounts of musical reminiscing, such as the comments posted to
the Top 2000, people often describe such physical reactions. Many of these
comments are brief, expressing a simple emotion or aesthetic judgment (“this
Record and Hold 81
song makes me happy” or “the tonal arrangement of this song is sublime”).

Bearing witness to music’s emotive and somatosensory reflexes are the nu-
merous comments inferring a listener’s somatic response when exposed to
particular music: “this song sends shivers down my spine” or “each time I
hear this song, I get goose flesh.” Visceral reactions abound in the thou-
sands of comments posted to the Top 2000 website; however, they are the
least interesting as narratives.
These reflexes, however significant in explaining emotional like or
dislike, cannot satisfactorily account for how music gains a permanent
presence in our autobiographical memories.13 In order to find a more
agreeable explanation, I propose two complementary views. The first—
neurocognitive theory detailing the brain’s and the mind’s involvement in
constructing personal memory—is touched upon only briefly, because the
second explanation, stemming from a cultural-semiotic perspective, ex-
pounds on the first. As elucidated by Antonio Damasio, emotions differ
from feelings, in a sense that feelings only occur after we become aware in
our brain of emotional arousals.14 These feelings are then inscribed as
mental image maps, maps that do not remain the same but mutate with
each recall; moreover, during acts of reminiscence, remembrance and pro-
jection coil beyond differentiation. Based upon Damasio’s conjecture, we
can assume that our memory of a song is more durable when we affectively
invest in making it stick—that is, by constructing meaning for and around
a musical item. But how do songs make sense to us in the long run? Dama-
sio answers this question by explaining autobiographical memory as a
function of extended consciousness that involves emotions and feelings. In
addition to storing the sound of an object we hear, our memories also re-
tain emotional reactions to it, as well as our mental and physical state at
the time of apprehending. Out of that sensation or feeling, we create a
(non-language) map or image of this event in our core consciousness, a
story that also becomes verbally present in our minds by the time we focus
on it. Upon later recall, recorded songs work as triggers, bringing back
waves of emotion tied specifically to a time, an event, or a relationship or
evoking more general feelings. This wordless storytelling precedes lan-
guage and happens entirely inside the brain; memory for recorded songs
appears to hold longer when people turn emotion-infested sounds into in-
ternal narratives. Damasio even speculates that the mechanism accounts
for why and how we end up creating drama: verbal stories, books, televi-
82 Record and Hold
sion plays, and so forth may directly derive from the wordless stories first
created in our minds.15
Damasio’s approach highlighting internal narratives is surprisingly
complementary to cultural-semiotic theory relating musical memory to
individual and social identity. Thomas Turino has attempted to counter
the intriguing problem of musical memory by approaching music as a
system of signs; he uses Charles S. Peirce’s notion of indexicality to ex-
plain how music is not about feelings but rather involves signs of feeling
and experience.16 Musical signs, he says, are sonic events that create ef-
fects and affects in a perceiver the way a falling tree creates waves
through the air. Rational effects or conscious responses are responses
that involve reasoning: the interpretation or appreciation of music. The
“secondness” or affect of music lies not in the sounds or words per se,
but in the emotions, feelings, and experiences attached to hearing a par-
ticular song. Musical signs thus carry strong personal connotations be-
traying an emotional investment; at the same time, however, members of
a social group share indices proportional to common experiences.17 In
sum, musical signs integrate affective and identity-forming meanings in a
direct manner, and it is through the recollection of songs that we may
come to see the nature of this integration.
Damasio’s neurocognitive speculation and Turino’s cultural semiotic
conjecture cannot be empricially tested, but applying narrative analysis to
stories that relate how people feel affected by recorded popular music of-
fers an insight into the connection of personal and collective memory.
Many respondents to the Top 2000 create images or stories around certain
songs to help them communicate a particular feeling or mood or to express
their affective ties to particular songs. Through these stories, we learn how
people came to invest emotionally in a song, how the song came to mean
anything to them in the first place, and how they retained that attached
meaning—a meaning they like to share with a large, anonymous audience.
As Damasio predicts recall includes the experience of listening and the
emotive state at the time of apprehending. Compare, for instance the first
reaction to John Lennon’s song “Imagine” with the next reaction, posted
in response to the U2 song “With or Without You”:
It was 1971, I was waiting on a boat someplace in Norway when I heard this song
for the first time. It was such a perfect day, everything was right: the weather, the
blue sky, the peaceful tidal waves in the fjord matching the melodious waves of
Record and Hold 83
music. There are moments in life that you feel thoroughly, profoundly happy.
This was such moment, believe me. (posted by Jan from Eindhoven)
My father died suddenly in November of 1986. That night we all stayed awake.
I isolated myself from my family by putting on the headphones and listening to
this song. The intense sorrow I felt that night was expressed in Bono’s intense
screams. I will never forget this experience, and each time I hear this song I get
tears in my eyes. (posted by Jelle van Netten from Woudsend)
Memories tied in with extreme pleasure or intense sorrow, like the

ones above, are likely to stick to our minds, due the brain’s tendency to
store sound perceptions along with their affects and moto-senseo im-
pact. The (explicit) narratives created out of these memories are deemed
worthy of sharing because they exemplify both universal and intimate
experiences.
But memories are not always tied in with specific affective experi-
ences; they may also evoke the mood of a time, place, or event in which
the song first became meaningful. Some songs trigger a more general mood
or atmospheric sensation—an almost Proustian invocation of the past.
The Beatles recording of “Penny Lane” seems especially conducive to such
invocations of sensory moods:
When this song first came out, I was three years old. Every time I now hear this
record I can see a picture of my grandmother’s living room, because I lived there
at the time. This is very odd, because I can’t remember anything else from that
time, and this record puts me back into that time and place. It is my very first mu-
sical remembrance. (posted by Anja from Rosmalen)
In this comment, a general longing for the mood of a past era is as-
sociated with lived experience, even though the experience is somewhat
blurred and sensuous. Mental maps, as neuroscientific theories show, are
derived partly from the object itself and partly from the auditory, visual,
olfactory, or other perceptions triggered in our minds.18 Respondents also
frequently report smells and tastes to be invoked by familiar songs.
The comment above implicitly suggests that the memory aroused
upon hearing the song is an exact repeat of the original listening experi-
ence. The idea of a recording reiterating its exact same content each time it
is played is subconsciously transposed to the experience attached to hear-
ing the music. People’s expectation to feel the same response each time a
song is played stems from a craving to relive the past as it was—as if the
84 Record and Hold
past were a recording. Many of us want our memory of the original listen-
ing experience to be untainted by time, age, or life’s emotional toll. And
yet, it is improbable that repeated listening over a lifespan would leave the
original emotion (if there ever was such thing) intact. Instead, the original
listening experience may be substituted by a fixed pattern of associa-
tions, a pattern that is likely to become more brightly and intensely col-
ored over the years.19 Memories change each time they are recalled, and
their contents are determined more by the present than by the past. As
Geoffrey O’Brien eloquently puts it in his musical memoir: “The age of
recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia—when was the past so haunt-
ingly accessible?—but its bitterest insight is the incapacity of even the
most perfectly captured sound to restore the moment of its first inscribing.
That world is no longer there.”20
Cognitive research confirms that musical remembrance alters with
age. An American clinical study shows a significant difference between
how older and younger people remember recorded music; whereas young
adults tie in recorded music with memories of specific autobiographical
events, seniors use familiar songs as stimuli to summon more general
memories and moods from the past.21 Recorded music infested with feel-
ings elicits stronger—even if less specific—autobiographical memories later
on in life. Because the narratives posted to the Top 2000 website do not sys-
tematically disclose the respondents’ ages, I cannot use them to confirm or
disprove the researchers’ empirical observation. In general, though, respon-
dents who give clues to their age as being over forty-five tend to refer more
to nostalgic moods triggered by specific songs than respondents who iden-
tify themselves as being young adults. However, this might just as well be
attributed to the fact that a majority of songs featured in this collective
ranking were popular in the era when baby boomers came of age.
The observation of neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists that
musical memory is an emotional investment has been corroborated by both
sociologists and cultural theorists. Australian cultural geographers John
Connell and Chris Gibson argue, for instance, that “music can evoke mem-
ories of youth and act as a reminder of earlier freedoms, attitudes, events;
its emotive power . . . serves to intensify feelings of nostalgia, regret or rem-
iniscence.”22 And yet, it is too simple to assume that music triggers memo-
ries; recorded music may also construct a cognitive framework through
which (collectively) constructed meanings are transposed onto individual
Record and Hold 85
memory, resulting in an intricate mixture of recall and imagination, of rec-

ollections intermingled with extrapolations and myth. One listener, in re-
sponse to the same Beatles song mentioned earlier, comments on the oddity
of certain music invoking a historical time frame she did not live through:
This song elicits the ultimate Sunday-afternoon feeling, a feeling I associate with
cigarette smoke, croquette (the Dutch variant of the hamburger, jvd) and amateur
soccer games. This feeling marks my life between the ages of five and fifteen. A
nostalgic longing of sorts, although I have to admit I was not even conceived
when this record became a hit song. (posted by M. Klink from Leiden)
The respondent transposes the general mood of an era onto her
childhood, even though these periods are distinctly apart. It is not un-
thinkable that she has projected a general impression of the zeitgeist onto
this particular song.23 Recall and projections thus curl into one story, even
when the respondent realizes that the memory is not rooted in actual lived
experience. Mixing memory with desire or projection is a common phe-
nomenon acknowledged by cognitive scientists and neurobiologists.24
At this point, the unmistakable intertwining of personal and collec-
tive memory, as theorized by Turino, is obvious: narratives about music
often braid private reminiscences into those of others or connect them to
larger legacies. Certain songs become “our songs,” as they are attached to
the experience of various collectives, whether families or peer groups. Ver-
bal narratives appear to be important in the transmission of both musical
preferences and the feelings associated with them to the extent that it be-
comes difficult to distinguish lived memories from the stories told by par-
ents or siblings.25 This does not mean, of course, that children uncritically
adopt their parents’ memories or, for that matter, their musical taste, but
young people construct their own favored repertoire by relating to peers as
well as to older generations, either positively or negatively. Musical memo-
ries become the input—resources to adapt or resist—in the edifice of one’s
own repertoire. A few assorted comments posted to the Top 2000 website
may illustrate this. One respondent, reacting to the Doors hit song “Riders
on the Storm,” writes:
One of the things my father passed on to me was his musical taste. His absolute fa-
vorite was Jim Morrison and as a child, I would sing along with every Doors’ song.
Remarkably, my father thought “Riders on the Storm” to be one of the worst
Doors songs, but I think it’s one of their best. (posted by Joanna from Heerlen)
86 Record and Hold
And another listener attributes her fondness for the pop song “You’re
So Vain” by Carly Simon to fetal exposure:
When my mother was pregnant with me, in 1973, my father bought her this al-
bum as a present. They played the record innumerable times. As long as I am
aware, this has been my favorite pop song, but I only found out about my parents’
story several years ago. Who knows, listening to music in the womb may have an
effect on a person’s musical taste! (posted by Harriette Hofstede from Dordrecht)
Musical memories can thus be understood as an intergenerational
transfer of personal and collective heritage, not only by sharing music but
also by sharing stories; many comments posted on the website testify to
this circular cultural process. Like photographs, recorded songs relate
personal memories. That older people are eager to pass on their stories
along with their preference for certain recorded music is therefore not
surprising.
Damasio’s conjecture about the mind’s involvement in autobiograph-
ical recall, suggests that narrated audio impressions help glue recorded mu-
sic to people’s cultural memory. Understood in terms of bodily affect, the
mind is a sewing machine that quilts personal memory onto recorded mu-
sic, stitched together by emotion and feelings. Whether tied in with specific
experiences or general moods, stories appear a distinct aid in remembering
the mental associations attached to a particular kind of music. These sto-
ries, like the memories themselves, are likely to change with age, and as
much as we like to capture the original affection triggered by music, we
want the story to hold that feeling for future recollection. Yet stories, like
records, are mere resources in the process of reminiscence, a process that
often involves imagination as much as retention. In other words, our per-
sonal musical repertoire is a living memory that stimulates narrative en-
gagement from the first time we hear a song up to each time we replay it at
later stages in life. It is this vivid process of narrative recall that gives mean-
ing to an album and assigns personal and cultural value to a song.
Enabling Technologies: Recorded Music

and “Techno-stalgia”
Technologies and objects of recorded music are an intrinsic part of

the act of reminiscence; even though their materiality alters with time, often
Record and Hold 87
generating resentment, their aging may partially account for our very at-
tachment to these objects. Personal memory evolves through our interac-
tions with these apparatuses (such as record players, compact disc players,
radios) and material things (such as records, cassettes, digital files), as both
are agents in the process of remembering. Media technologies and objects
are often deployed as metaphors, expressing a cultural desire for personal
memory to function like an archive or a storage facility for lived experience.
When it comes to music, it is easy to see where this metaphorical notion
originated. The record’s presumed ability to register—to record and hold—
a particular mood, experience, or emotional response can be traced back to
the its historically ascribed function as a material-mechanical inscription of
a single musical performance. It is almost a truism to expect recording
equipment to replay the presumed original sound of a song, notwithstand-
ing our awareness that objects and apparatuses—like bodies—wear out,
age, and thus change over time. The “thingness” of recorded music is un-
stable and yet this knowledge does not prevent a peculiar yearning for the
re-creation of audio quality as it was first perceived, evidenced for instance
by the recent vinyl nostalgia accompanying the surge in compact disc
sales.26 People who use recorded music as a vehicle for memories often
yearn for more than mere retro appeal: they want these apparatuses to reen-
act their cherished, often magical experiences of listening.
It may be illustrative to filter this kind of techno-stalgia from the
comments posted on the Top 2000 website, espousing the integrality of
technology to people’s reminiscing. Many respondents recall the sound
equipment through which they first heard a particular song, emphasizing
how it defined their listening experience. Writing in reaction to the Beatles
song “The Long and Winding Road” a woman writes:
The first time I heard this song I almost snuggled into my transistor radio. This was
the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. When I got the Beatles’ album, I re-
member pushing the little Lenco-speakers against my ear (they were sort of the
precursor of the walkman). Whenever this record is played again, I get on my
knees, direct my ears downward, pushing them toward the speakers on the floor.
I still want to live in this song. (posted by Karin de Groot from Rotterdam)
In this comment, the experience of listening seems inextricably in-

tertwined with the (primitive) equipment that enabled its broadcast—and
that memory has become partial to its reenactment in contemporary stereo
systems. Needless to say, the reenactment never brings back the equipment
88 Record and Hold
and context of the original sound—a fact the respondent is very aware
of—but certainly brings about the intended affect.27
In other instances of reminiscence, the role of technology should be
understood indexically rather than metaphorically—adhering to Thomas
Turino’s Peircian apparatus—as it stands for taking control over one’s
sonic space. Memories of the original listening experience often include
allusions to the newly acquired freedom to listen to these songs, alone or
with friends, outside the living room where the soundscape was usually
controlled by the musical taste of parents. The 1960s ushered in a period
of “private mobilization,” to borrow Raymond Williams’s renowned
term, so it is not surprising to find that many respondents, recalling im-
pressions from that era, take notice of sound technology’s bearing upon
their coming of age.28 Many are still committed to the sounds mounting
from the radio (especially transistors and car radios), a medium that first
confronted the baby-boom generation with pop music. In contrast to mu-
sic played on personal stereos (record players or tape recorders), radio
sound is ephemeral. Listening to music on the radio often allows for a mo-
mentary inner sensation that the listener is part of something larger; it cre-
ates relationships between self and others that contribute to an individual’s
sociality.29 Narratives that testify to the liberating role of music technol-
ogy abound on the website postings to the Top 2000. Read, for instance,
this reaction to the Herman Hermits song “No Milk Today”:
Because this was the first song to wake me up to the phenomenon of pop music in
the years 1966–1970, it reminds me of how magical it felt to just listen to my small
transistor radio, often secretively, because I needed to hide it away from my par-
ents. When I listen to this song now, I turn up the sound as much as I can, prefer-
ably when I am driving my car and listening to old tapes. (posted by Maarten
Storm from Leusden)
For this respondent, hi-fi equipment was (and remains) a technology

that endowed him with the liberty to create his own sonic space. There are
many responses similar to this one, all attesting to the importance of stereos
in forming an autonomous sense of self and the mental-physical room to
develop one’s personal musical taste. Some respondents explicitly relate
how their attempts to capture favorite songs played on the radio resulted in
tapes of very poor quality, and yet they still treasure their amateur record-
ings not in spite of, but because of their obvious technical shortcomings.
Record and Hold 89
The eminent awareness that objects and technologies are subject to

inevitable erosion underscores their quality not only as objects but also as
agents of autobiographical memory. Many respondents to the Top 2000
website remember the song in the gestalt of an object they once bought.
For instance:
I was eleven years old when Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” become a hit. I liked this
song immediately and purchased the single with my hard-earned savings. Even af-
ter thirty years, I still cherish this object. (posted by Liesbeth)
Objects also become agents once people start to rerecord music—

taping songs in order to literally appropriate them and use them for end-
less replay. Fiddling with lo-fi tape recorders to catch radio broadcasts, or
playing vinyl records over and over again—even as their quality deterio-
rates as a consequence of multiple use—somehow contributes to the inten-
sity of recorded music stored in memory. As one anonymous respondent
admits on the Top 2000 website: “This album finally collapsed on my
record player, completely worn out by its relentless owner. I tried to obtain
a vinyl replacement, but was unsuccessful.”
Audio artifacts and technologies apparently invoke a cultural nostalgia
typical for a specific time and age. The ability of digital recording techniques
to meticulously recapture a worn-out recording and reproduce its exact poor
auditory quality may offer only partial solace to a cultural yearning. Joseph
Auner suggests that every new medium in a way authenticates the old,
meaning that each time a new audio technology emerges on the scene, the
older ones become treasured as the authentic means of reproduction or as
part of the original listening experience.30 In the digital era, scratches, ticks,
or noise can be removed from tapes to make old recordings sound pristine,
but they can also be added to make a pristine recording sound old. Sound
technologies thus figure in a dialogue between generations of users: think,
for instance, of a young musician’s sampling of original pop songs into dig-
ital sound experiences or the creative use of old telephone sounds as ring
tones on teenagers’ cell phones.31 The dialogue with outdated technologies,
frequently used in contemporary pop songs, symbolizes recorded music’s in-
effable historicity. Paradoxically, sound technologies are concurrently agents
of change and of preservation; with the new digital technologies, sonic ex-
periences of the past can be preserved and reconstructed in the future.
Incontrovertibly, the materiality of recorded music influences the
90 Record and Hold
process of remembering. The term “recorded music” has become the rather
generic container for vinyl albums, cassette tapes, compact discs, and MP3
files stored in computers. But the status of these items varies and that varia-
tion affects their function in memory formation. Each song listened to from
live radio, records, cassette tapes, or MP3 players has a different emotion at-
tached to it. Prerecorded CDs and records are more valuable as objects to
hold on to and collect, whereas MP3s and cassette tapes have a different
function: they are more often a backup or backlog. As music theorist Mark
Katz shows in his study on sound capturing, which includes a survey of
young downloaders of recorded music, a large majority of respondents still
buys prerecorded CDs, often after having listened to them in rerecorded
form or after having shared them in whatever mechanical or digital form:
“The tangibility of the CD is part of its charm. A collection is meant to be
displayed, and has a visual impact that confers a degree of expertise on its
owner.”32 In semiotic terms, the indexical function of the musical sign is
bound up with its auditory materiality: hearing a familiar song on the radio
constitutes a different memory experience than playing that very song from
one’s own collection, perhaps even more so when these recordings are played
from MP3 formats. As one respondent to the Top 2000 puts it:
It is so strange: I keep most songs [featured in the Top 2000] on CDs and I have
the entire list of songs stored in MP3 format on the hard disk of my PC, so I can
listen to these songs any day any time. And yet, I only swing and sing along with
my favorite songs when I hear them on the radio, during this yearly end-of-the-
year broadcast. (posted by Jaap Timmer from Winterswijk)
The transfer of emotive affection from the brain onto the technology
and materiality of audio recordings shows how memory acts out in the
spaces between individual reminiscences and shared experiences. These same
narratives disclose how materiality and technology often become integral to
memory, something that is unlikely to change with the advent of digital
equipment. As long as listening to music remains a mediated experience,
memory will be enabled and constructed through its material constituents.
Embedded Memory: Shared Listening and Exchange
From our explorations of the embodied nature and enabling aspects

of recorded music with regard to memory, it is clear that individual and
Record and Hold 91
collective memory are inextricably intertwined. Memories attached to songs

are hardly individual responses per se; recorded music is perceived and
evaluated through collective frameworks for listening and appreciation.
Individual memories almost invariably arise in the context of social prac-
tices, such as music exchange and communal listening, and of cultural
forms, such as popular radio programs, hit lists, music programs, and so
on. These social practices and cultural forms appear almost inseparable
from the memory of actual songs; as a sign of their time, popular songs
create a context for reminiscence.
Through these practices and forms individual memories become col-
lective vehicles for identity construction. Sociologist Tia de Nora observes
in her ethnographic study of young adults and the way they use recorded
music in everyday life how audio equipment implicates individuals evolv-
ing into social agents.33 Throughout their entire lives, people build up
mental and material reservoirs of musical preferences. Selected songs may
become meaningful when they are consigned aesthetic value, when they
are associated with lived and shared experience, or when linked up with
spatial configurations. Since the introduction of sound recording in the
last decade of the nineteenth century, sonic experiences have been as-
signed meaning as collective memories through performative rites, like
shared listening and exchanging music.34 Listening to recorded music has
always been a social activity: listening with peers or sharing musical evalu-
ations with friends helps individuals to shape their taste while concurrently
constructing a group identity. It is therefore understandable that the socia-
bility of listening to pop music becomes an inherent part of people’s mem-
ories. For instance, one respondent adds the following general comment to
the Top 2000 chatbox:
It was 1976, and with a number of friends I organized disco events for the local
soccer club. These events always turned into choose-your-favorite-pop-song tour-
naments. The Top 2000 reminds me of these days. (posted by Henk Vink)
A large number of comments posted to the Top 2000 website relate

how groups of people—varying from three-generation families at home to
labor crews and office personnel—stay tuned to the nonstop five-day event
and listen as a group. One woman confides to the chatbox how listening to
the Top 2000 during a house remodeling project facilitates previously
deadlocked communication between a grandfather, parents, and children.
92 Record and Hold
The radio event engenders collectivity at the same time and by the same
means that it generates collective memories; the actual sharing of music
and singing along with a group hence becomes part of the emotion trig-
gered by a song.
Some sound technologies, by nature of their hardware, promote lis-
tening to music as a solo activity, but can still be deployed in social activi-
ties. Ever since the emergence of the Walkman in the 1970s, personal stereos
have been associated with the construction of individual sonic space. As
British sociologist Michael Bull argues, personal stereos can function as a
form of “auditory mnemonic” in which users attempt to reconstruct a
sense of narrative within urban spaces that have in themselves no narra-
tive sense to them.35 And while it is true that the Walkman—and more
recently the MP3 player and Discman—are designed with individual ur-
ban listeners in mind, these recording technologies can also be put to so-
cial use and serve as collective listening instruments. As we can read in
the posting of an eighteen-year-old respondent to the Top 2000 website,
who commends the 1961 song “Non, je ne regrette rien” performed by
Edith Piaf:
Last summer, half a dozen of my classmates drove to France to celebrate our high
school graduation. We played a lot of oldies, and as both cars had their own iPods
attached to the stereo system, we sang along as loud as we could with our self-
compiled repertoire. Now we’ve all gone off to different colleges, but next month
we’ll have a reunion and I’m sure we’ll bring our iPods along, so we can bring
back some cherished memories. (posted by Willem van Oostrum from Utrecht)
The rather novel act of plugging the iPod into the car’s stereo sys-
tem, allowing the youths to collectively listen to and sing along with the
songs stored on the device, is inscribed in the narrative recollection of a
generation of young adults; they consciously create their own sonic mem-
ories, using the newest devices to re-create golden oldies. The MP3 player,
rather than being a mere vehicle for individual listening and storage of fa-
vorite songs, thus figures as agency in the conscious process of building up
a collective memory.
Besides collective listening, remixing and exchanging songs are im-
portant means for constructing a collective platform for shared memories.
Memory and identity are ineffably bound to us in the way we re-create
given formats; interventions in prerecorded cultural forms propelled by
the music industry are more than symbols of individual appropriation.
Record and Hold 93
Through rerecording, mixing, and remixing ready-made formats (such

as albums), people invent their own memory products—they use the
available templates as input for creating idiosyncratic compilations. Com-
piling one’s own favorite collections, to give away or share, has become a
popular social practice since the emergence of tape recorders. Mixtapes
typically have a strong emotional and personal touch to them. They are
anchors of personal memory; each time they are replayed, they rouse the
expectation not of relived experience per se but of a familiar, anticipated
order determined by its maker. That order of songs is reified on tape and
in memory as a coherent, customized unit of musical replay. Good and
lasting mixtapes become personalized albums: unique recordings made to
stick to one’s mind and reflect the compiler’s taste. If any feature stands
out from the plethora of mix-and-burn software products currently avail-
able on the Internet, it is the capacity to compose musical collages to gen-
erate, incite, or control certain moods—feelings, occasions, emotions, or
frames of mind.36 Self-compiled mixes provide a contextual narrative for
channeling concrete feelings or experiences; they “burn” certain impres-
sions into the mind and thus confine audio-image maps to memory.37
Idiosyncratic compilations are commonly not restricted to private
use but are made to share with friends or, increasingly, with unknown re-
cipients via playlists and home-burned CDs. MP3 files lend themselves
particularly well to multiple and effortless exchange, although this digital
materiality, in recent years, has become the center of a controversy over
the legality of freely downloading recorded music. As Jonathan Sterne ar-
gues, though, the new material quality of recorded music obviously de-
serves to be examined in its own right as it generates new cultural
practices involving mixing and sharing.38 Digital mixes of songs copied
onto compact discs or playlists, made for sharing or distributing on the
Internet, are both continuations of and variations on earlier auditory ex-
change rites.39 The mix-and-burn culture, favoring the reconfiguration of
digital songs into playful aggregations, signifies an individual’s desire to
contribute to the formation of communal tastes and group identity; with
the advent of CD-burning software, mixing and burning compilations
has become technically easy, so the social practices of sharing music and
(symbolic) gift exchange are increasingly part of the apparatus’s script.
Many comments in the Top 2000 chatbox testify to listeners’ inclination
toward audio-creativity, for instance by offering one’s own compilation of
94 Record and Hold
live recordings of the songs played on the radio. The chatbox at times
functions as a platform for the exchange of homemade selections, thus be-
coming a venue for sharing creative re-collections—a way of embedding
one’s idiosyncratic choice in a community of listeners.
To sum up, cultural practices like communal listening, mixing, and
swapping recorded music appear crucial in understanding how and why
we construct shared memories through embedded experiences: musical
memories are shaped through social practices and cultural forms as much
as through individual emotions. New digital technologies allow music fans
to customize their favorite songs and use them as symbolic resources in the
construction of collective identity and community. But let us now turn to
the role the Top 2000, as a cultural form, plays in inculcating a sense of
collectivity in its listeners. Should we look upon this event the way we re-
gard rankings of pop music and radio programs? In what sense do the Top
2000 stories of individual reminiscence contribute to a sense of collective
memory and communal cultural heritage?
The Top 2000 as Collective Cultural Memory
The Dutch Top 2000 nicely illustrates how mediated memories are
shaped precisely at the intersections of personal and collective memory.
Mental mappings, sound technologies, and sociocultural practices consti-
tute the channels for shaping individuality while concurrently defining the
larger collectivity we (want to) belong to—ensuring autobiographical as
well as historical continuity. Through embodied affection, enabling tech-
nologies, and cultural embedding, recorded music becomes part of our
collective memory at the same time and by the same means as it gets settled
into our personal memories. Viewed from a neurocognitive angle, we of-
ten engage with recorded music by stitching emotion or lived experience
onto musical impressions, hence conjuring up mental maps—internal sto-
ries that are later recalled as part of our musical memory. Theorized from
a semiotic-cultural perspective, personal emotions and affects attached to
songs are articulated in explicit memory narratives that people like to
exchange—reminiscences of lived experience expressed through musical
preferences. These stories not only are about emotions triggered by music,
but they also directly bespeak musical memory as it relates to personal
and group identity, not seldom handed down generation to generation.
Record and Hold 95
Through collective experiences, embedded in social practices and cultural

forms (shared listening, rerecordings, the exchange of music compila-
tions), people build up collective reservoirs of recorded music that stick to
the mind and, in terms of collectivity, become our cultural heritage.
Building a national heritage of favorite popular music is obviously the
propagated goal of the Top 2000, and of course, an important key to its suc-
cess. The eminent value of creating collective musical repertoires, as Ameri-
can historian William Kenney points out, has proved vital to the “ongoing
process of individual and group recognition in which images of the past and
present could be mixed in an apparently timeless suspension that often
seemed to defy the relentless corrosion of historical change.”40 The Dutch
Top 2000 constructs and reflects a national consensus about which songs in
this particular moment in history constitute the people’s national heritage.
Even if only 15 percent of the elected pop songs are of Dutch origin and/or
are performed in a language other than English, the selection is a quintessen-
tial national event. How important compiling this list is to the formation
and (re)confirmation of Dutch identity appears from the many comments
posted by expats and emigrants tapping into the event from all over the
world. Without exception, they praise Radio 2’s initiative to make this five-
day event available through broadband Internet. As one respondent residing
in Australia claims, “The Top 2000 enables you to travel to the homeland
of your youth, going home without leaving home.” The event produces a
collective, national identity because the memories invoked are themselves
the result of a particular kinship between listeners and nation.41
But as important as creating a cultural heritage may be as a key to un-
derstanding the Top 2000’s popularity as a national event—more than half
the population of the Netherlands plugs into the yearly event—its success
can hardly be explained by the nation’s craving for a collective repertoire.
We cannot overstate the significance of this event as a platform for exchang-
ing personal stories of musical reminiscence—a crucial function in the for-
mation of collective memory. Of course we can never speak of a unified
collective memory; instead, there are numerous networks, platforms, and
sites for constructing versions of a communal past. Collective memories are
achieved through negotiation and consensus building among a variety of re-
membering subjects. It is in the public spaces between individuals, technolo-
gies, and communities that memory is shaped and negotiated. The process
of narrating, discussing, and negotiating musical heritage and personal
96 Record and Hold
versus collective identity is far more important than the ultimate result; in-
teractive participation of listeners is the goal, not the means by which a rank-
ing is compiled.
One might argue that the collective nature of the Top 2000 can just as
well be explained by its trendy catering to a participatory, (inter)active audi-
ence; the event, after all, fits in well with the current boom of audience par-
ticipation contest shows on radio and television. However, there are several
arguments to rebut this explanation. For one thing, it is not a coincidence
that the event is staged through public rather than commercial radio. Stag-
ing the Top 2000 is unlike oldies listings by commercial stations catering to
a retro experience. As stated earlier, many if not all of the songs featured in
the Top 2000 can be heard by tuning into one of the many commercial
oldies stations abounding on the airwaves, and they can be listened to on de-
mand by downloading or pulling them from one’s private collection. Cul-
tural historian Paul Grainge proposes the relevant distinction between
nostalgia as a commercial mode and a collective mood. In the example of the
Top 2000, nostalgia emanates from a collectively experienced mood, in con-
trast to a conception of nostalgia as a consumable stylistic mode espoused by
commercial outlets such as the Top 40 or oldies stations.42 I concur with
Grainge that the oldies station phenomenon can be better explained by the
industry’s imperative to find profitable market segments and niche con-
sumption than by a presumed generational longing for an idealized past.
Grainge’s concept of nostalgia as an experienced mood links up with my
definition of collective cultural memory: it connects personal affect and
emotion to collective identity and heritage via recorded music.
In addition, I think the participatory, interactive nature of the Top
2000 is geared toward discussion and exchange rather than commercial
call-in activities and revenue-generating voting strategies. Through a com-
bination of a radio event, website, and television broadcast, this multime-
dia platform offers space for consensus building on a national heritage of
pop songs, and it simultaneously serves as a podium for collective nostalgia
and communal reminiscence. Audience participation is of course a consti-
tutive element of the ultimate ranking list—indeed, without individuals
sending in their favorite top fives there would be no Top 2000. And with-
out the hundreds of thousands of comments filling the chatbox and par-
ticipants sharing stories through web postings, there would be no event. It
is rather the desire to couple personal memories onto collective experience
Record and Hold 97
and the need for a platform for the exchange of musical memories that
constitutes the repeated success and public impact of this event.
The extensive archive of responses generated by the Dutch Top 2000
constitutes an interesting source of data on personal musical memory and
cultural heritage formation. It opens up new perspectives on the impor-
tance of public space for sharing personal stories and constructing a collec-
tive musical kinship, which in turn feeds our individual creativity and
identity. The commercial domain, although an important provider of re-
sources for a common culture, seems to have less and less tolerance for the
necessity of building up collective reservoirs, public involvement, and cre-
ative exchange. Virtually void of commercial push-and-pull mechanisms,
the Top 2000 offers space for narrative engagement and gives room to what
American legal scholar Lawrence Lessig calls a “creative commons.”43
Whereas (digital) culture, according to Lessig, opens up ample opportuni-
ties for strengthening the public domain and for promoting individual
creativity, the commercial music industry often impedes exchange and par-
ticipation.44 The Top 2000 encourages both individual memories and col-
lective reminiscence; attaching emotion to recorded music is not only
imperative to the formation of personal identity, but it is instrumental in
imagining collectivity. Indeed, the public domain, or the creative com-
mons, is vital to keep alive a vibrant heritage of old and new music, because
it provides individuals with cultural resources to understand their own
pasts and guarantee a shared interest in a communal future—both essential
forces in people’s long-term commitment to music. By ignoring insights in
how recorded music functions as cultural memory—the linchpin between
individual remembrance and collective cultural heritage—we may deprive
ourselves of an important enticement for future growth.
5
Pictures of Life, Living Pictures
A student recently told me about an interesting experience. She and

four friends had been hanging out in her dormitory room, telling jokes
and poking fun. Her roommate had taken the student’s camera phone to
take a group picture of the friends lying in various relaxed positions on
the couch. That same evening, the student had posted the picture on her
photoblog—a blog she regularly updates to keep friends and family in-
formed about her daily life in college. The next day, she received an
e-mail from her roommate; upon opening the attached JPG file she found
the same picture of herself and her friends on the couch, but now they
were portrayed with dozens of empty beer cans and wine bottles piled up
on the coffee table in front of them. Her dismay at this unauthorized act
of photoshopping only intensified when she noticed the doctored picture
was e-mailed to a long list of peers, including some people she had never
met or only vaguely knew. When she confronted her roommate with the
potential consequences of her action, they engaged in a heated discussion
about the innocence of manipulating pictures (“everybody will see this is
a joke”) versus the incriminating potential of photographs (“not every-
one may recognize the manipulation”) and the effect of their distribu-
tion, which might have a less transitory impact than anticipated (“where
do you think these pictures may show up?”).
In recent years, the role and function of digital photography seem to
have changed substantially. In the analog age, personal photography was
Pictures of Life, Living Pictures 99
first and foremost a means for autobiographical remembering, and photo-

graphs usually ended up as keepsakes in someone’s album or shoebox.1 They
were typically regarded to be a person’s most reliable aid for recall and for
verifying life as it was, despite the fact that imagination and projection are in-
extricably bound up in the process of remembering.2 Photography’s func-
tions as a tool for identity formation and as a means for communication were
duly acknowledged, but they were always rated secondary to its prime pur-
pose.3 The recent explosion in the use of digital cameras—including cameras
integrated in other communication devices—may be a reason to reconsider
photography’s primacy as a tool for remembering. Deployment of the digital
camera is now quite commonplace, but it is a truism to say that technology
has impacted the way we “picture our lives.” This chapter explores how digi-
tal photography, in conjunction to a changing cognitive mindset and socio-
cultural transformations, is reshaping personal cultural memory.
As the student’s anecdote illustrates, digitization is often considered
the culprit of photography’s growing unreliability as a tool for remem-
brance; but in fact, history shows the camera has never been a dependable
aid for storing memories, and photographs commonly have been twitched
and tweaked in the process of recollection. The story above raises several
intriguing questions concerning the revamped role of personal photogra-
phy in contemporary digital and networked culture. First, there is the
question of (digital) manipulation and cognitive editing: what is the power
of digital tools in sculpting autobiographical memory and forming iden-
tity? How do we gauge new features that help us edit our pictures and
make our memories picture perfect? Besides seeing photography as an ex-
tension of mental processes, we need to account for its materiality and per-
formativity. Pixeled pictures on a computer screen have a different touch
and feel to them than their laminated precursors; photoblogs are not the
equivalent of digital photo albums, as they elicit distinctly new presenta-
tional habits. And finally, we need to ask how these changes evolve along
with sociocultural practices: photographs increasingly seem to be used for
live communication instead of for storing moments of life for later recall.
What are the implications of this transformation for our quotidian uses of
personal photography?
Underlying these three questions is the recurrent issue of control ver-
sus lack of control. Part of the digital camera’s popularity can be explained
by an increased command over the outcome of personal pictures now that
100 Pictures of Life, Living Pictures
electronic processes allow for greater manipulability. Photography in the

age of digitization may indeed yield more control over someone’s own pic-
torial identity and personal memory, and yet the flipside is that pictures
can also be easily manipulated by everyone who has rudimentary software.
A similar paradox can be noticed with regard to the distribution of per-
sonal pictures. Although the Internet allows for quick and easy sharing of
private snapshots, that same tool also renders them vulnerable to unautho-
rized distribution. Ironically, the picture taken by the roommate as a token
of instant and ephemeral communication may live an extended life on the
Internet, turning up in unexpected contexts many years from now. Per-
sonal memory insidiously coils with collective memory once pictures are
unleashed onto the World Wide Web. As I argue in the last section, the in-
creased malleability of photographic images may suit our need for contin-
uous self-remodeling, but that same flexibility may also lessen our grip on
our images’ future repurposing and reframing, forcing us to redefine fun-
damental notions of memory.
Picture Your Self: Remodeling Life
From the early days of photography, its significance as a personal

tool derived from its function as a mnemonic aid: without pictures of
ourselves, we would most likely lose a sharp idea of what we physically
looked like at a younger age. Some theorists claim that personal pictures
equal identities (our pictures are us), but this claim appears to understate
the intricate cognitive, mental, social, and cultural processes at work in
memory and identity formation.4 Pictures of family and friends are visible
reminders of historical appearances, inviting us, as Roland Barthes as-
sumes, to reflect on “what has been.”5 By the same token, personal pictures
dictate our autobiographical memory: they tell us, time and again, how
we should remember ourselves as younger persons. We remodel our self-
image to fit the pictures taken at previous moments in time. Memories are
made as much as they are recalled from photographs; our recollections
never remain the same, even if the photograph appears to represent a fixed
image of the past. And yet, we use these pictures not to fix memory but to
constantly reassess our past lives and reflect on what has been as well as
what is and what will be. As extensively described in Chapter 2, recollect-
ing is not simply a revisionist project; anticipations of future selves inform
retrograde projections, and these mental image maps, in turn, feed a desire
to impact external (camera) visions of ourselves.6
The role photographs play in the complex construction of one’s per-
sonal memory and identity has been theorized in cognitive theory as well
as in cultural theory, particularly semiotics. Cognitive psychologists have
investigated the intriguing question of how photographs can influence
personal memories.7 The human mind actively produces visual autobio-
graphical evidence through photographs, but it also modifies this evidence
through pictures—cutting off estranged spouses or throwing away depress-
ing images depicting them when they were still seriously overweight. Re-
search has shown that people are easily seduced into creating false
memories of their pasts on the basis of unaltered as well as doctored pic-
tures. In the early 1990s, researchers from America and New Zealand per-
suaded experimental subjects into believing false narratives about their
childhoods, written or told by family members and substantiated by “true”
photographs.8 Over the next decade, these findings were corroborated by
experiments in which doctored pictures were used; more than 50 percent
of all subjects constructed false memories out of old personal photographs
that were carefully retouched to depict a scene that had never happened in
that person’s life.9 There is a continuing debate whether it is narratives or
photographs (or a combination of both) that trigger most false memories,
but the conclusion that people’s autobiographical memories are prone to
either self-induced intervention or secret manipulation is well estab-
lished.10 Not surprisingly, these scientific insights are gratefully deployed
in marketing and advertising departments to advance sales by manipulat-
ing customers’ memories about their pasts and thus influence their future
(buying) behavior. What customers recall about prior product or shopping
experiences often differ from their actual experiences if marketers refer to
those past experiences in positive ways.11
The close interweaving of memory, imagination, and desire in cre-
ating a picture of one’s past has also been subject to theoretical probing
by cultural theorists, most notably Roland Barthes. When exploring the
intricacies of the camera lucida, Barthes testifies to this complex loop of
images/pictures informing desire/memory when describing the discom-
fort he feels the moment he succumbs to being the camera’s object.
Having one’s photograph taken, as Barthes observes, is a closed field of
forces where four image repertoires intersect: “the one that I think I am”
(the mental self-image); “the one I want others to think I am” (the idealized
self-image); “the one the photographer thinks I am” (the photographed
self-image); and “the one the photographer makes use of when exhibiting
his art” (the public self-image or imago).12 Whereas the first two levels rep-
resent the stages of mental, internal image processing, the third and fourth
levels refer to the external process of picture taking and presentation—the
photographer’s frame of reference and cultural perspective. In contrast to
psychologists, Barthes’s semiotic perspective emphasizes that cognition
does not necessarily reside inside our brains but extends into the social
and cultural realm.
Barthes’s exploration of analog photography elucidates how the
four image repertoires of self intersect and yet never match. They collide
at various moments: at the instant of capturing, when evaluating the out-
come or photographed object, or while reminiscing at a later point in
time, reviewing the picture. When a picture is taken, we want those pho-
tographs to match our idealized self-image—flattering, without pimples,
happy, attractive—so we attempt to influence the process by posing, smil-
ing, or giving instructions to the photographer. At a later stage, we can try
to change the undesired outcome by selecting, refusing, or destroying the
actual print. A photographed person exerts only limited control over the
resulting picture. The photographer’s choice of frame and angle defines
the portraiture, and the referent can be further modified at the stage of de-
velopment by applying retouching techniques. Barthes obviously feels
powerless in the face of the photographer’s decisions, lacking control over
the picture’s referent, which he wants to equal his idealized self. Its fate is
in the hands of the photographer who is taking the picture and of the
chemical, mechanical, and publishing forces involved in its ultimate mate-
rialization. Barthes’s discomfort signals a fundamental resentment about
his inability to fashion pictures in his own image. Because the four levels
never coincide, portrait photographs are profoundly alienating, even to the
extent of giving the French philosopher a sense of imposture.
Paradoxically, Barthes perceives a lack of control over his photo-
graphed image and imago and yet he feels confident he can exert power over
the mental and idealized images entering his mind. According to Barthes,
our mental capacities determine which images are allowed to enter our
minds and memories. Photos that “work” are those you still remember when
you no longer see them. To test the affect of a picture, Barthes suggests
that you close your eyes and wait to see if the photographed image is incul-
cated in the mind—that is, if it conjures up mental images. Barthes’s now
famous concept of the photograph’s punctum uses memory as a litmus test
for admitting pictures to the mental reservoir. In a similar vein, the auto-
biographical self selects those photographed images that work the mind,
though they do not necessarily “work” to accommodate or feed its idealized
self-images. On the contrary, old photographs of self may counteract such
projections. For instance, when looking at a group portrait of myself amidst
a class of sixth graders, I may identify myself as the one who looks dumb or
innocent, or I may point at the stupid dress my mother made me wear to
school. In the process of recalling, photographs may block or parcel out spe-
cific mental images. We can apparently resist photographs the way we resist
memories, not just by literally destroying them but also by simply barring
them from entering the mind’s eye. The photograph is never a simple con-
duit but is made to signify something by the mind’s ability to frame a picture
each time it is (re)viewed.
Barthes’s perceived powerlessness over the photographer’s perspec-
tive and the black box of the camera in relation to the assumed autonomy
over his mental images and memories appears entirely plausible, and yet
neither perception can go undisputed. The photographed image—the
manipulation of one’s public imago—has never been outside the subject’s
influence. Since the late 1840s, commercial portrait photographers have
succumbed to their patrons’ desire for idealized self-images the way paint-
ers did before the advent of photography: by adopting flattering perspec-
tives and applying chemical magic. However, the subject’s power over
images entering the mind may not be as manageable as it appears. Cultural
ideals of physical appearance, displayed through photographs and evolv-
ing over time, often unconsciously influence the mind’s (idealized) images
of self.13 Control over photographic images is hence not inscribed in the
machine’s ontology, and neither does the mind have full sovereignty over
the images it allows to enter memory. Instead, control over one’s self-
portrait is a subtle choreography of the four image repertoires, a balancing
act in which photographic images enculturate personal memory and a sub-
ject’s memory evolves through cultural engagement.14 Individual cognitive
editing and processes of image manipulation are intertwined at every level
of cultural memory.
Now when we replace the analog camera with a digital one, and
laminated photos with pixeled shots, how does this affect the intertwining
of mental-cognitive and cultural-material image processes in photogra-
phy? The attempt to answer this question reveals a conspicuous absence
of interdisciplinary research in this area. None of the cognitive studies
discussed above pay attention to ways in which individuals use digital
photography to manipulate their own personal pictures and memory; the
cultural, material, and technological aspects of memory morphing appear
strikingly irrelevant to cognitive science. This is striking because scientists
often mention how their academic interest in manipulated pictures gains
relevance in the face of a growing ubiquitous use of digital photography
and its endless potential to reconstruct and retouch one’s childhood
memories; skills once monopolized by Hollywood studios and advertising
agencies are now within the reach of every individual who owns a “digital
camera, image editing software, a computer, and the capacity to follow
instructions.”15 Indeed, without digital photo enhancement equipment,
cognitive psychologists would have a hard time conducting their research
on manipulated autobiographical memory in the first place; only with the
help of computer paintbrush programs can they make doctored photo-
graphs look immaculate. Mutatis mutandis, when turning to cultural the-
orists for enlightenment, their disregard of psychological and cognitive
studies in this area is rather remarkable; semioticians and constructivists
typically analyze the intricacies of technological devices to connect them
to social and cultural agency.16 Yet without acknowledging the profound
interlacing of mental, technical, and cultural levels involved in digital
photography, we may never understand the intricate connection between
memory, identity formation, and photography.
It may be instructive to spell out a few significant differences between
analog and digital photography in terms of their (cognitive and technical)
mechanisms. At first sight, digital photography provides more access to
the imaging process between the stages of taking the picture and looking at
its printed result. Only seconds after its taking, the picture may be pre-
viewed via the camera’s small screen. The display shows a tentative result,
an image that can be deleted or stored. Because this sneak preview allows
the photographer to instantly share the results with the photographed sub-
ject, there is room for negotiation: the subject’s evaluation of his or her self-
image may influence the next posture. A second review takes place at the
computer, in which images, stored as digital code, are susceptible to editing
and manipulation. Besides selecting or erasing pictures, photo-paint soft-

ware permits endless retouching of images—everything from cropping and
color adjustment to brushing out red eyes and pimples. Beyond the superfi-
cial level, one can remove entire objects from the picture, such as unwanted
decorations, or add desirable features, such as sharper cheekbones or palm
trees in the background.
It is important to be straight about one thing: digitization never caused
manipulability or artificiality. Although some theorists of visual culture have
earmarked manipulability as the feature that makes digital photography
stand out from its analog precursors, history bespeaks the contrary.17 Re-
touching and manipulation have always been inherent to the dynamics of
photography.18 What is new in digital photography is the increased number
of possibilities to review and retouch one’s own pictures, first on a small
camera screen and later on the screen of a computer. When pictures are
taken by a digital camera, the subject may feel empowered to steer its out-
come (the photographed or public image) because he or she may have access
to stages formerly “black boxed” by cameras, film roles, and chemical labs.
Previews and reviews of the pixeled image, combined with easy-to-use pho-
toshop software, undoubtedly seduce pictorial enhancement. But does this
increased flexibility cause the processes of photographic imaging and mental
(or cognitive) editing to further entwine in the construction of autobio-
graphical memory? In other words, does image doctoring become an integral
element of autobiographical remembering? Answering this question requires
us to include culture in our explanation.
Of course, we have already become used to the prevailing use of
the “camera pictura” with regard to the creation of public images. Since
the 1990s, people no longer expect indexical fidelity to an external person
when looking at photographic portraits, particularly those in advertising;
almost by default, pictures in magazines, billboards, and many other pub-
lic sources are retouched or enhanced. Digital stock photography uses
public images as resources or input to be worked on by anyone who pays
for their exploit.19 Companies like Microsoft and Getty have anticipated
the consequence of this evolution by buying up large stocks of public
images, licensing their re-creations, and selling them back to the public
domain. From the culturally accepted modifiability of public images it is
only a small step to considering your own personal pictures to be mere
stock in the ongoing remodeling project of life’s pictorial heritage. The
impact of editing software on the profiling of one’s personal identity and

remembrance is evident from many photoblogs and personal picture gal-
leries on the Internet. Enhancing color and beautifying faces is no longer
the department of beauty magazines: individuals may now purchase pho-
toshop software to brush up their cherished images. A large number of
software packages allow users to restore their old, damaged, and faded
family pictures; in one and the same breath, they offer to upgrade your
self-image. For instance, VisionQuest Images advertises its packages as
technical aids to create a “digital masterpiece of your specification”; com-
puter programs enable you to change everything in your personal appear-
ance, from lip size to skin tint.20 Examples of individuals who use these
programs abound on the Internet. Asian American student Chris Lin, for
instance, admits in his photoblog that he likes to picture himself with
brown hair; he also recolors the faces of his friends’ images to see if it en-
hances their appearance.21 Nancy Burson, a New York–based artist and pi-
oneer in morphing technology, attracted a lot of media attention with her
design of a so-called Human Race Machine, a digital method that effort-
lessly morphs racial features and skin colors in pictures of peoples’ faces.22
These instances divulge that the acceptability of photographic manipula-
tion of personal photographs can hardly be separated from the normalized
use of enhanced idealized images. Digital doctoring of private snapshots is
just another stage in the eternal choreography of the (mental and cultural)
image repertoires identified by Barthes.
The endless potential of digital photography to manipulate one’s
self-image seems to render it the favorite tool for identity formation and
personal memory construction. Whereas analog photographs were often
erroneously viewed as the still input for static images, digital pictures
more explicitly serve as visual resources in a lifelong project to reinvent
one’s self-appearance: they become “living pictures” amenable to infinite
change. Software packages supporting the processing of personal photo-
graphs often bespeak the digital image’s status as a liminal object; pixeled
photographs are touted as bricks of memory construction, as software is
architecturally designed with future remodeling in mind.23 As Canadian
design scholar Ron Burnett eloquently phrases it: “The shift to the digital
has shown that photographs are simply raw material for an endless series
of digressions. . . . As images, photographs encourage viewers to move be-
yond the physical world even as they assert the value of memory, place,
and original moments.”24 Digital photography, in other words, advances

the concept of autobiographical remembrance as a mixture of memory and
desire, of actual pictures and idealized images, of constantly evolving in-
put and output.
I am not saying, though, that with the advent of digital photogra-
phy people all of a sudden feel more inclined to photoshop their personal
pictures stored in the computer. Nor am I arguing that mental imaging
processes change as a result of having more access to intermediate layers
of photographic imaging. My point is that the condition of modifiability,
plasticity, and ongoing remodeling equally informs—or enculturates—all
four image repertoires involved in the construction of personal memory.
The condition of plasticity and modifiability, far from being exclusive to
memory, resounds in diverging cultural, medical, and technological self-
remodeling projects. Ultrasound images of fetuses—sneak previews into
the womb—stimulate intervention in the biological fabric, turning the
fetus into an object to be worked on.25 Cosmetic surgery configures the
human body as a physical resource amenable to extreme makeovers;
before-and-after pictures not only structure subjective self-consciousness,
but upon entering the public image repertoire, they concurrently normal-
ize intervention in physical appearance. The most remarkable thing about
before-and-after pictures abounding on the Internet and on television
these days is that they do not promote perpetual modification of our pic-
tures to portray a better self, but rather they advertise the potential to
modify our bodies to match our idealized mental images. Contemporary
notions of body, mind, appearance, and memory seem to be equally in-
formed by the cultural condition of perpetual modification; our new tools
are only in tune with the mental flexibility to refashion self-identity and to
morph corporeality.
The question whether changing concepts of personal memory have
followed from evolving technologies or the other way around is in fact be-
side the point. What is more important is to address how the new chore-
ography of image repertoires operates in a social and cultural climate that
increasingly values modifiability and flexibility, and whether this climate
indeed allows more individual control over one’s own image. But to un-
derstand this larger picture, we first need to look at the sociotechnical as-
pects of photography. The camera is not solely used as a tool for identity
construction and remembrance; the apparatus of personal photography
also produces material keepsakes that embody routines and generate com-
mercial products.
Digital Photographs as Material Keepsakes
Photographs are by far the most cherished memory objects in some-

one’s personal heritage, probably more so than videos, diaries, and tapes
combined; they owe their special status to a strange mix of material and im-
material preciousness, a blend of “thingness” and performativity, and a
combination of domestic and commoditized value. The power of photo-
graphic images stems from their being material realities in their own right,
while they are coveted as symbolic personal possessions. People may store
their pictures as ongoing collections in shoeboxlike containers, or they may
order them carefully in albums to present them as finished narratives of a
specific period in their lives. Different storage frames engender different
performative routines of showing pictures: a box with slides implies a dif-
ferent presentational setting than a photo album. And although personal
photographs are commonly considered domestic items without any mone-
tary value, they also form the core product of an extensive commercial
branch.26 From the development of film rolls to the creation of digital pic-
ture management systems, that mythical space known as private life, cap-
tured in personal photographs, is pervaded by industrial services and
products, not only ensuring continuous profits but also guaranteeing a firm
grasp on their ideological framing. The photographic image, as Don Slater
argues, takes its shape and force from the “mélange of domesticity, con-
sumerism and leisure.”27
When considering current trends spurred by digitization, we may
witness an interesting metamorphosis in the photographic object’s materi-
alization as well as in its performative nature and its commoditized essence.
Let me subsequently illustrate each of these transformations. Considering a
photograph’s materiality, it may be instructive to once again compare digi-
tal and analog photography, now in terms of picture processing. In film
cameras, the output commonly refers to two things—negative images on
celluloid strips and laminated paper prints—the status of which differs
considerably. Negatives are not kept to be looked at but to ensure future re-
production; like slides, their value as objects lies in their reproducibility and
“projectionability.” Although the negative of a photograph can guarantee
infinite reproduction, its potential to be retouched is rather limited and the

process cumbersome. Laminated prints are not only images, but they are
the finished products of chemical processes, paper objects to be preserved
and presented.28 Shoeboxes or photo albums hold them together as collec-
tions, and the tangibility of these paper products constitutes an important
part of their value as pictorial heritage.
The new materiality of digital photographs is often referred to as vir-
tual or intangible, but such denomination erroneously connotes immateri-
ality. In digital photography, celluloid strips are replaced by invisible binary
codes, stored on computer hard disks or on external storage mediums.
Coded images hold a material value similar to their celluloid counterparts,
even if they cannot be looked at unless they are turned into pixeled objects.
Once they appear on the screen, they are visible entities, even if they have a
different feel to them than slides or laminated prints. It is precisely this pix-
eled quality or the bright backlit screen that may cause its specific affect. In
addition to being reproducible and projectionable, virtual images are also
malleable and versatile: they can be endlessly and effortlessly retouched
without losing quality, and they can be printed on paper as well as on mugs
or T-shirts. The versatility of coded pictures supports the managing act of
personal identity construction: we may now store infinite numbers of single
pictures on our digital media and re-present them in multiple different for-
mats, such as photoblogs, Powerpoint presentations, or multimedia config-
urations, without compromising their quality.
Along with their materiality, the performative nature of pictures
changes upon moving to a digital platform; so far, little attention has been
given to these objects’ agility or their illocutionary force.29 Digital presen-
tational formats of pictures engender different performative uses than ana-
log ones. Instead of framed pictures showcasing loved ones on someone’s
office desk, we can now expect these images to light up on desktop screen-
savers. Exhibiting the ritual highlights of family life in a professional envi-
ronment, the illocutionary force of the screensaver, though, diverges from
the framed picture’s message: rather than a mere ornament on permanent
display, the reminder of home is effectively switched on when taking a
break from the computer. Virtual objects do not automatically replace
printed pictures; on the contrary, they are often exhibited complementary
to photographic prints, or they are used to personalize someone’s com-
puter, desk, or workspace.30 Photos sent as e-mail attachments to show a
toddler’s latest achievements may have been distributed with the same in-
tent as laminated pictures enclosed with a letter, but that does not mean
they convey the same message. The connotation of e-mailing pictures as
attachments is one of transience rather than of permanence, a mere update
rather than a record. Along similar lines, showing a slide show on a laptop
is a performative act ardently reminiscent of an old-fashioned slide show,
and yet the casualness of the gesture implied in the laptop presentation
sharply contrasts the cerebral efforts involved in setting up the slide pro-
jector, pulling out the screen, and sorting through the slide racks.
Digital photography elicits a performativity and materiality that de-
serves to be evaluated in its own right, not just as a virtualization of former
analog products and practices. The virtual image, as a screen object, is grad-
ually acquiring a new status beside the laminated object, which in turn ad-
justs its meaning to suit this pixeled neophyte. We can see this also in
relation to methods of storing and presenting personal picture collections.
Software engineers increasingly begin to realize that the design of picture
management systems requires a profound understanding of why and how
users interact with their pictures: the acts of storing pictures in a shoebox or
sticking them into albums cannot simply be transposed onto digital plat-
forms.31 In terms of hardware, the single-purpose camera for taking still
pictures gives way to multifunctional appliances, combining the camera
function with the personal digital assistant (PDA), the mobile phone, MP3
players, and global positioning devices. But the so-called camera phone also
permits entirely new performative rituals, such as shooting a picture at a live
concert and instantly e-mailing the image to a friend. Emerging digital tools
are thus deeply affecting the way people socialize and interact and, by ex-
tension, the way they maintain relationships and consolidate them into per-
sonal memory.
Because personal photography is the pivot of a large industrial branch,
commercial stakes in the digital refurbishing of material keepsakes are high.
The logic of consumption and replenishment very much underlies digital
photography, hence the huge economic interest in creating and tracing new
material and performative uses of photography. Hardware industries are
gradually shaking off their chemical and laboratory divisions, instead con-
centrating on corporate strategies that concurrently target digital and pa-
per image processing. Software developers respond to the camera phone
trend by integrating photography into multifunctional scripts for online
communication and shareware. Cameras and related paraphernalia still

support the demand for printed snapshots—partly by bringing the printing
process into the do-it-yourself market—while also inscribing the new pref-
erence for sharing pictured experience into their technological scripts. So-
called dock-and-share systems cater to people’s dual desire for instant
gratification and instant notification.
In the analog days, the wish to have picture viewing virtually coincide
with real-time experience could only be achieved by using Polaroid or In-
stamatic cameras that ejected instant laminated pictures. The drawbacks
of Polaroids—they were very expensive and produced rapidly fading print
images without negatives—made them impractical as memory tools.
Hence, their success was mostly limited to (commercial) exploits where pic-
tures were sold as signals of presence: photographers offering instant snap-
shot services at entertainment venues such as roller coasters and canal
cruises or distributing thank-you pictures to wedding guests as they leave
the party. Digital dock-and-print systems bring some of these formerly
commercial applications within the reach of individual consumers; without
the drawbacks attached to Instamatics and Polaroids, the rituals of pictorial
thank-you notes and personalized invitations may rise to a new normative
level. Besides banking on instant gratification, digital camera and docking
systems increasingly cater to the desire for instant notification. Whereas
Kodak’s Brownie, in 1901, popularized the camera with its slogan “You push
the button, we do the rest,” the company’s newest camera, Easy Share,
highlights its most prominent feature: a button to automatically e-mail a
picture upon docking the camera. Instant sharing and self-service, rather
than easy use and full service (“we do the rest”), appear the new selling
points of digital pocket cameras.
The logic of consumption still underpins the need for more technol-
ogy and its industrial spin-offs, although we can recently detect a shift from
easy-to-use cameras and ready-made laminated objects to camera parapher-
nalia and software supporting instant materialization and exchange; how-
ever, expectations that digital cameras will result in more pictures but fewer
actual prints may well turn out to be another paperless-office myth. This
technological and material transformation seems to come with an inherent
bias toward the communicable and the disposable, at the expense of perma-
nence and durability. Whereas laminated pictures are meant to be stored
as keepsakes, coded or screen images tend to be assigned a temporary
(exchange) value, always amenable to recycling or reframing. The laminated

print is an object to hold on to, whereas the digital picture appears to be an
object to work on and distribute.
However, conclusions on the changing material and technological na-
ture of personal photography are inevitably bound up with questions con-
cerning photography’s transforming sociocultural use. The digital camera
and its resulting snapshots give rise to newly accentuated uses and ritualized
practices. Easy manipulation and sharing are not simply new technological
features; they reflect and construct a desire to control and direct identity
formation. And yet, if digital photography indeed bodes a preference for
networked distribution and manipulation—consolidating its penchant to-
ward the transient and ephemeral—how does this affect its use as a tool for
remembrance?
Digital Photography as Communication and Experience
When personal photography came of age in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, it gradually emerged as a social practice that revolved
around families wanting to save their memories of past experiences in
material pictorial forms for future reference or communal reminiscing.
Yet even in the early days of photography, social uses complementary
to its primary function were already evident. Photography always also
served as an act of communication and as a means to share experience. As
Susan Sontag argued in 1973, the tourist’s compulsion to take snapshots
of foreign places reveals how taking pictures can become paramount to
experiencing an event; at the same time, communicating experiences with
the help of photographs is an integral part of tourist photography.32
Notwithstanding the dominance of photography as a family tool for re-
membrance and reminisce, the communicative function was immanent
to photography from the moment it became popular as a domestic tech-
nology. In recent years, there have been profound shifts in the balance
between these various social uses: from family to individual use, from
memory tools to communication devices, and from sharing (memory) ob-
jects to sharing experiences. I subsequently elucidate each of these pro-
found shifts.
The social significance and cultural impact of personal photography
grew exponentially in the past century: by the early 1970s, almost every
American and western European household owned a photo camera. Long

before sociologists and anthropologists began to acknowledge the signifi-
cance of photography as a cultural rite of family life, Sontag took on the
ethnographer’s cloak and described its meaning as a tool for recording fam-
ily life: “Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait chronicle
of itself—a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connected-
ness.”33 By taking and organizing pictures, individuals articulate their con-
nections to, and initiation into, clans and groups, emphasizing ritualized
moments of aging and of coming of age. Cameras go with family life, Son-
tag observed: households with children are twice as likely to have at least
one camera as households in which there are no children. Photography did
not simply reflect but constituted family life and structured an individual’s
notion of belonging. Quite a number of sociological and anthropological
studies have scrutinized the relationship between picture taking, organiz-
ing, and presenting photographs on the one hand and the construction of
family, heritage, and kinship on the other.34
Over the past two decades, the individual has become the nucleus of
pictorial life. In her ethnographic study of how people connect personal
photographs to memory and narration, anthropologist Barbara Harrison
observes that self-presentation—rather than family re-presentation—has
become a major function of photographs.35 Harrison’s field study ac-
knowledges a significant shift from personal photography as a tool bound
up with memory and commemoration toward pictures as a form of iden-
tity formation; cameras are used less for the remembrance of family life
and more for the affirmation of personhood and personal bonds.36 Since
the 1990s, and most distinctively since the beginning of the new millen-
nium, cameras increasingly serve as tools for mediating quotidian experi-
ences other than rituals or ceremonial moments. Partly a technological
evolution pushed by market forces, the social and cultural stakes in this
transformation cannot be underestimated. When looking at current gener-
ations of users, researchers observe a watershed between adult users, large
numbers of whom are now switching from analog to digital cameras, and
teenagers and young adults, who are growing up with a number of new
multifunctional communication and media devices.37 The older group
generally adheres to the primacy of photography as a memory tool, partic-
ularly in the construction of family life, whereas teenagers and young
adults use camera-like tools for conversation and peer-group building.
This distinctive swing in photography’s use also shows up in ethno-

graphic observations of teenagers’ patterns of taking and managing pic-
tures. One American study focusing on a group of teens between fourteen
and nineteen years of age reports a remarkable incongruence between what
teenagers say they value in photography and how they behave: most of
them describe photos as permanent records of their lives, but their behav-
ior reveals a preference for photography as social communication.38 Show-
ing pictures as part of conversation or reviewing pictures to confirm social
bonds between friends appears more important than organizing photos in
albums and looking at them—an activity they consider their parents’ do-
main. Photos are shared less in the context of family and home and more
in peer-group environments: schools, clubs, friends’ houses. The study
notes how teens regard pictures as circulating messages, an interactive ex-
change in which personal photographs casually mix public images, such as
magazine pictures, drawings, and text.39 In the past three years, photo-
blogs have become popular as an Internet-based technology—a type of
blog that adds photographs to text and hyperlinks in the telling of stories.
Photoblogs have an entirely different function than photo albums, but
they are also different from the lifelogs described in Chapter 3. Photoblog-
gers want to promote photographs as more valuable than words, and they
profile themselves in their pictures.40
Whereas their parents invested considerable time and effort in build-
ing up material collections of pictures for future reference, youngsters ap-
pear to take less interest in sharing photographs as objects than in sharing
them as experiences.41 The rapidly increasing popularity in the use of cam-
era phones supports and propels this new communicative deployment of
personal photography. Pictures distributed by a camera phone are used to
convey a brief message, or merely to show affect. Connecting and getting
in touch, rather than reality capturing and memory preservation, are the
social meanings transferred onto this type of photography. Whereas par-
ents and/or children used to sit on the couch together flipping through
photo albums, most teenagers today consider their pictures to be tempo-
rary reminders rather than permanent keepsakes. Phone photography
gives rise to a cultural form reminiscent of the old-fashioned postcard:
snapshots with a few words attached that are mostly valued as ritual signs
of (re)connection.42 Like postcards, camera phone pictures are meant to be
discarded after they are received.
Not coincidentally, the camera phone merges oral and visual

modalities—the latter seemingly adapting to the former. Pictures become
more like spoken language as photographs are turning into the new cur-
rency for social interaction. Pixeled images, like spoken words, circulate
between individuals and groups to establish and reconfirm bonds. Some-
times pictures are accompanied by captions that form the missing voice to
explain the pictures. For instance, a concert visitor takes a camera phone
picture of her favorite band, adds the caption “awesome,” and immediately
sends off the message to her friends back home. Camera phone pictures are
a way of touching base: Picture this, here! Picture me, now! What makes
camera phones different from the single-purpose camera is the medium’s
verbosity—the inflation of images inscribed in the apparatus’s script. When
pictures become a visual language channeled by a communication medium,
the value of individual pictures decreases, whereas the general significance
of visual communication augments. A thousand pictures sent over the
phone may now be worth a single word: see! Taking, sending, and receiving
photographs are real-time experiences, and like spoken words, image ex-
changes are not meant to be archived.43 In their bounty, photographs gain
value as “momentos” while losing value as mementos.
Even though photography may still capitalize on its primary func-
tion as a memory tool for documenting a person’s past, we are witnessing a
significant shift, especially among the younger generation, toward using it
as an instrument for interaction and peer bonding. Digitization is not the
cause of this trend; instead, the tendency to fuse photography with daily
experience and communication is part of a broader cultural transforma-
tion that involves individualization and intensification of experience. The
emphasis on individualism and personhood at the expense of family is a
social pattern whose roots can be traced back as far as the late 1960s and
early 1970s. The intensification of experience as a turn-of-the-millennium
economic and social force has been theorized most acutely by American
economists Joseph Pine and James Gilmore; commercial products are in-
creasingly marketed as memorable experiences engaging all five senses—
sight, sound, touch, taste, smell—and packaged with snappy themes, so as
to prolong the contact zone between product and consumers.44 Digital
photography is part of this larger transformation in which the self be-
comes the center of a virtual universe made up of informational and spa-
tial flows; individuals articulate their identity as social beings not only by
taking and storing photographs to document their lives but also by partic-
ipating in communal photographic exchanges that mark their identity as
interactive producers and consumers of culture.
From the above observations, it is tempting to draw the conclusion
that digital cameras are moving away from their prime functions as mem-
ory tools, instead becoming tools for identity formation, communication,
and experience. If photographs were always a medium for remembering
scenes and objects from the past, digital cameras particularly encourage
users to imagine and invent the present. Digital personal photography gives
rise to new social practices in which pictures are considered visual resources
in the microcultures of everyday life.45 In these microcultures, memory
does not so much disappear from the spectrum of social use as it takes on a
different meaning. In the networked reality of people’s everyday life, the
default mode of personal photography becomes sharing. However, few
people realize shared experience almost by definition implies distributed
storage: personal live pictures distributed through the Internet may remain
there for an indefinite period, turning up in unforeseen contexts, reframed
and repurposed. A well-known example may clarify the meaning of distrib-
uted memory and demonstrate the intertwined meanings of personal and
collective cultural memory: the Abu Ghraib pictures.
In May 2004, a series of the most horrific, graphic scenes of torture
and violence used by American guards stationed at the Abu Ghraib prison
against Iraqi detainees appeared in the press, and they were subsequently
disseminated through the Internet.46 Most pictures were made by prison
guards and frequently featured two lower ranked members of the armed
forces, Charles Graner and Lynndie England; they often posed giving the
thumbs-up in front of individual or piled up prisoners who invariably
showed signs of torture or sexual assault. The hundreds of pictures taken
by prison guards of detainees communicate an arduous casualness in the
act of photographing. Clearly, these picture were made by digital cameras
(or camera phones) deployed by Army personnel as part of their daily
work routines—perfectly in tune with the popular function of photogra-
phy as a ritual of everyday communication. As Sontag poignantly describes
in her essay on the case: “The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu
Ghraib reflect a recent shift in the use made of pictures—less objects to be
saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a
common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was
the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all

photographers—recording their war, their fun, their observations of what
they find picturesque, their atrocities—and swapping images among them-
selves and e-mailing them around the globe.”47 Intentionally taken to be sent
back home as triumphant trophies or to be mailed to colleagues, the pictures
were a social gesture of bonding and poaching. Some pictures allegedly
served as screensavers on prison guards’ desktops, a sign of their function as
office jokes to be understood by insiders only. The casualness and look-at-
me-here enunciation of the Abu Ghraib photographs, conveyed by the uni-
formed men and women whose posture betrayed pride as if they had just
caught a big fish, connotes the function of these pictures as symbolic re-
sources for communication. Their makers never meant for these pictures to
be objects of lasting memory.
And yet, this is exactly how they ended up in the collective memory
of the American people and the world. Once interceded and published in
newspapers and on television worldwide, they were reframed as evidence
of the Army’s abhorrent behavior as torturers posing triumphantly over
their helpless captives. The Abu Ghraib pictures became evidence in a mil-
itary trial that incriminated the perpetrators responsible for the abuse
shown in the pictures but acquitted the invisible chain of command that
obviously condoned such behavior. Perhaps most telling was the military’s
response to the Abu Ghraib debacle. Rather than condemning the prac-
tice depicted by the images taken, the military subsequently ordered to
ban personal photography from the work floor; pictures made for private
use may no longer be taken outside penitentiaries. The incident resulted in
stricter communication regulations as well as a prohibition against taking
and distributing personal photographs on military premises.
Ironically, pictures that were casually mailed off as ephemeral post-
cards, meant to be thrown away after reading the message, became a per-
manent engraving in the consciousness of a generation; pictures sent with
a communicative intent ended up in America’s collective cultural memory
as painful visual evidence of its military’s hubris. The awareness that any
picture unleashed on the Internet can be endlessly recycled may lead to a
new attitude in taking pictures: anticipating future reuse, photographs are
no longer innocent personal keepsakes, but they are potential liabilities in
someone’s personal life or professional career. The lesson learned from the
Abu Ghraib pictures—beyond their horrendous political message—is that
personal digital photography can hardly be confined to private grounds;

embedded in networked systems, cultural memory is forever distributed,
perpetually stored in the endless maze of virtual life.
Digital Photography and Image Control
The digital evolution that has shaped personal photography is any-

thing but an exclusive technological transformation. “Picturing the self”
appears to be an embodied act, enabled by the newest digital tools and em-
bedded in the new cultural practices these tools bring along. The shift in
use and function of the camera as a tool for identity formation and com-
munication seems to suit a more general cultural condition that may be
characterized by terms such as “manipulability,” “experience,” “versatility,”
and “distributedness.” This cultural condition has definitely affected the
nature and status of photographs as building blocks for personal identity
and as material input for acts of communication. Even if the function of
memory capture persists in current uses of personal photography, its real-
located significance reverberates crucial changes in our contemporary cul-
tural condition. Returning to the issue of power, it is difficult to conclude
whether digital photography has led to more or less control over our per-
sonal images, pictures, and memories. The choreography of image reper-
toires, blending mental and cultural imaging processes, not only seems to
reset our control over pictures and memory but also implies a profound re-
definition of the very terms.
Photographs, as mediated memories, could never be qualified as truth-
ful anchors of personal memory; yet since the emergence of digital photog-
raphy, pictorial manipulation seems to be a default mode rather than an
option. To some extent, the camera allows more control over our memories,
handing us the tools to brush up and reinvigorate remembrances of things
past. Presently, photography allows subjects take some measure of control
over their photographed appearance, inviting them to tweak and reshape the
referent. As stated earlier, digital photography is not the cause of memory’s
transformation, nor is personal memory directly the result of technical
changes. The digital camera derives its revamped application as a memory
tool from a culture where manipulability and morphing are commonly ac-
cepted conditions for shaping personhood. Flexibility and morphing do not
apply exclusively to pictures as shaping tools for personal memory but also
apply to bodies. Memory, like photographs and bodies, can now be made
picture perfect; memory and photography change in conjunction, adapting
to contemporary expectations and prevailing norms. Our photographs tell
us who we want to be and how we want to be remembered. Just as before-
and-after photos on the Internet or on television normalize the need for cos-
metic surgery, the abundance of editing tools available will make the
inclination to brush up our past selves even more acceptable. Personal pho-
tography may become a lifelong exercise in revising past desires and adjust-
ing them to new expectations. Even if still a memory tool, the digital camera
is now pushed as an instrument for identity construction, allowing more
shaping power over autobiographical memories.
And yet, this same manipulative potential that empowers people to
shape their identity and memory may be also used by others to reshape
that image. The consequence of digital technology is that personal pictures
can be retouched without leaving traces and be manipulated regardless of
ownership or intent of the original picture, as evidenced at the beginning
of this chapter by the anecdote about the student who was unpleasantly
surprised to find a doctored picture of her and her friends electronically
distributed to (anonymous) recipients. Personal photographs are increas-
ingly pulled out of the shoebox to be used as public signifiers. Pictures
once bound to remain in personal archives increasingly enter the public do-
main, where they are invariably brushed up or retouched to (retro)fit con-
temporary narratives. It is quite plausible to see personal pictures emerge in
entirely different public contexts, either as testimony to a criminal on the
run, as a memorial to a soldier who died in the war, or as evidence of a
politician’s excessive alcohol use in college.48 Like the subjects who were
shown altered pictures in the psychologists’ experiments, we may be un-
able to determine whether they are true or false: is it memory that manip-
ulates pictures, or do we use pictures to create or adjust memory? The
digital age is setting new standards for remembrance and recall: the value
of the terms “true” and “doctored” in the context of memory will have to
be reconsidered accordingly.
The ability of photographic objects to evoke personal memories, is
increasingly giving way to its communicative and experiential uses. In
addition to photographs’ function as material keepsakes, once primarily
intended for veneration or ritual use—stored in the family archive or ex-
posed on the walls of the home gallery—photographs metamorphose into
virtual objects of exchange and versatile coded artifacts. Once treated as

memory objects imbued with private connotations, the casual dissemina-
tion of digital pictures signifies a new ephemeral meaning. Pictures taken
by a camera phone, meant as expendable enunciations to be shared with co-
workers, have a distinctly different discursive power than the framed black-
and-white ancestor photographs on the wall. We may now take pictures and
electronically distribute them to a number of known and anonymous recip-
ients, enabling instant notification and gratification. Networked systems de-
fine new presentational contexts of personal pictures, as sharing pictures
becomes the default mode of this cultural practice. In many ways, digital
tools and connective systems expand control over an individual’s image ex-
posure, granting more power to present and shape oneself in public.
However, the flipside of this increased versatility is actually a loss of
control over a picture’s framed meaning: pictures that are amenable to ef-
fortless distribution over the Internet are equally prone to unintended re-
purposing. But because the framing of a picture is never fixed for once and
for all, each rematerialization comes attached with its own illocutionary
meaning and each reframing may render the original purpose unrecogniz-
able. So even if taken with a communicative use in mind, a picture may
end up as a persistent object of (collective) cultural memory—as evidenced
by the Abu Ghraib pictures. The consequences of reframing and repur-
posing are particularly poignant when pictures move seamlessly between
private and public contexts. Of course, this risk is never the direct implica-
tion of photography’s digital condition, but it cannot be denied that digi-
tization has made reframing in electronic media much easier and smoother.
Distributing personal pictures over the Internet or by camera phone, which
is now a common way to communicate, intrinsically renders private pic-
tures into public property and therefore diminishes one’s power over their
presentational context.
Image control is still a pressing concern in the debates over personal
photography in the digital age, even if the parameters for this concern
have substantially shifted, adapting to new cognitive mindsets as well as
to new technological, social, and cultural conditions. We may hail the
increased manipulability of our self-image due to digital photography
while at the same time we resent the loss of power over our pictorial fram-
ing in public contexts.49 The enhanced versatility and multipurpose uses
of digital pictures facilitate promotion of one’s public image and yet also
diminish control over what happens once the pictures become part of a
networked environment, which changes their performative function each
time they are retrieved. Due to this networked condition, the definition
of personal cultural memory is gravitating toward a distributed presence.
We can no longer keep the lid on the shoebox we used to store in our at-
tic: its pictorial contents will increasingly spill out into the virtual corners
of the World Wide Web, where it seamlessly blends in with our collec-
tive pictorial heritage. Once again, pictures of life will become living
pictures—even if unwittingly.
6
Projecting the Family’s Future Past
Upon his return from work, a colleague of mine was buoyantly

greeted by his ten-year-old daughter. She begged him to fetch his cam-
corder and come to her room, where she was playing with her sister—they
were performing a karaoke of sorts in which they combined song and
dance with typical kids’ spells of laughter and fun. “You need to tape us
because when we become famous they may show this on television,” his
daughter explained with a sense of urgency. The children’s motivation for
being filmed betrays a sophisticated reflexivity of the camcorder as a tool
for producing future memories. Even at a young age, children keenly ap-
prehend the pliability of mediated experience; their father’s film is not
simply a registration of present fun activities, but it is also a conscious
steering of their future past. The camcorder constructs family life at the
same time and by the same means as it constructs our memory of it;
whereas the camcorder registers images of private lives, in the context of
television these images may help shape (future) public identity. The chil-
dren’s awareness was most likely triggered by contemporary television
programs—anything from so-called reality TV and lost-relative quests to
dating shows and celebrity interviews—that deploy home video footage to
represent a person’s past life.
This scene helps articulate a few intriguing questions on home
movies as a means to study the connection between individuals and fam-
ily, media and memory. Can filming the family be considered an act of
Projecting the Family’s Future Past 123
cognition—minds instructing instruments to manufacture desirable im-

ages of how one wants to remember his or her family in the future?1 Are
home movies registrations of actual or real families, enabled by the various
generations of technological equipment? And what if home movies be-
come cinematic constructions of past family life—footage shot and later
reassembled into a common cultural format? Filmed families constitute
fascinating windows into cultural memory, illustrating how the horizon-
tal axis of relational identity and the vertical axis of time intersect in mem-
ory acts and products. As the children in the above scene perfectly
understand, video footage may serve to actually steer one’s history as it is ac-
tively deployed to shape a family’s future past. Home movies remade into
cultural products like fiction films, documentaries, websites or television
programs can hardly be considered mere pictorial representations of family
at a certain moment in time; as mediated memories, they are audiovisual
constructions of hindsight. The goal of this chapter is to examine family
movies as co-productions of mind, technology, and culture: to what extent
are the concepts of “home movie” and “family films” mental projections en-
abled by media technologies and embedded in sociocultural practices?
First, embodied memory as it relates to home movies is examined.
Neurobiologists and philosophers of mind have theorized the intimate rela-
tionship between the mind’s eye and the camera’s eye from various angles.
Neurobiologists use movies, screens, and cameras as metaphors to describe
the intricate mechanism of human consciousness, whereas some philoso-
phers take them to be more than metaphors. Gilles Deleuze, for instance,
suggests the inseparability of the human brain and the movie screen. Films
are imagined in the brain, a process that involves a convergence of mental
projections and technological scripts; projecting the future and capturing
the present are closely intertwined activities of memory. Following the
footsteps of Deleuze, Mark Hansen upgrades Deleuze’s notion of filmed
memories to the digital age, arguing how this convergence takes place at the
intimate junction of body and technology.
Beyond the “embodied” perspective, a social constructivist angle is
introduced, directing the inquiry into mediated memories from the inter-
section of technology and culture. As James Moran argues, home movie
technologies can hardly be separated from social contexts; notions of family
change in conjunction with the technical tools we use to capture families in
the private sphere of home. The movie camera, the video camera, and
124 Projecting the Family’s Future Past
more recently the digital camcorder have been used to capture the rou-
tines of everyday life. At the same time, “real families” transpire in cul-
tural products everywhere. Families played out in television series shape
our mental concepts of family interaction, and home movies provide in-
put for media products. In the age of camcorders, webcams, and multi-
media productions, family lives are becoming an insidious part of our
combined mental, technological, and cultural fabric of memory. We need
to differentiate between these three levels in order to understand how, in
the digital age, filmed family life always involves remembrance, fabrication
and projection. Various examples—a feature film, a documentary, and
websites—will illustrate this combined theoretical approach. From the
analyses of contemporary mediated memories, I argue that the future of
memory will be determined by our tools for reconstruction as much as by
our imaginative capacities.
Future Memories as Projections of Family
Let us return for a moment to the scene in which the children de-
manded their playful activities to be taped by their father’s camera. The
youngsters were keenly aware of how video footage potentially steers their
public image as they grasp the essence of raw images serving as input for
memories that have yet to be shaped. But could such awareness be the re-
sult of their minds’ projections or, perhaps more likely, is it the result of
the movie camera’s infiltration into their mindsets—the result of the ubiq-
uitous presence of camcorders in their everyday lives? Mind and technol-
ogy, as I argued in earlier chapters, are closely interwoven in our projections
and memories of self. The desire to identify oneself as belonging to a
family may be deeply implicated in the private camera as a mnemonic
tool—to save visual evidence of family life for later reference—but it may
just as well be a function of the brain to funnel conscious perceptions of
family into desirable or idealized (moving) images. I succinctly explore
various hypothetical angles to account for the complex interrelation be-
tween mind and audiovisual technology in the construction of personal
cultural memory.
Some neurobiologists who study the physiological mechanisms of
autobiographical memory concentrate on the brain as an explanatory
framework, and choose to ignore the constitutive function of technology or
culture in the process of remembering. When neurobiologist Antonio

Damasio speaks of memory as a form of consciousness, he defines it as a
two-tired problem. First, he wants to know how the brain turns neural pat-
terns into explicit mental patterns called “images” (see Chapter 4). Multi-
sensory qualia, such as the tone of a violin, the blueness of a sky, and the
taste of apple pie, are translated by the brain into mental image maps—
image narratives Damasio calls “movies-in-the-brain.” Second, in produc-
ing those mental images, the brain also engenders a sense of self in the act
of knowing; all perceptions are the unmistakable mental property of an au-
tomatic owner who concurrently constructs images of objects and of self.2
Obviously, when Damasio speaks of a movie-in-the-brain, he uses the term
metaphorically: as if the brain were both a camera, a movie screen, a filmed
production, and a moviegoer. Without a proper analogy, it seems impossi-
ble to explain the complexity of the brain’s involvement in configuring a
sense of self over a period of time. However, the use of this metaphor pres-
ents a peculiar paradox: apparently, we need a cultural metaphor (movie) to
imagine a physical process (memory, consciousness), whereas actual movies
are ultimately the result of a complex brain-machine network involved in
film production (scripting, directing, camera work, editing, watching, and
so forth)—a subject addressed in the next paragraph. Damasio’s theory is
understandably oblivious of actual movies as input for actual brains; nei-
ther does he account for the role of the camera or other media technologies
in equipping the mind’s construction of images. The pair brain/mind is
hierarchically off set from the pairs technology/materiality and cultural
practices/forms; the latter two are mere conceptual aids in the neurobiolog-
ical theory of movies-in-the-brain.
It is rather interesting to compare Damasio’s inquiry into memory as
a form of consciousness with Deleuze’s philosophical reflections on cin-
ema, memory, and time.3 Building on Henri Bergson’s conjectures in Mat-
ter and Memory, Deleuze has theorized the internalization of the film
camera in the human mind to explain memories as filmic projections of
the present. The “matter” of memory, according to the French philoso-
pher, emerges at the intersection of brain/mind and technology/materiality.
In his book The Time-Image, Deleuze highlights the intimate relation be-
tween memory and cinema—between moving images in the mind and mov-
ing images on the screen. When Deleuze suggests that “the brain is the
screen,” he does not mean this metaphorically but literally: recollection is
inherently defined by the input of actual moving images, which are always
partly constructions of the brain.4 Whereas Damasio’s term “movie-in-the-
brain” implies a figural equation (to understand the brain’s mechanism in
terms of film productions), Deleuze explicitly connects cognitive mecha-
nisms to the movement-image of cinema. Cinema is as much a production
of the individual mind as it is a production of a mechanical apparatus.
Echoing Bergson, Deleuze distinguishes between different categories of im-
ages in motion: the perception-image, the affection-image, and the action-
image.5 “External images” act upon the mind and become “internal images,”
moving images that stir action or affection, converging into experience.
Memory, in Deleuze’s concept, is never a retrieval of past images but
always a function of the present, a function that embodies the essential
continuation of time. Body and cinema are part of the same organic, con-
nective system: just as the body constantly renews itself molecularly, im-
ages never remain the same when processed in an individual’s mind. In
other words, moving images produced by film are input for the brain, al-
ways resulting in updated output. Such a dynamic concept of movement-
image sharply contrasts semiotic theories that consider film footage as
representations or signs. “Perception-images” of the present determine
how actual images of the past are interpreted, and yet, both are inevitably
injected with projections of the future: idealized images, virtual images,
desire. It is instructive to quote Deleuze’s words in full here: “But instead
of a constituted memory, as function of the past which reports a story, we
witness the birth of memory, as function of the future which retains what
happens in order to make it the object to come of the other memory. . . .
[M]emory could never evoke and report the past if it had not already been
constituted at the moment when past was still present, hence in an aim to
come. It is in fact for this reason that it is behavior: it is in the present that
we make a memory, in order to make use of it in the future when the pres-
ent will be past.”6 Films are imagined in the brain—a process involving
the convergence of mental projections and technological scripts. If the past
is a filmic product of the present, so is the future; according to Deleuze,
memory is always in a “state of becoming.”
It takes little effort to translate this part of Deleuze’s theory into the
mediated memories model outlined in figure 2 (see Chapter 2). Applied to
the specificity of home movies, one could argue that the film apparatus is
inseparable from the individual who deploys the camera to articulate a
sense of connection between self and family. As a memory object, a home

movie changes meaning each time it is seen. The act of memory also in-
cludes the actual shooting of the movie; the later use of home movies and
video footage—even if unspecified—is already anticipated at the moment
of shooting. In addition, home movies are never simply found footage of
the past: each time they are reviewed or recycled, they are edited by the
brain. Moving images, first shot and later edited, project the intricate time-
movement of mental recollection so characteristic of the human mind; the
mind’s tendency to impact future remembrance is implicated in technolo-
gies of memory, particularly the movie camera. Deleuze’s philosophical re-
flections on memory and cinema stress the interdependent connections
between the functions of the brain/mind in the act of memory and the
technology/materiality of the memory object. Applying his theory to spe-
cific (fiction) films, Deleuze minutely analyzes how the brain is always in-
volved in articulating moving images produced by the cinema apparatus,
an apparatus that only works because the anticipation of mental images is
part of its technological script.
However, as we move into an age when the cinematic apparatus and
the video image are gradually replaced by the multimedia apparatus and
the virtual image, Deleuzian philosophy needs updating in several respects.
As Mark Hansen contends, processes of digitization and virtualization call
for a new concept of embodiment—the body’s relation to image and its
affects. Whereas Deleuze still accepts a distinction between perception and
simulation—between external and internal images that stir action or affec-
tion, converging into experience—Hansen argues that our bodies, brought
into contact with the digital image, experience the virtual through affect
and sensation rather than through techniques, forms, or aesthetics.7 Draw-
ing examples from digital art works and virtual reality environments,
Hansen counters Deleuze’s neuroaesthetics and “cinema of the brain”
with a concept in which “the brain is no longer external to the image and
is indeed no longer differentiated from an image at all.”8 Rather than talk-
ing about an affect caused by a technological (cinematic) apparatus, Hansen
considers the digital apparatus to be an integral part of a new embodied
experience. Digital technologies call for an approach to cinematic hind-
sight that privileges the bodily basis of vision; the mind, according to
Hansen, filters the information we receive to create images of the past, in-
stead of simply receiving images as preexisting technical forms.
Both Deleuze and Hansen agree that family portraits captured in

moving images are never simply retrospectives—found footage as relics of
the past—but they are complex constructions of mental projections and
technological substrates. Deleuze in particular pays little attention to the
sociocultural forces involved in filmic productions.9 And yet, it is pre-
cisely this triangle of forces that seems to account for the richness of
family movies as objects of cultural analysis. The social practice of (home)
moviemaking and the impact of conventional cultural forms on our un-
derstanding of moving images appear to play an equally constitutive role
in the construction of cinematic hindsight. A concrete example may help
illustrate both the relevance and shortcomings of this techno-embodied
perspective, instead arguing for the comprehension of movies as collabo-
rations of mind, machine, and culture.
It should come as no surprise to find that fiction films, in recent
years, have echoed a Deleuzian connection between brain and screen in
the configuration of human memory. Whereas movies such as Eternal Sun-
shine of the Spotless Mind and Memento, described in Chapter 2, capitalize
on confounding past and present in an individual’s mind, science-fiction
films such as The Matrix and Strange Days typically envision the potential
of media technologies to mix past and future memories.10 The advent of
digital technologies, and particularly virtual reality environments, inspires
the creation of virtual consciousness, allowing either a glimpse of the past
through the eyes of a former self (Strange Days) or offering an embodied
perspective on future events (The Matrix). In these movies, media tech-
nologies enable individuals to escape the constraints of the present, al-
lowing them to move effortlessly between past, present, and future.
Philosophical concepts articulated in science fiction films, in turn, help
shape our mental and technological constructs of memory. The function
of these movies is to “imagineer” what memory may look like in the
future. A projected collapse of the brain with technology, far from an inci-
dental concept, is a recurring trope in science fiction films.
One film that mingles a projection of memory’s future with an imag-
inative design of the home movie as a conflation of brain and screen is
Omar Naim’s The Final Cut (2004). The movie is staged in the unspecified
future, where the latest hit in home movie technology is the so-called Zoe
Eye Tech Implant: an invisible organic device implanted in the brain of a
fetus, equipping that recipient to shoot a lifetime of experiences through
the eyes—an audiovisual recording straight from the brain. The implanted
camera starts rolling the moment the fetus passes its mother’s birth canal,
and it is not removed until that person’s death. In Naim’s imagined soci-
ety, one out of five people carry an implant, often unwittingly, as parents
are not supposed to inform their children of this surprise until the chil-
dren turn twenty-one. The Zoe implant is one of the most precious gifts
a parent can donate to a child; it replaces the need for personal photo-
graphs or home movies because the eye camera offers a full and impecca-
ble registration of someone’s life. After the person’s death, the chip is
removed to be edited into a so-called rememorial, a ninety-minute film
reminiscent of a made-in-Hollywood biopic. The implant comes with a
new ritual: the “Re-Memory” is a commemorative gathering taking place
forty days after a person’s death at a cinema-alias-funeral parlor where the
feature-length retrospective of the deceased is premiered to an invited
audience.
The main character of The Final Cut is Alan Hakman (Robin
Williams), one of the best professional cutter’s of Re-Memory movies; his
job is to turn the lifetime reels, removed from the deceased’s brain, into con-
ventional audio-visual productions, a sort of edited and anthologized digest
presented as the ultimate obituary. In the main plot line, Hakman is asked
to perform the “final cut” on the life movie of Charles Bannister, one of Eye
Tech’s attorneys who recently died. His widow Jennifer instructs Hakman
to edit her husband’s implant footage into a glossy retrospective, honoring
the principles “family, community, career” and thus carefully omitting any
scenes that would compromise his public image. As all cutters do, Hakman
betrays the cutter’s code proscribing to refrain from manipulation, instead
accommodating the wishes of surviving relatives. While sorting through
Bannister’s life files, the editor is not only confronted with dubious money
laundering schemes and fraud, but he also witnesses scenes in which the
attorney commits adultery and incest with his daughter Isabel. Hakman
discretely erases all compromising evidence from the deceased’s ultimate
portrait: the delete function turns out to be the cutter’s most important Re-
Memory tool. The result is a sanitized life in review, a public version of a
family man with a brilliant career. Although every Re-Memory visitor un-
derstands the subtext of this genre, the dark side of Bannister’s life remains
invisible to the public eye. The ultimate home movie is everything but a
true memory of the deceased’s life. Like any film, this one is a mediated
construction rather than a concatenation of pure registrations of authentic

past events; after all, the editor defines both the choice and order of scenes.
By definition, the retrospective captures the idealized family, and by remov-
ing painful episodes of adultery and incest, the family’s memory is literally
cleansed of its troubled past.
Director Naim takes Deleuze’s idea of the brain as screen very liter-
ally: the eye is the camera, and the home movie is allegedly shot straight
from the visual cortex. The theory of the movie camera coinciding with
the mind’s eye and the screen with the brain suggests the inseparability
of thought processes from the technological substrates enabling their
manifestation—what Deleuze touts as cinema’s “psychomechanics.”11 The
vector of time is an arrow bent into a circle: projections of the past become
memories of the future, and vice versa. Naim’s movie conveys a philo-
sophical reflexivity based on Deleuze’s contention that cinema is not about
concepts but is itself a conceptual tool, raising questions such as: What
are the new forces unleashed by memory once it becomes an organic
biological-mechanical construct? What are the ethical and social conse-
quences of eye implants?12 Updated to Hansen’s conjecture of digital tech-
nologies, Naim underscores the bodily basis of vision by making external
and internal views indistinguishable. We constantly switch from the
mind of Hakman, whose filtering of information is clearly tainted by his
own memory, to images “shot” by Bannister’s chip implant—the very
images Hakman is supposed to filter. Instead of simply receiving images
as pre-existing technical forms, mind-images and movie-images are mutu-
ally constitutive, consequently questioning the ultimate reliability of bio-
engineered vision.
However, the convergence of brain and technology is not enough to
account for this intricate construction of hindsight. The Final Cut attests to
the idea that, despite the merger of eye and camera, the ultimate manipu-
lating power of memory lies neither in the brain nor in the technology nor
in a combination of both but in the interaction between brain, technology,
and culture. With the help of advanced media technologies, every Re-
Memory made up of mind-footage is modeled after the accepted cultural
form of an audiovisual obituary, a life-in-review movie that is inevitably
modeled after the conventional Hollywood format. In fact, the brain is the
camera shooting the movie, but that movie is ultimately a product of cul-
ture. Capturing and projecting the family, even in the futuristic high-tech
bio-digital society of science fiction, remains the work of an editor whose

final cut is subject to the norms and social codes of the present. As becomes
eminently clear from Naim’s movie, mind and brain may fuse with tech-
nologies of memory, but all mental and technological constructs of past
family life are always also social and cultural constructs.
What we learn from this film is that the construction of hindsight is
arduously interwoven with dominant social and moral codes, anchoring
futuristic extrapolations of techno-engineered memory in hegemonic cul-
tural forms. The malleability of memories over time is not in the least fa-
cilitated by the technologies enabling their conception and later revision.
In a way, technologies of memory facilitate the flexible interweaving of
past, present, and future that our minds proffer. We wield camcorders and
home videos to construct a pleasing future memory of our family’s past
life, thus anticipating the editing function as a feature of the mind as
much as a feature of technology. And we wield film cameras to construct a
version of memory that accounts for the conventional use of home record-
ing technologies, while concurrently reflecting on the potential formative
power of future technologies. At first sight, Naim’s science fiction movie
offers a straightforward illustration of Deleuze’s theory of embodied mem-
ory as an amalgamation of mind and technology. Closer analysis yields the
inescapable significance of cultural forms as constitutive elements in the
construction of cinematic hindsight.
The “Home Mode” as a Techno-social Construct
Whereas Deleuze and Hansen focus on the merger of brain/mind

with technology as the preeminent junction to study the meaning of mov-
ing images, cultural theorists find themselves more comfortable at the in-
tersection of technology with sociocultural forces. In his excellent study of
the home video, James Moran theorizes the historical and technological
specificity of what he calls the “home mode”—the place of home movies
or home videos in a gradually changing media landscape.13 Rather than
identifying the home movie or home video according to its ontological purity
or as a technical apparatus, Moran rethinks the home mode as a historically
changing effect of technological, social, and cultural determinations—a set
of discursive codes that helps us negotiate the meaning of individuals in re-
sponse to their shared social environment.
The home mode is not simply a technological device deployed in a

private setting (the family), but it is defined by Moran as an active mode
of media production representing everyday life: “a liminal space in which
practitioners may explore and negotiate the competing demands of their
public, communal, and private personal identities.”14 The home mode
articulates a generational continuity over time, providing a format for
communicating family legends and stories, yet it concurrently adapts to
technological transformations, such as the introduction of new types of
equipment: first the movie camera, later the video, and more recently the
digital camcorder. Moreover, the home mode is affected by social trans-
formations such as the position of family in Western society. Moran
poignantly sums up: “While we use these media audiovisually to represent
family relations to ourselves, we also use family relations discursively to
represent these media to each other.”15 The changing depictions of fami-
lies on public screens, most notably television, are part and parcel of the
sociocultural transformation he is trying to sketch.
It is imperative to understand the evolution of the home mode and its
technological and sociocultural constituents, because without recognizing
these historical roots it will be difficult to account for its specificity as we en-
ter the digital age. From the early beginnings of film, consumer technolo-
gies such as movie cameras have been drafted into the depiction of family
life, whether as tools for idealization or as tools for inquiry and criticism.
Although quite a few studies have been written on home movies in relation
to the history of film or photography, few scholars have paid attention to
the transformation of technologies in conjunction with changing social and
cultural patterns of family life. Patricia Zimmerman explains, in her classic
study of amateur film in the twentieth century, how the invention of in-
creasingly lighter cameras seduced ever more parents into chronicling their
children, thus providing a visual homage to the familialism of postwar
America.16 Zimmerman and other film historians tend to uncritically trans-
pose the technological and ideological effects of the home movie as an in-
strument for promoting the ideal nuclear family in the 1950s onto home
modes prevalent in later decades.17 Moran, by contrast, convincingly ar-
gues that in subsequent decades the conventions of family representation
changed in conjunction with home movie technologies.
The growth of the suburban family in the 1950s is inextricably in-
tertwined with the emergence of television and of home movie cameras as
domestic symbols of individual wealth and social cocooning. As television

entered the private homes of the 1950s, images of screen families started
to fill living rooms across America and shaped the concept of the nuclear
family unit. Not coincidentally, many televised families, such as those
portrayed in Leave It to Beaver or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,
conflated real life and screen reality.18 Capturing one’s own family in the
1950s and 1960s often meant to imitate the idealized family as shown on
TV. The possession of an 8 mm camera in itself signaled the newly ac-
quired material wealth that was prominently showed off both in televi-
sion series and home movies of these decades. A parent’s home movie
camera functioned as a confirmation of intimate family life, an amateur
production that defined itself against the increasingly popular public im-
ages of families on television; home recordings also served to entertain the
family in their present. As objects of memory, home movies feature a
family’s life as a concatenation of ritual highlights, from birthday parties
to first steps and from weddings to graduation ceremonies. The ability to
record everyday events, to construct family life as it was, signified the in-
dividual consumer’s power to model bliss and happiness after the ideal
shown on television.
As the 8 mm movie cameras of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to the
video cameras of the 1970s and 1980s, the style and content of the home
mode changed accordingly, eclipsing the hegemonic portrayal of idealized
families even if never replacing it.19 In terms of its material apparatus, the
light-weight video camera equipped the amateur user with an unobtrusive
instrument to record everyday life. Video’s ontology, unlike film, was based
not in chemical but rather in electronic image processes, allowing for an
unmediated display of moving images on the television screen. Video cul-
ture, as British media theorist Sean Cubitt contends, promoted the “meta-
physics of presence”: a documentary style that favored the inconspicuous
presence of a camera as a fly on the wall, as if the filmmaker were part of
the furniture.20 It would be far too simple to reduce the vérité style of an
era to the effect of a newly introduced media technology, but it is certainly
no coincidence that video provided a way for capturing ordinary people’s
lives as they were in addition to the prevailing idealized way of recording
them in the earlier home movies.
The home video became a favored instrument for recording quotid-
ian reality, even if this reality did not live up to the traditions of family
portraiture. A light-weight video camera lends itself much more easily

than the 8 mm camera to unexpected and unobtrusive shootings; a family
row or a sibling secretly stealing a cookie no longer evaded the discrete eye
of the camera. And that new apparatus seemed particularly suitable to
record everyday family life that was quickly changing in the wake of larger
social and cultural transformations. A political climate with waxing protests
against established norms of patriotism and paternalism defined this new
generation of young adults; large numbers vocally opposed their parent’s
values about class, race, gender roles, sex, and ethnic identity. The nuclear
family became a contested concept, as a new generation paved the way for
sexual liberation, emancipation, and social diversity.21 Home video de-
fined itself in opposition to home movies as a mode subversive to the nu-
clear family ideal epitomized by 1950s home movies. In addition, video
also came to define itself in opposition to television as a tool for re-
belling against mainstream, collective values: community activists and gay
and women’s liberation movements used this medium to spread alterna-
tive concepts of identity and lifestyle to counter homogeneous mass media
images.
The shift from idealized families and home movies to real families and
home video also prominently figures in the production of domestic televi-
sion series in the 1970s and 1980s. Images of family conveyed by typical
postwar television series, and prolonged by series such as The Brady Bunch
and The Partridge Family, were gradually supplemented by portrayals of less
ideal and more realistic families, such as the Bunkers in Norman Lear’s pop-
ular All in the Family, which first aired in 1971. Frequent confrontations
between Archie Bunker and his son-in-law Michael (“Meathead”) played
out contemporary generational conflicts over political convictions, gender
politics, and race relations in a society characterized by upheaval and rap-
idly changing norms. And yet, television never single-authored the hege-
monic identity of the American family, just as the home video never
uniquely covered the private lives of relatives. Television and home video
mutually shaped the home mode in this historical time frame.22
There is no better example to illustrate the entanglement of television
and home video in this era than the PBS series An American Family. A new
genre, namely, family portrait documentary, was coming of age in the early
1970s when young filmmakers started to experiment with the new tech-
niques of cinema vérité.23 An American Family, a twelve-part documentary
series that premiered on January 11, 1973, captured seven months in the life
of a real California family—Pat and Bill Loud and their five teenaged chil-
dren, Lance, Kevin, Grant, Delilah, and Michele. Producer Craig Gilbert
and filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond followed each member of the
household at a turbulent time of their lives: the Louds’ marriage ended in a
divorce; the oldest son, Lance, announced he was gay; and the family unit
was literally splitting up. A PBS announcement described this new televi-
sion format as it invited viewers to “meet TV’s first real family tonight and
share their lives in the 11 weeks to follow.”24 The immensely popular series
struck a chord with the American audience, as the Louds’ turmoil mirrored
quite a few experiences that real families encountered in this decade of
change. The center was not holding—to echo Yeats’s famous dictum—and
television was recording its falling apart.
Because the series itself, as a unique and revolutionary media phe-
nomenon, has received due scholarly attention, here I concentrate on the
construction of the home mode in An American Family, because it exem-
plifies the struggle with codes inscribed in the home movies of the 1950s
in favor of the newer, more immediate style of home video and cinema
vérité.25 An American Family subscribed to this new style as it suited the
function of capturing family life as it is. In the words of the PBS announce-
ment: “The Louds are not actors. They had no scripts. They simply lived.
And were filmed.”26 Film crews that followed the Louds made themselves
unobtrusive and their presence went almost unnoticed by the Loud family
members, even while recording the couple’s rows over Bill’s extramarital
affairs and their decision to file for divorce. Lance, the oldest son living in
New York, received a light-weight Portapak recorder to document his own
observations in addition to being filmed. This direct cinema style sharply
contrasted the nostalgic photographs and home movie reels edited into the
series as a way to visualize the Louds’ past family life. As Ruoff explains in
his reconstruction of the series: “The home movies and family photo-
graphs themselves represent an important detour from the observational
focus on images and sounds recorded in the present. The Louds’ home
movies chronicle festive occasions such as Thanksgiving dinners and baby
Lance taking his first steps. These nostalgic recollections suggest happier
times, offering a powerful contrast to the Louds’ contemporary lives.”27
Those incremental snippets of home movies and photographs not only sig-
nify life as it was for the Louds, but they also serve as a confirmation of
collective memory of the 1950s as an era of happiness and peaceful family

lives supported by ceremonial, ritual signposts and cemented in a transpar-
ent social structure with distinct roles for each family member. The camera
registering life as it is stands in opposition to the previous home mode in
both style and content, as it articulates the era’s crumbling normative
ideals by fixating the camera on the other side of family life: an emanci-
pating housewife, a homosexual son, an unfaithful husband. The Louds’
new mediated memories are recorded in a different fashion—using video
and light-weight cameras—because the family can no longer live up to the
ideal that was previously constructed through the lens of the home
movies.
The oppositional home modes featured in An American Family are
clearly in dialogue with its fictional counterparts on television, both conven-
tional and more subversive sitcoms such as All in the Family. But whereas the
fictional generational conflicts played out by the Bunkers are filled with ex-
plicit conflicts concerning sexuality, politics (Vietnam), identity, and race,
the confrontations in America’s “first real family on television” are much less
ideological, only casually alluding to pressing political events or social de-
bates raging at that time. Nevertheless, the realist record of a family falling
apart, even if this reality was presented in the condensed and edited format
of an eleven-part series, became a milestone in the history of American tele-
vision. What attracted the audience at the time was most likely the way in
which the Louds explored and negotiated the competing demands of their
personal identities and prevailing family values in front of the public eye.
The documentary camera, long before the introduction of so-called reality
TV in the 1990s, became a constitutive element in the shaping of family life
and personal identity.28 Capturing the family, as a scheme for understanding
and remembering, became integral to family life as a means to negotiate no-
tions of individuality and togetherness, of deviation and belonging.
As poignantly put forward by Moran, every new media apparatus
affects practices of production in conjunction to ideologies of home that
reconstitute the family as a discursive domestic space. Now, if we extend
this thesis to the last two decades—an era in which camcorders and digi-
tal equipment came into vogue—how does the home mode change along
with notions of screened families? In the digital era, screened family life is
paradigmatically defined by the ubiquitous presence of surveillance cam-
eras and privately operated webcams. Whereas fly-on-the-wall cinema
techniques set the standards for arresting reality in the era of analog
video, the webcam may currently count as the symbolic catching hook for
life as it is. A naturalistic mode of filming gives way to a surveillance
mode of recording: fixed webcams cover an unwitting subject’s move-
ments. Even when the subjects are aware of the cameras’ presence, there is
no actual intervention from a camera crew. This mode of surveillance is
not only frequently employed in public areas, where cameras control the
movements of passengers, but with the webcam installed in a home, it is
also rapidly becoming a common means of self-exposure on the World
Wide Web.29
The digital mode seems to better suit contemporary fractured no-
tions of family and more prominent individualism. Extending the home
video logic of the 1980s—the real family captured in their rebellion against
normative domestic values—the camcorder of the 1990s allots even more
power to individual users to construct their idiosyncratic views of family.30
As Moran observes, families in the 1990s and the twentieth-first century
are no longer “natural” units: they are “families we choose”—domestic
relationships between individuals construed as family ties.31 The family
we choose is the family that chooses to film itself as a unit, using an in-
sider’s perspective and camera, giving each member a direct voice in his
or her representation. New conventions of television programming also
define what constitutes a real family: a number of individuals who volun-
tarily move into a house, succumb to a regime of created conditions, and
are continuously monitored by numerous surveillance cameras. The Big
Brother effect, in a way, is the televised, formatted counterpart of circuited
webcams installed in a family’s home, continuously beaming pictures of
real family life on the Internet.
Let us look at one example of a turn-of-the-millennium webcast fea-
turing a regular family and compare it with a typical television series inte-
grating the surveillance home mode into its program format. The webcam
site of the Jacobs family from Alta Loma, a Los Angeles suburb, is one of
thousands of sites featuring regular family life on the Internet these days.32
Consisting of two parents and seven children, the Jacobs keep up an ex-
tensive home page where each member presents him- or herself in pictures
and texts. The site presents an interesting mixture of the 1950s idealized
family–style pictures and the digital surveillance home mode. When turned
on, the webcam beams live footage from the living room: the children
joking, the mother showing things to the webcam, the father leaning
backward in his office chair.33 The webcam footage seems to verify the real
happiness professed in the website’s texts and still pictures, as if saying,
“Look, this happiness is authentic; you can watch us live from our home,
every day.”
Interestingly, the Jacobs family is literally made possible through the
Internet. On their home page, they introduce themselves as follows: “We
are the Jacobs Family. Clarence and DeShawn were married on November
27, 1999. We met on the internet [sic] in August of 1999, fell in love, and
were married in Las Vegas. When me met, DeShawn had her son Dustin,
and Clarence had Jennifer, CJ, Kyle, and Davey. Since then, we have
‘added’ Jarrett and Julia. A true ‘Brady Bunch’ as we are sometimes called.”34
The Jacobs, as we can see and read, are a typical postmodern fractured
family: DeShawn writes about her birth mother and the search for her bi-
ological father, daughter Jennifer lives with her mother and stepfather in
Arizona, and Clarence’s sons are getting used to their new half brother and
half sister. We can safely assume digital technology not only facilitates but
actually enables family life for the Jacobs: without the webcam, their
daughter Jenny in Arizona could not participate in everyday life, and with-
out the Internet, DeShawn would not have been able to contact her bio-
logical father. In short, the Jacobs construct their “bunch” through digital
media, while at the same time (and by the same means) they also beam this
family’s domestic bliss to a potentially worldwide audience.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the Jacobses’ favorite pastime, as we can
read on their site, is watching reality series on television. One of the more
popular domestic reality series featuring in the early twenty-first century
is The Osbournes. Ozzie Osbourne, once the notorious band leader of the
heavy metal group Black Sabbath; his wife and manager Sharon; and their
teenage children Kelly and Jack, according to MTVs announcement, al-
low surveillance cameras to continuously peek into their private lives,
and that footage is turned into “an addictive new docu-series.”35 Even if
the announcement promises the series to be a continuous window onto the
lives of a famed rock star and his family, the net result is a traditional tele-
vision format. On the one hand, The Osbournes deploys technological de-
vices to create a sense of reality: furtive handicam footage is alternated by
fixed steadicam shots, which are occasionally used by a family member to
stage an intimate tête-à-tête with the television audience. On the other
hand, the MTV docu-series is edited into an episodic format that undeni-
ably reminds us of conventional genres—in this case a hybrid of a domes-
tic sitcom and a video clip.36 The docu-reels in the television series bring
the traditional format of the domestic sitcom (and traditional family
values) up to the current technical standards of reality capturing.37 Natu-
rally, the home mode and family concept featured in reality series like The
Osbournes inspire many family webcam sites.
Following the social constructivist logic of James Moran, audiovisual
representations of the Bunkers, the Louds, the Osbournes, and the Jacobs,
reveal the interlocking of home movie technologies and cultural forms
such as (reality) television series. In contrast to Deleuze and Hansen, Moran
considers filmed family portraits to be technical substrates interwoven with
sociocultural norms and conventions. While (cognitive) philosophers show
little interest in the sociocultural component of converging brains-cum-
apparatuses, cultural theorists such as Moran tend to disregard mental-
cognitive functions when describing the home mode. And yet, I think we
need a merger of both approaches in order to fully comprehend the intri-
cateness of current filmic constructions of hindsight, especially now that
digital technologies prompt us to develop a renewed awareness of medi-
ated memory as a fabric woven of cognitive, technological, and cultural
threads.
Capturing a Family’s Past in the Digital Age
As stated earlier, our remembrance of family is prone to constant re-

vision; home movies or videos shape and feed our memories, as filmic re-
constructions insipidly coil with mental projections of family. In the digital
age, it becomes increasingly easy to refurbish old footage into technically
smooth productions and revivify former memories while retroactively ad-
justing them to fit our present knowledge and norms. Indeed, digital video
in many ways destabilizes the supposed naturalness of analog video, as
an emerging digital infrastructure shifts the center of gravity from simply
shooting to complete processing and from image-sound recordings to mul-
timedia productions. Today’s computer hardware and software allows for
affordable near-professional standards of editing and full-fledged produc-
tions, complete with subtitles, sound, and sophisticated montage, all in our
private homes. Burned onto a DVD, the family’s summer vacation in Cuba
is now an audio-visual product that may compete technically and stylis-

tically with travel programs featured on television. In addition, tradi-
tional image-sound recordings of home movies and videos increasingly
yield to multimedia productions integrating documents, pictures, texts,
(moving) images, and links to webpages. Multimedia productions on DVD
no longer privilege the chronologically ordered visual narrative prescribing
a viewer’s reading but promote browsing through a library of connected
files and (sub)texts. The digital cultural form breaks with inscribed codes
of sequential episodes, allowing past and present images—even if shot in
different technical modes—to merge in a smooth media product.
New technological devices, such as the digital camcorder, the World
Wide Web, the webcam, the DVD, and the compact disc are of course not
in and of themselves triggers for new mental concepts. A medium is both
a material and a social construct, whose metaphors and models provide a
horizon for decoding present knowledge.38 Digital tools appear to give in-
dividuals more autonomy over their (multi)mediated portrayals of a
family’s past: mentally, by projecting remembered family history onto a
new media product; technically, by editing old footage into recon-
structed versions of family life; and culturally, by weaving in fragments of
public footage (such as newsreels) with private portrayals. The emergence
of a digital type of home mode does not make the filmic discourse of re-
membered family life more self-evident. Contrarily, because of their versa-
tile and manipulative nature, moving images may easily become part of a
dispute over disparaging versions of what family life was like. In watching
contemporary (digital) reconstructions of family life, we need to account
for at least three different levels of analytical awareness: First, we need to
acknowledge how camera perspective and editing always imply an “I”—an
individual imposing a particular view on a family’s past. Second, we need
to distinguish between various time levels implied in historical home modes;
movie or video reels shot in previous eras beget a new illocutionary force
when integrated in digital productions. And third, we need to remember
the social codes and cultural contexts of historical and contemporary home
modes while watching a production of screened family life. In the follow-
ing analysis of a contemporary documentary, I demonstrate the signifi-
cance of each level.
The documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003) confronts viewers
with the powerful role of various home mode technologies in authenticating
and reshaping family life; director Andrew Jarecki’s production is not just a
documentary; the DVD-version, which I focus on here, renders a much
more comprehensive view of the harrowing family saga he is trying to tell.39
The Friedmans are a typical middle-class Jewish American family living in
Great Neck, Long Island, where Arnold and Elaine, both into their fifties,
have raised three sons: David, Seth, and Jesse. A retired schoolteacher,
Arnold teaches computer classes for kids in his home basement and is helped
by his youngest son Jesse, then eighteen. In November 1987 they are both ar-
rested on charges of repeated sexual abuse of boys who attended their
classes. The police raid heralds months of denigrating incarceration, release
on bail, a media frenzy, a neighborhood witch-hunt, and—within the Fried-
mans’ home—family rows over the best strategy to keep Arnold and Jesse
out of jail. The family is torn apart by conflicting emotions of guilt, doubt,
suspicion, and loyalty; David chooses the side of his father and brother and
resents his mother Elaine, who is in more than one way the family’s outsider.
She is never convinced of Arnold’s innocence, as he has lied to her in the
past about his pedophilic inclinations and molestations. When her endearing
attempts to save Jesse, by urging both father and son to plead guilty, inad-
vertently backfire, her oldest son David bitterly turns against her. In separate
hearings, Arnold and later his youngest son enter their guilty pleas and are
sentenced to substantial jail time; Arnold commits suicide in 1995 while im-
prisoned, and Jesse is released in 2001 after having served thirteen years of
his sentence.
Although the events unfolding in retrospect before the viewers’ eyes
are dramatic by themselves, it is the hypertextual nature of this documen-
tary and particularly the DVD that prevents the story from turning either
sensationalist or partisan. Rather than following a chronological narrative
logic, the documentary relies on the viewer’s ability to identify three dif-
ferent technical types of film and to intertwine the distinct historical and
contemporary home modes to which they refer: the home movies shot by
Arnold in the 1950s through 1970s; David’s home video footage recorded
after the arrest in 1987; and interviews taped in the present by Jarecki.
For starters, the documentary features home movies and family
pictures shot by Arnold Friedman primarily in the 1950s through the 1970s.
These images are in perfect accordance with the conventions of home
movies at the time: happy scenes of birthday parties, beach fun, and fam-
ily vacations. Filming appears to be a family tradition—a narcissistic way
of preserving the Friedmans’ heritage on tape—as exemplified by an early

1940s recording that Grandfather Friedman made of his six-year-old
daughter, performing as a ballerina in front of the camera. We learn from
Elaine’s voice-over that, several months after shooting this film, Arnold’s
sister died of lead poisoning. The joyful pictures of Arnold’s childhood
sharply contrast Elaine’s commentary that her husband admitted to having
repeatedly raped his younger brother Howard while sleeping in the same
bed with him. Howard, interviewed in the present by Jarecki, desperately
denies any recollection of his brother’s self-confessed acts (“There is noth-
ing there”). This incongruity between the ideal family life featured in the
home movies and remembered reality cues the viewer to be suspicious when
David Friedman, in turn, also claims to have nothing but rosy memories
of his youth. His memory is corroborated by Arnold’s home movies of his
three sons playing in harmony with their father, having fun, and joking
among themselves. Clearly, the home movies authenticate idyllic family life,
but due to the comments by various family members, the viewer can only
doubt their status as verification documents.
The second type of authentic footage stems from David’s deploy-
ment of the video camera. Honoring the family’s tradition, David had just
bought a video camera in 1987, when the family started to fall apart fol-
lowing the arrest and the subsequent trial. In line with the conventions of
cinema vérité and home video of the 1970s and 1980s, the camera keeps
rolling as siblings engage in heated disputes at the dining table.40 Mother
Elaine often begs to turn off the camera, but the men clearly hold sway
over the camera and ignore her requests. David and Jesse take turns in film-
ing family rows but also record remarkable moments of frivolous acting—a
sense of humor that obviously binds father and sons. The video camera,
evidently deployed to capture life as it is, turns out to be just as unreliable
as the old home movie camera capturing life as it was. Both home modes
record a version of reality that later paradoxically serves as a desired bench-
mark for truth—whether this truth is a memory of ideal family life or a
memory of a family at the verge of total disintegration because of false
allegations.
The third type of footage, on-camera interviews conducted by Jarecki,
reframes and unsettles the documentary evidence offered by pieces from the
Friedmans’ family archive.41 Interviews with family members (Arnold’s
brother Howard; Arnold’s wife Elaine and their sons David and Jesse, but
not their son Seth, who declined to be interviewed) are supplemented by a

number of interviews with people who were at that time involved in the
Friedmans’ indictment: their former lawyers, police investigators, alleged
victims (then children, now adults, who both confirm and deny former
allegations), parents of alleged victims, and an investigative reporter who
wrote on the case. Mixing contemporary interviews with old news footage
and trial tapes, the filmmakers manage to demonstrate the many angles on
this case without ever privileging a single truth.
A condition for understanding the compilation of private reels is that
viewers recognize the various perspectives at work in this production, laid
in there by various family members who each try to steer and influence the
outcome of this memory product and thus define the meaning of what
happened to their family. The conundrum of slippery and quivering truth,
which is clearly present in the screen version of Capturing the Friedmans, is
even more palpable in the DVD version of the documentary. Needless to
say, digital equipment was instrumental in the seamless cross-editing of the
three (historical) types of recordings and in braiding together the various in-
dividual perspectives of the family members. Turning the movie into the
cultural format of a DVD—often including footage of the making of
scenes and evidentiary material—viewers assume the position of active co-
constructors of the story. The DVD includes many extras: full interviews
with witnesses for the prosecution, a family scrapbook with photos, more
home video footage, and news reels on the case. In addition, a second DVD
disc features coverage of the discussion after the New York premiere, where
many people involved in the case dispute each other’s versions of what hap-
pened to members of the Friedman family. And most significantly, the disc
contains a section where the viewer can read key documents, such as letters
from Arnold and a police inventory from a search of the Friedmans’ house.
As the extra documents become an integrated part of the puzzle, the viewer
is encouraged to sharpen his or her judgment by reading more evidence,
both to buttress the judge’s decision and to back up the family’s defense. In
fact, as director Jarecki suggests in an interview, the documentary serves as
“the trial that never was” (there were only hearings in front of a judge), and
the audience serves as a jury. From the puzzle of recordings, viewers ulti-
mately decide for themselves what happened to this family. The seamless
web of digitized documents weaves the family’s narrative into an open-
ended hypertext of possibilities: facts, testimonies, truths, and illusions.
And the documentary is extended on the Internet via a website that updates
its viewers on the continuous saga of the Friedman family. David and his
brother Jesse—now released from prison—try to get a retrial, on the basis
of Jarecki’s film (especially his interviews with witnesses), to prove their
father’s and Jesse’s innocence.
In line with Moran’s constructivist theory, technical and socio-
cultural codes codetermine the construction of family and our personal
and collective memory of it. Yet beyond this constructivist analysis, we
need to acknowledge that Capturing the Friedmans is also a coproduction
of mind and technology, involving both the reconstruction of past images
and the projection of future memories. Future construction of cinematic
hindsight is already inscribed at the moment of each home movie shoot-
ing, most notably when David Friedman, in the middle of the turmoil in
1988, takes up the video camera and turns it onto himself. Sitting on his
bed, and starts a monologue: “This is a private thing, you know . . . if you’re
not me, you’re not supposed to be watching this. This is between me and
me, between me now and me in the future.” In this scene, David is ad-
dressing himself in the future. Indeed, why make a video if there was no
intention of telling the family story someday, in some form? Another in-
stance illuminating the intentional inflection of future memories of the
family’s past comes in David’s response when director Jarecki asked him
why he started to film his family’s ordeal: “Maybe I shot the video tape so
I wouldn’t have to remember it myself. It’s a possibility. Because I don’t
really remember it outside the tape. Like your parents take pictures of you
but you don’t remember being there but just the photographs hanging on
the wall.” David cogently identifies the power of home video and home
movies as dual instruments for constructing and remembering family life.
On the one hand, he needs to record his own version of reality because his
father is going to jail and he does not want his own future children to re-
member their grandfather from newspaper pictures. On the other hand, he
wants to document his father’s and brother’s innocence. For instance,
David films Jesse while driving the car on his way to the courthouse where
Jesse intends to enter his guilty plea and hopes to obtain a reduced prison
sentence; David forces his brother to state his innocence when he asks,
“Did you do it, Jess?” to which Jesse solemnly responds, “I never touched a
kid.” This home video footage painfully contrasts the official court video
later in the documentary, showing a crying, remorseful Jesse admitting his
guilt to the judge—an act so convincing you no longer know which docu-
mentary evidence to believe. David and Jesse undoubtedly utilize the home
video to assert some measure of control over the events as they are unfold-
ing, perhaps in an attempt to avoid the family breaking up. But in doing
so, they consciously build their future defense—their personal memory of
a torment that was, in their version, uncalled for and unjust.
As we learn from Capturing the Friedmans, family is a production
of media as well as a product of memory, involving projection and re-
construction.42 Through our home modes, we construct the memories of
tomorrow, and via our technologies, we create projections of the past.
Family is remembered through mental, technological, and cultural means
of mediation, and every generation chooses its own tools to understand
and reframe that concept. If we want to understand how both media and
memory change along with notions of family, we may depart from Jarecki’s
improvised definition of memory in an interview included in the DVD:
“We think we can put our memories away in a box and we can go check on
them later and they will be the same, but they are never the same; they are
these electro-chemical bubbles that continue to bubble over time.” Mem-
ories never just are; they are always in the process of becoming. Our
memories of family evolve in conjunction with home movie technologies
and social codes and conventions; the real challenge of cultural analysis is
to recognize mediated memories’ historical complexity in order to explain
their contemporary relevance.
The Future of Home Movies
The home mode, besides referring to a screen registration and a social

construct, also involves a mental projection of family life. Remembered fam-
ilies are hence projected families—the simultaneous products of mind and
matter, of home and Hollywood. Therefore, the future of memory will be
determined as much by our tools for remembering as by our imagination.
Cultural forms—such as television series, documentaries, family websites,
science fiction movies—and the technical tools by which they are produced,
intimate from the minds that peruse and deploy them. Deleuze states that
cinema makes the invisible perceivable: in movies, past reconstructions
and future projections materialize into image sequences, which in turn
feed the viewer’s imagination. Cinema is a matter of “neurophysiological
vibrations” where the image “must produce a shock, a nerve wave which
gives rise to thought.”43 Memory moves along the axis of time: we are always
in a state of becoming. The cultural forms we produce, whether home
movies or science fiction films, are at once the result of, and input for, our
brain waves. The future of home movies is contingent on the shaping power
of past and present (filmic) productions—a shaping power that leads Hansen
to shift his focus to the “post-cinematic problem of framing information in
order to create (embodied) digital images.”44
That same circularity applies to the model’s horizontal axis relating
self to others. Individual family members produce and project home modes
while the home mode defines the concept of family as a social unit of be-
longing. What we call a home movie is in fact a coproduction in which
mental and cultural concepts of family and home constantly evolve, at
once revising old notions and anticipating new ones. Changing technolo-
gies (8 mm film, video, camcorders) are instrumental in the construction
of familial memories—images of how a family was, how it presents itself,
and how it wants to remember in the future. But the filmic perspective on
family is always embodied in individual minds: individual members whose
subjective pairs of eyes provide points of view that may at any time di-
verge or converge from siblings or other relatives. A home movie, like
memory itself, is not a self-evident filmic document that chronicles a fam-
ily’s past. Instead, by analyzing the discrepancies and tensions between its
various makers and producers, we acknowledge moving images stored in
our family archives to be input for—rather than output of—memory acts.
The meaning and impact of these documents may always be subject to fu-
ture reuse and reinterpretation, and hence our notion of family is never es-
tablished for once and for all.
With the advent of camcorders and advanced editing facilities on
personal computers, the awareness of moving images serving as input for
future memories is likely to become more prevalent. The rapidly growing
cultural practice to record one’s life audiovisually by means of ever more
digital instruments, combined with the innate inclination of human mem-
ory to select and reinterpret the past, presages the immanent expansion of
cinematic retrospection. Bolstering this trend is the growing interest of
people in multimedia productions that galvanize their remembrance after
death; like artists or actors, we want to secure an eternal place in the vir-
tual universe.45 Personal recordings of someone’s life increasingly resemble
fashionable television formats or conventional film genres. A perfect exam-

ple is the popularity of memorial videos as part of a funeral experience.
Businesses such as Life on Tape and Precious Memories offer the possibil-
ity to turn pictures and home video footage into a smooth five-minute eu-
logy to be screened during the memorial service or to be burned on a
DVD as a gift to family and friends after the funeral.46 Reminiscent of the
fictive re-memorial in The Final Cut, the five-minute eulogy proffers a
seamless blend of personal (moving) images into a standard format of pre-
selected soft-focused imagery, complemented by the deceased’s music of
choice. A recent trend to shoot and edit your own memorial movie while
still alive and edit the footage into a memorial video—which not coinci-
dentally resembles the biopics of public figures broadcast on television
upon their death—seems the next stage in the construction of cinematic
hindsight.
Mental projections, technical imagineering, and cultural imagina-
tions can hardly be analyzed as separate manifestations of audiovisual re-
membrance. Therefore, we need both Deleuze’s and Hansen’s concepts
exploring the construction of memory at the junction of mind and tech-
nology, as well as Moran’s constructivist theories analyzing the home
mode at the intersection of technology and culture. Cinematic construc-
tions of family-life-in-review are the result of concerted efforts to save and
shape our private pasts in a way that befits our publicly formatted present
and that steers our projected futures. Combining (cognitive) philosophical
with social constructivist perspectives and cultural theory, we will be bet-
ter equipped to understand future constellations of home modes as the
multifarious products of mind, technology, and culture.
7
From Shoebox to Digital

Memory Machine
An old friend recently admitted, with a sense of understatement,

that the size of his personal digital collection has outpaced his ability to
keep track of its contents. Since acquiring a digital photo camera and a scan-
ner in 1996, he has taken, stored, and scanned well over a hundred thou-
sand pictures of his daily life, work, and family. His collection of DVDs
and audio files also faces the fate of infinite expansion due to the increas-
ing availability of downloads. Combined with occasional camcorder activ-
ity and heavy Internet use, the act of recording and storing files, images,
audio, and data absorbs nearly all of his spare time. Space is no longer an
actual or virtual constraint, because only my friend’s prerecorded movies
on DVDs are still stored as material artifacts on the shelves, and computer
RAM has become relatively inexpensive. His proposal to transfer the fam-
ily’s entire collection of old photographs and videotapes onto digital media
met resistance from his partner who is attached to the touch and feel of
analog products. In addition, digitization confronted my friend with issues
of time and order: time to enjoy and relive recorded cultural and personal
moments, while constantly engaged in capturing and storing the newest
and latest experience; and order to allow the retrieval of specific moments,
as the danger of getting lost in his multimedial repository was growing by
the day.
Previous chapters illustrated how the gradual takeover of analog
by digital technologies has impacted various forms of personal cultural
From Shoebox to Digital Memory Machine 149
memory; this chapter focuses on the accumulation, storage, and retrieval

of digital recordings. Multimedia technologies offer new opportunities in
the everyday lives of people but also impose new complexities; with ever-
expanding memory capacities, the computer seems to become a giant stor-
age and processing facility for recording and retrieving bits of life. As more
people enjoy the pleasures of digital equipment, many of them, like my
friend, also acknowledge the problems that come with new technology,
such as handling exploding quantities of personal data. Although we tend
to attribute both the bliss and dilemmas of expanding memory collections
to digitization, they are neither completely new nor uniquely related to the
computer age.
History has given rise to a number of fantasies imagining all-
encompassing solutions to the fallibility of human memory. Since early
modernity, people have tried to imagine and invent memory machines
that could remedy two basic shortcomings of the human brain: its inabil-
ity to systematically record and store every single experience in our lives, as
well as the brain’s incapacity to retrieve these experiences unchanged at
any later moment in time. Fantasies such as Vannevar Bush’s memex are
based on such mechanical notion of memory, aiming for ubiquitous record-
ing and accurate retrieval of recorded documents.
Historical blueprints of memory machines were premised on static
models of human memory, so it will be interesting to see whether contem-
porary designs account for more recent insights in the dynamic nature of
memory. Commercial ventures are quick to provide digital alternatives to
familiar analog forms, such as digital photo albums, weblogs, and audio
software, facilitating the storage and retrieval of personal files on the com-
puter. Understandably, marketers tend to focus on digital products that
assume memory to be a locus of retention—a library or archive. Software
engineers, working for both commercial developers and public research in-
stitutions, have recently started to address the question of comprehensive
memory storage by designing digital tools that may accommodate large
quantities and varieties of personal digital files. Four such projects are ana-
lyzed in more detail in this chapter. Whereas some projects simply prom-
ise to solve the shoebox problem, others aim at designing completely new
systems of memory storage and retrieval; yet others predict that their soft-
ware and hardware will revolutionize our very ability to remember. De-
spite their bold claims, it is surprising to find how most projects adhere to
150 From Shoebox to Digital Memory Machine
the mechanical logic espoused by Bush and regard the brain and the ma-
chine (memory and media) to be ontologically distinct entities.
Because a main thesis of this book is to show the mutual shaping of
human cognitive memory and media technologies in everyday cultural
contexts, I address the questions of how new digital memory machines
may affect the nature of our recollections and the process of remember-
ing and, vice versa, how a connectionist model of human memory and its
recycling mechanism influence the conceptualization of new tools. The
last section of this chapter argues that networked computers serve less as
repositories and more as agents of change. Digital storage-retrieval facil-
ities, such as search engines, are not merely new metaphors that mold
our concepts of memory; they actually define the performative nature of
memory. Identifying three major types of transformation—digitization,
multimediatization and googlization—I argue these developments are in-
tegrated in the ways we store, retrieve, and adjust memories in the course
of living.
Fantasies of a Universal Memory Machine
Fantasies of the perfect memory machine—a machine that stores

everything and keeps its items systematically ordered in immaculate
condition—have always accompanied the invention of new media tools; the
age of modernity gave rise to a number of technologies heralding broader
social and cultural transformations. As Australian media sociologist Scott
McQuire points out, the split of living memories from so-called artificial or
technological memory, first made possible by the invention of writing, en-
gendered dreams of complete recordings as well as systematic orderings
and the retrieval of lived experiences.1 Both the German philosopher-
mathematician Gottfried W. Leibnitz and the English mathematician
Charles Babbage are credited with visions of mechanized memory tools,
which in hindsight are seen as early precursors of the computer.2 Yet the
most famous visionary of the modern memory machine is undoubtedly
Vannevar Bush, former director of the American Office of Scientific Re-
search and Development, whose fantasies had more than a little impact on
the ideas of contemporary engineers and scientific communities.3
In his famous essay “As We May Think,” published in 1945, Bush ex-
presses his fear that society will soon be bogged down by an explosive
growth of specialized publications, and he urges scientists and engineers to

turn to the massive task of making our bewildering stock of knowledge
more orderly and accessible.4 Placing himself in the tradition of Leibnitz
and Babbage, who both envisioned extensions of the mind in the form of
calculating and arithmetical machines, Bush commits himself to designing
a memory machine that enables the storage and retrieval of various types
of records: documents, photographs, film, television programs, and sound
and speech recordings. His essay contains descriptions of imagined record-
ing devices, including the Cyclops Camera (“Worn on forehead, it would
photograph anything you see and want to record. Film would be devel-
oped at once by dry photography”) and a vocoder (“a machine which
could type when talked to”).5 The first invention is reminiscent of the Zoe
Eye Tech Implant, the science-fiction device described in Chapter 6,
whereas the vocoder is now a successful commercial product also known as
speech recognition software. But Bush’s essay is most famous for the pre-
diction of a new type of machine allowing humankind to avoid repetitive
memory tasks and thus make room for more creative thought. Analogous
to the idea of calculating machines, Bush suggests the memex: “a device in
which an individual stores all his books, records, communications, and
which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and
flexibility.”6 An essential feature of the memex is its ability to automati-
cally select and retrieve every stored item swiftly and efficiently.
Bush’s memex fantasy has been hailed as the greatest vision in antici-
pation of the computer age, but it has also been criticized for its ideological
undercurrents of “pioneerism” and “frontierism.”7 For the purpose of my
argument, however, I am less concerned with Bush’s general ideas about sci-
ence and progress and more interested in his assumptions about the rela-
tionship between the human brain and the memory machine. He proposes
to model his memex device after the human brain in order to artificially du-
plicate the mental process of memory retrieval, thus relieving the brain
from a number of repetitive tasks. Conventional storage and retrieval sys-
tems, which classify data alphabetically or numerically and in which infor-
mation is found by tracking it down through subclasses and indexing, are
cumbersome and counterintuitive. According to Bush, the human mind
operates by association and so should memory machines. Note that the
mind is both a model and a metaphor for the machine—two separate enti-
ties connected figuratively. In the history of information technology up to
the digital age, the brain has been frequently invoked as a source of meta-
phorical imagery, mirroring the frequent use of (media) technologies in
neurobiological and cognitive circles, as described in the previous chapter.8
Bush’s concept of the memory machine is both mechanical and para-
doxical. Mechanical because he presumes an unambiguous vector between
technology and the human mind: the memex ought to function as a human
mind. Memory, to his regret, is fallible (“transitory”) and therefore, a ma-
chine should take over part of the brain’s function to prevent amnesia due
to information overload. Ideas, memories, and thoughts are stored in docu-
ments or other recordings, and these recordings should be randomly (“asso-
ciatively”) retrievable. When talking about data, Bush equates bits of
information to ideas, memories, and thoughts that can be put away in a
repository and be pulled out in random order. However, retrieval of docu-
ments from a database and retrieval of memories from a human brain are
fundamentally different processes with very distinctive goals. Documents or
recordings can be stored in a database, and we want them to be there, un-
changed, as we retrieve them and subject them to (re)interpretation; mem-
ories are never unchanging data that can be stored and retrieved in original
shape. As German media theorist Hartmut Winkler puts it: “Material stor-
age devices are supposed to preserve their contents faithfully. Human
memories, on the other hand, tend to select, reconfigure, and forget their
contents—and we know from theory that this is the real achievement of
human memory. Forgetting, in that sense, is not a defect, but an absolute
necessary form of protection.”9 Even if human memory and material infor-
mation deposits are distinctly different entities, they are inextricably inter-
twined in the process of remembering: retrieved documents constantly feed
upon a twisting and changing memory, whereas the human mind tends to
alter information in a depository by replacing, renaming, or deleting its
content files. As most people know from experience, reordering shoebox
contents or reorganizing one’s files on a desktop always involves both a
mental and a material exercise. Of course, deleting or destroying items may
cause intense regret later, but that regret is part of the integral act of re-
membering one’s past.
Returning to Bush’s concept of memory, we can conclude that, be-
sides being mechanical, it is also paradoxical. Machines cannot simply be
modeled after the human brain, because the brain interacts with the ma-
chine and vice versa. In Bush’s vision, there is no room for the logic that
technology also structures, rather than simply reflects, cognition—a seri-

ous flaw that is echoed in quite a few contemporary hypertext theories.10
Hypertext enthusiasts proclaim that interactive software programs erase
mediation, liberate the writing subject, and empower writers who were for-
merly restricted by the constraints of linear narrative discourse. Like Bush,
they regard the human mind as the model for the machine rather than in
interaction with the machine. Counteracting the commonplace notion
that hypertexts are more natural (hence better) because they are more like
the human mind, I here defend the notion that technologies of inscription
actually shape human cognition.
Bush’s fantasy of the universal memory machine, the memex, has in-
spired many recent projects concerning the inscription, storage, and re-
trieval of personal memories or “bits of life.” In its 1945 utopian form,
Bush’s concept prefigured the need for an exterior digitized memory with
unlimited capacity; it anticipated the transformation of personal collections
into multimedial compilations of images, text, and sound—technical tools
to record and invoke memories; and most of all, the memex foreshadowed
the need for automated retrieval systems as a consequence of exploding
quantities of information. In sum, the memex fantasy supposedly contains
every ingredient to solve the giant shoebox problem, and it is therefore
hardly surprising to find many recent projects citing Bush’s fantasy. His
mechanical and paradoxical assumptions about the machine’s verisimili-
tude to the brain are equally echoed in contemporary digital projects. Four
specific contemporary projects for designing a digital memory machine,
discussed below, illuminate either how the brain is envisioned as the func-
tional model for the computer or how the computer serves as a model for
the dynamics of human memory. And yet remarkably, neither of these in-
novative projects anticipates the co-evolution of brain and machine, let
alone the even more complicating factor of sociocultural practices and
forms as decisive factors in the construction of digital memory machines.
Contemporary Visions of Memory

Machines: Four Projects
The past decade has given rise to various initiatives—both commer-

cially and privately funded—to solve the complex management of digital
personal collections. There have been many more initiatives in this area
than I have room to describe here, so instead of a general overview, I fo-
cus on four projects in more detail: Shoebox, the Living Memory Box,
Lifestreams, and MyLifeBits. Some of these projects are technical in na-
ture, concentrating on the development of hardware and software tools that
help tackle the management of personal data; others are more visionary, es-
pousing a comprehensive perspective on the nature and structure of per-
sonal memory machines—more in line with Bush’s historic effort. Despite
the different goals and outcomes of these various projects, their common
assumptions about the functioning of personal collections in relation to
memory betray a peculiar desire to control and manage the human brain
like a computer system or, vice versa, to model the machine after the brain.
Shoebox
“Shoebox” is the name of a digital photo management system devel-
oped by AT&T labs in Cambridge, England.11 Its software package pro-
vides a range of browsing and searching facilities for the storage and
retrieval of digital photographs, utilizing spoken and written annotations
as well as a content-based image retrieval method.12 The AT&T researchers
specifically tested the usability of Shoebox as a retrieval system in the con-
text of personal photo collections, involving audio and textual labels be-
sides photographic images. Although they rarely talk about memory as
such, their research is built on the assumption that personal photo col-
lections primarily—if not solely—serve as reminiscing tools in people’s
everyday life. Perfectly ordered photo collections save the user time and
annoyance: easy retrieval depends on logical storage and labeling.
For instance, the easiest way to index series of photographs would be
to order them chronologically (when taken) or geographically (where taken).
Yet the designers resist the notion that personal collections of photos are ex-
clusively stored or retrieved by factual data. Shoebox tacitly subscribes to the
idea that people remember a picture topically (the Tower of Pisa) or recall a
series of pictures thematically (our vacation in Italy). Adding key words or
short descriptions, users can also retrieve specific photos by combining ob-
jects and persons (Uncle Sam at the Eiffel Tower). Frequent users may
vaguely remember the content or image shape of the picture, but they may
have forgotten when or where it was taken and thus, where it is stored.
Image-based indexing, in that case, may be a helpful retrieval tool. The
outcome of the comparative trial is that audio or textual annotations tagged

onto digital pictures by the user are a more effective means of automatic re-
trieval from large collections than image-based indexing.
Although Shoebox is a strictly technical project concerned with the
automated labeling and retrieval of photographs, its ensuing software prod-
ucts are peculiarly grounded in mechanical assumptions about personal
memory. Researchers seem to reduce cultural practices to technical tools,
and they project the logistics of the machine onto cognitive and cultural
processes without actually scrutinizing the latter. For instance, Shoebox
forces users to add verbal “tags” or textual annotations to photos, preferably
when loading images into the system. Technical considerations dictate the
moment of tagging: it occurs not when the picture is made but when it is
stored away in the system, because noise is reduced when the spoken anno-
tations are recorded in a quiet and controlled environment. However, anno-
tations impact memories depending on their moment of attachment. While
taking the photograph, one may add superficial or intuitive descriptions;
while processing the pictures into the system at a later moment, the image is
already colored by memory and has probably become part of a narrative—
comparable to putting a picture into a photo album and adding textual
comments.13 But a picture in an album has a different function than a pic-
ture in a shoebox. Both are building blocks for personal memories, yet
whereas the album is formatted as a narrative, the shoebox is a deliberately
unsorted collection. The annotation, rather than a fixed bit of factual infor-
mation, is thus a flexible constituent in the recollection process.
In light of the assumed technological imperative projected onto the
working of personal memory, the disappointing conclusion of the Shoe-
box designers that “users may not be willing to annotate images and may
never even wish to perform a search” does not come as a surprise.14 The
mismatch between the tested technical tool and the chosen application
may rest, to a large extent, on the conceptualization of personal memory as
a mechanical process rather than a cognitive and cultural one. Designed as
an automated solution to a complex mental-technical-cultural practice,
Shoebox ignores both time and order as shaping factors in the memory
process; the attachment of meaning changes with the various stages of tak-
ing pictures, identifying them, ordering them, turning them into a narra-
tive, and remembering them at a later stage. Identifying labels or indexes
may vary with time, and so does their meaning in the memory narrative.
The process of remembering, in other words, is infused with time and

order—determinant factors in the continuous shaping and contextualizing
of past experiences.
The Living Memory Box

Whereas Shoebox is primarily devised as a software tool for photo
management, the Living Memory Box (LMB) advances its view from com-
puterized storage systems to the more expansive level of a memory sup-
porting activity; four researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology
envision how a digital support system may help “enhance the memory
archiving experience of today’s families.”15 The LMB encompasses a cen-
tral storage display combined with a portable recording device connected
through an innovative interface design that makes it look like a transpar-
ent shoebox with a screen on top. The researchers, who have tested the
prototype on several focus groups, emphasize the importance of usability:
they want to know how individuals and families actively engage in storing
and retrieving precious memories and to recognize a person’s concerns in
savoring his or her future personal heritage. The result is a holistic design
that addresses software and interface models after a careful reconsideration
of user needs with regard to memory activities.
In contrast to Shoebox, a system basically restricted to the storage of
photographs, the Living Memory Box supports scrapbook activities, en-
couraging the inclusion of a variety of objects. Because its design limits
the capacities of material objects to be tucked away, the “box” should be
leveraged metaphorically: every cherished object may be photographed
and included in the digital archive. Hence, a child’s crayon art finds its way
into the LMB through pictures of the actual drawing, and the memory of
an impressive theater play may be stored away by saving a picture of the
performance along with a picture of the entrance tickets or flyers. Another
conceptual difference with Shoebox is that the Georgia Tech researchers
regard memory as an active and discursive process that entails more than
just saving and retrieving (photographic) artifacts. Users of the LMB
system consider making digital scrapbooks a “time of personal expres-
sion” that is therapeutic and/or pleasurable. Therefore, the interface of
the box allows for natural interaction between technology and users, such
as the inclusion of human voices along with images and text in compos-
ing memory narratives. More important than storing pictures, say the
researchers, is “to help users complete more pleasurable and complex

tasks,” that is, telling stories about particular events and then linking them
to “related memories through the simple interface.”16 Telling stories helps
memory come to life, hence it turns the box into a living family archive.
Even though the LMB is a major improvement over the mechanical
interface of photo management systems, it runs into some of the same para-
doxes concerning spatial order and time. One returning problem with digi-
tal storage is the attenuation of memory items through digitization: the
necessity to render every three-dimensional, physical object digital before
storing it may diminish the user’s appetite for the system. Many people, af-
ter all, want to hang on to the actual object (such as the crayon drawing)
rather than save a picture of it. Digitization opens up new potential because
of hardware’s infinite storage capacity, and yet this storage is limited to vir-
tual objects only. Peculiarly, one of the conclusions coming out of focus
group research is that in order to be successful, the LMB should bring inter-
action away from the computer: users want their act of memory to be more
than a cut-and-paste activity based on interaction with the screen. Another
paradox is that researchers acknowledge the importance of integrating the
factor of time into their design but fail to accommodate the dynamic and
versatile nature of memory. The LMB still works from the assumption that
memories are stored, retrieved, and perhaps reassembled or reused, but in
essence they remain unchanged. Needless to say, the design caters to parents’
anxiety that they are not saving enough or are choosing the wrong memories,
but the obsession with complete storage strangely distracts from the great
potential of digital systems to exploit the inherently dual nature of human
memory to both store and revise, to simultaneously save and delete, and to
function both like an archive and like a story-generating machine.17 Appar-
ently, the concept of memory as an accurate retrieval machine is still the
dominant model after which contemporary visions are sculpted.
Lifestreams
Whereas Shoebox and the Living Memory Box offer designs of con-
crete software-supported memory machines, the next two projects are
more in line with Bush’s visionary scheme. Introducing their Lifestreams
project, four researchers from the Department of Computer Science at
Yale University define their modest goal: “to change the world, computa-
tionally speaking.”18 A lifestream is a time-ordered stream of documents
that functions like a diary of an individual’s electronic life; every docu-

ment you create is stored in your lifestream, and so is every document you
receive from other people. Lifestreams are comprehensive recordings of
someone’s activities, registering every communicative and expressive
daily activity mediated by the computer. In the electronic world to come,
according to these computer scientists, software handles a good deal of
the overhead that comes with managing chunks of information. By
“chunk” they mean any piece of data that would ordinarily be treated as
a unit: a document, an e-mail message, a calendar item, a software Rolodex
card, a fax image, or the transcript or screen image created by an executing
application. The Yale engineers promise a lifelong tracking system that dis-
poses of cumbersome hierarchical filing directories and instead privileges
“chunks of life,” which require no explicit storage management system by
means of labels: “If you are a student, your transcripts, graded assignments,
bulletins and schedules are stored on your stream. If you are a patient, your
medical history is stored as a series of discrete chunks (lab reports, pre-
scriptions, doctors’ notes). Whoever you are, item number one in your
Lifestream-of-the-future is probably your birth certificate.”19 The tacit as-
sumption underlying this project is that you are what you document, and
“documents are us.” Life’s experiences are inscribed through machines and
digital files that verify each second of one’s existence.
In more than one way, the Lifestream software design subscribes to
Bush’s vision of a computed world in which the brain serves as a model for
the computer. The machine, like the mind, creates streams or substreams
that can be suppressed, activated, or trashed but never lost. A chunk that has
not been worked on for a while simply becomes hidden in someone’s virtual
past, resting in the repository unchanged, waiting to be retrieved. This the-
ory of lifestreams inadvertently resembles the stream of consciousness and
subconsciousness concepts underpinning Freud’s theory: experiences are al-
ways somehow preserved in human memory, either consciously or uncon-
sciously, only to be activated at a later moment of recall. Yet though the
machine is modeled after the brain, the computer is also upheld as a model
for how the brain ought to work. Inscribed in the software is the idea that
strings of information are accessible anywhere, anytime, anyplace (ubiqui-
tous availability) as well as the presumption that our personal “lifestreams”
are always connected to others’ digitized “lifestreams,” allowing one to
copy a chunk from someone else’s digital stream (ubiquitous connectivity).
Lifestreams thus foregrounds ubiquitous availability and connectivity but

disregards the dynamic nature of both documents and memory.
Although Bush’s metaphor—the brain as a model for the computer—
echoes in the Lifestreams project, the multimedia computer hardly seems to
affect human memory.20 The new digital memory machine, in which various
types of media modalities (audio, video, text) have converged, seems a per-
fect instrument to naturally record one’s multifaceted, multisensory, and as-
sociative experiences, but it never influences the way we remember these
events. Life’s past episodes are considered holistic multimedial experiences,
the inscription, collection, and recollection of which are conceived as an in-
finite database that can be exhaustively recorded and endlessly replayed. It is
interesting to notice how this metaphorical equation hinges on the same as-
sumptions about ubiquitous recording and accurate retrieval as its historical
precursor. A corollary to this metaphor is a denial of interaction between
human and machine as mutually constitutive entities.
MyLifeBits
Whereas Lifestreams sprouts from the minds of computer scientists,
MyLifeBits is an American commercial venture, but the two projects operate
from remarkably similar premises. MyLifeBits was launched in 2002 by a
group of Microsoft engineers at the MS Media Presence Lab in San Fran-
cisco led by Gordon Bell.21 The project leaders work on a comprehensive
software system and communicate their goals and mission to a broad audi-
ence.22 The engineers at Microsoft aim to build multimedia tools that allow
people to chronicle their lives’ events and make them searchable, because
memories deceive us: “Experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing
of events, and simply forget stuff,” says one of the project leaders. “What we
want and need is a faithful memory, one that records and builds on the reli-
ability of the PC.”23 Bell and his team consider memory’s ability to forget
and revise a weakness rather than a strength or necessity. In the many inter-
views Bell issued to the news media, he pitches MyLifeBits not only as the
solution to the giant shoebox problem but as an organizer of life: everyday
events will be fully recorded in text, images, and audio and stored orderly in
a computer. Each item will be tagged by audio or text annotations—tags
that may also be cross-linked. To test the program, Bell has downloaded all
his personal bits of life, including his parents’ photographs, onto a hard
drive; MyLifeBits, he claims, is more than a memory, it’s “an accurate surro-
gate brain,” the realization of Bush’s memex machine, which equally fea-
tured automated retrieval as its highest ambition. Bell imagines how, someday
in the future, a compulsive recorder will call up a single day in his or her life
and get an hour-by-hour breakdown of what he or she did, said, and saw.
Besides chronological retrieval, one major advantage of MyLifeBits software
is its ability to allow a “Google-like search on your life”: to retrieve random
memories by typing in a tag.
Unlike Shoebox, but much in accordance with the Living Memory
Box, MyLifeBits software departs from the notion of stories or memory
narratives as key-ingredients of the remembering process. The shoebox of
digital items is viewed as a nonhierarchical repository of annotated data,
out of which users construct a story every time they retrieve a single bit.
Annotated stories may be browsed like the World Wide Web, that is, the
user simply follows the links connecting one resource to another by means
of keyword. Thus, memory is conceived as an associative journey through
linked bits of life, which may subsequently be re-presented in any medi-
ated form: as a Powerpoint presentation, a slide show, or a photo album.
Unlike other systems heretofore described, the presentation of stories en-
abled by item retrieval constitutes the conceptual heart of this project. The
most valuable inheritance to our children or grandchildren, Bell claims, is
not a shoebox of assorted items but a selection and representation of
annotated stories. “Your cinematic deathbed flashback will already be
uploaded to your hard drive,” one of his interviewers concludes.24 In
MyLifeBits, the idea of the computer as a model for the brain is extended
from its storage and retrieval capacities to its presentation capacities. It is
interesting to notice how Microsoft engineers construct the notion of life
as a story, while simultaneously equating life stories with mediated formats.
Personal memories cast in narrative, using images as material signposts, con-
ceptually morph into preformatted media presentations—preferably copy-
righted by Microsoft, of course.
MyLifeBits’s design deftly reflects (and smartly caters to) two con-
temporary anxieties: worrying about managing one’s life and worrying
about amnesia. For an upscale Western audience, managing data has be-
come an attractive metaphor for controlling life. To live an experience at a
date and time of one’s choosing—rather like a television program recorded
on a VCR—takes some pressure off life’s fast pace, regulated by the clock.
What could be more appealing to a contemporary user struggling with time

constraints in an experience economy than the storage of events in media-
tized, retrievable memories? The anxiety brought on by missing events as
one’s children grow up can be assuaged by the thought of a personal mem-
ory machine, enabling precious moments to be replayed at a time more
convenient than the ever-demanding present. Experiences etched in dimen-
sions of time hence become a timeless repository of reruns. On the other
end of the spectrum, the prospect of harrowing memory disorders, such as
Alzheimer’s disease, feeds on the fear of amnesia. Complete storage of per-
sonal memory and collections should avoid the erasure of someone’s unique
identity. The anxiety of forgetting is implied in the desire not to be forgot-
ten: as MyLifeBits insists, the most important beneficiaries of this software
product are your descendants. Immortality through software cultivation
appears to be an attractive prospect in which to invest.
Shoebox, the Living Memory Box, Lifestreams, and MyLifeBits—
projects that envision the future of memory machines—all capitalize on the
digital enhancement of limited human memory. Viewing human memory
as something that is profoundly lacking in its prime function (remembering
full and exact registrations of events that happened in the past), they tend to
focus on products of memory that presumably fix that fallibility. Yet in do-
ing so, they fail to acknowledge a far more important function of digital me-
dia in the act of human memory. If we consider media technologies to be
tools for selecting, framing, and encapsulating autobiographical memories—
rather than mechanical devices for recording and storing documents or
files—they play a constitutive role in the continuous (re)construction of our
selves. Technologies of self involve a constant reworking of our relationship
with the past; events and reflections are encrypted by technological and dis-
cursive devices that actively locate our experience in time and space. Human
remembrance, for most software designers, appears to be a natural cognitive
process standing ontologically apart from the machine, whereas it is abun-
dantly clear that the brain and the machine are mutually constitutive forces.
N. Katherine Hayles has typified the presumed division between the human
and the technological as an origin story; she urges a critical understanding of
the interactions between the materiality of inscription technologies and the
contents they produce.25 Because this is precisely the aspect missing in the
design of contemporary visionary and technical projects, the next section
elucidates this interaction.
Memory Storage in the Age of Networked Multimedia
Following in Bush’s footsteps, the four contemporary projects of

memory machines appear to be predicated on three recurring myths. First,
there is the myth that autobiographical memories are indelibly and unerr-
ingly stored in the warehouse of the mind, from which they can be re-
trieved in pristine condition. The second myth is that we have an innate
desire to record every single second and facet of our experience in our
memory for later retrieval. And third, these projects seem to advance the
illusion that memories, recorded and stored in digital databases, can and
should be kept separate from the rest of the connected wired world. With
the notable exception of Lifestreams, these projects consider individual
memories to be private affairs, untouched by the networked collective
reservoir of (public) documents and multimedial records.
The question of how digital technologies are affecting the nature of
our remembering processes deserves more philosophical contemplation,
ethnographic research, and psychological theorizing than the limited context
of this chapter allows. Based on the previous analysis of the four projects, it
is expedient to turn attention to a few selected aspects of digital memory ma-
chines that may help deconstruct the fallacious myths underpinning the
engineers’ project designs: the computer’s morphing abilities, its multime-
dial and multimodal qualities, and the networked imperative to connect per-
sonal to public databases. Unfortunately, engineers and scientists have failed
to incorporate new insights in remembering as a cognitive and cultural pro-
cess into their technology-driven designs. Rather than being self-confined
machines for automated recording, storage, and retrieval, multimedia com-
puters can be seen both as technologies of self with surprising creative and
affective potential and as technologies of truth (Foucault’s terms) pertaining
to the worlds of collectivity and social life. The material inscription of signi-
fiers in bits, the convergence of singular media in multimedia machines, and
the embedding of personal collections in global networks confront users
with profound changes in their cognitive functions and habitual cultural
practices. Hence, the question arises: How may the processes of digitization,
multimediatization, and googlization impact the construction of memory?
As explained in Chapter 2 and elaborated in subsequent chapters, per-
sonal memories are not infallible recordings of past experiences, but they are
reconstructions of the past that are filtered, interpreted, and expounded
upon through projections and desires. Our ability to create stories of the
past does not depend on our ability to recollect precise facts; on the contrary,
stories create memories. The morphing nature of episodic memory may lead
machines to enhance that quality. According to the reconsolidation theory,
memory is a creative amalgamation of fact and fantasy, and the biggest ad-
vantage of computers is that they may support this essential feature of
episodic memory better than any previous technology. In addition to storing
past recordings, we can use digital machines to transform records into new
stories that better suit our present understanding of memory and reality. In-
deed, although most projects focus on memories as narratives rather than
facts, they still tend to stress the accuracy of retrieved recordings. Terms like
“accurate,” “manipulated,” and “false” memories—in opposition to “authen-
tic” and “true” recollections—govern the discourses of psychologists and
cognitive researchers, and they also prevail in the design strategy of com-
puter engineers. The obdurate modernist belief in authentic versus manipu-
lated memories obviously echoes in MyLifeBits and other projects.
Instead of confirming fallacious binary frameworks, I have tried to
outline how digital tools may help reconceptualize memory as a process
etched in time—a process continuously prone to the vagaries of reinter-
pretation and reordering. If we consider the latest research results coming
from neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists, we have to accept hu-
man memory as an amalgamation of creative projection, factual retrieval,
and narrative recollection of past events. By the same token, we may look
upon media tools as creative reminiscing instruments in addition to them
being mnemonic aids. Defining memory concurrently as a product and a
process, we may acknowledge the versatility and morphing quality of dig-
ital memory machines as a positive element that is integral to human rem-
iniscing. Why not create multiple story lines out of stored documents and
images while still giving recourse to the original records? Why disregard
the creative and transformative potential of memory, as it is such integral
element of our identity as human beings? As earlier chapters show, lifelogs
may help people keep track of their changing personalities, manipulating
digital photographs supports a person’s identity formation, mix-and-burn
software may customize existing sounds to particular moods, and digitized
home movies can offer a reframing of a family’s contrived past.
Indeed, digitization of our entire collection of personal documents
may elicit new cultural forms and habits besides putting photos in a shoebox
or trusting documents to file management systems. Storing, collecting, and

retrieving documents—whether pictures, texts, or audio files—are combined
mental-technical-cultural processes; a new materiality is bound to affect the
mental activity involved in our understanding of self and others, as well as
the cultural practices involved in creating and handling memory products.
As a result, reminiscing may be defined as a lifelong creative project in which
originality is as valuable as authenticity, and in which factual recall naturally
supplements imaginative reconstruction. Memory narratives are also fic-
tional stories, just as fiction is always firmly cemented in the crypts of mem-
ory. It is the very thing that we love and look for in the digital—its universal
fungibility—that will have the biggest impact on what our memories may
become, signifying the past as a temporary stage in the enduring process of
becoming.
Another persistent tenet held by the creators of digital memory ma-
chines is the belief that people want to record every single second and facet
of their life’s experience for later retrieval. There is little empirical evidence
to back up this presumed innate desire. It may not be a coincidence that
people’s individual cultural memories are structured by the logic of singular
media types, woven into specific singular practices, such as photography,
making home movies, or compiling audiotapes. Most ordinary users exhibit
an unarticulated preference for one medium over another, for instance pho-
tography over the taping of moving images. The cultural forms and prac-
tices inherent to these singular media technologies unconsciously shape the
recording of experiences and thus profoundly affect one’s later remembrance
of things past. We are not always aware of how the choice of one medium
over another quintessentially defines the content of our mediated memories,
let alone how it impacts the construction of self-identity over a lifetime. The
fact is that the availability or coincidental presence of certain media tech-
nologies in one’s lifetime often determines one’s preference for preserving
memories in text, audio, or still or moving images or a combination thereof.
It is highly unlikely, though, that with the rise of multimedia computers
people would suddenly want to save every life event in every possible senso-
rial dimension simply because digital technologies allow them to do so.
Yet to what extent will current and future multimedia apparatuses en-
gender a transformation in the process of remembering? In Chapter 1, I
argued that mediated memories do not usually serve as exact or complete
recordings but as evocative frames. People want a specific sensory inscription
that triggers particular emotions or sensations. For instance, a song may help
invoke a specific mood, whereas a diary is more suitable to inscribe and recall
reflective thoughts. The recording medium once dictated the choice for a
particular sensory inscription, but multimedia computers and digital record-
ing devices expand the choices now that digital cameras combined with soft-
ware packages promote their multiple usage as recorders of sound, text, still
pictures, and moving images. I doubt whether people suddenly want to use
digital apparatuses to exhaustively record sensory experiences, but they may
start experimenting with the synesthetic qualities of the new machines. As
users of the Living Memory Box made clear, parents still want to save a tod-
dler’s crayon drawings in their shoebox, but their digital equipment enables
them to document a child’s cute hairdo, first words, and first steps in all their
respective visual, auditory, and textual dimensions. The multifunctionality
of the digital photo camera unwittingly adds moving images and sound to
the recording repertoire of eager parents.
Capturing multiple dimensions of experience—even if inadvertently—
may shift a person’s propensity to privilege a singular sense in the process of
remembering and even lead to new cultural practices. Chapter 5 noted how
camera phones do not simply alter the preference for still images in the act of
reminiscence by adding text but change social codes and cultural forms of
teenage communication as well. In other words, digital technologies poten-
tially change the way we choose to frame our pasts in new sensory modes;
but more profoundly, those individual preferences inevitably affect the con-
ventions for remembering and communicating. Sound may undergo a re-
vival in the creation of ego-documents now that audio tags and recorded
voices are almost as ubiquitous as image files or text labels. Perhaps personal
digital assistants will be deployed to tape dinner-table discussions, which will
be disseminated afterward as podcasts—the audio equivalent of e-mailed
photographs. We can imagine a large variety of new modes of recording and
storing memories, exploiting the new variability of multimedial equipment.
It is remarkable to observe how computer engineers bet on multimedia com-
puters as instruments of exhaustive recording and retention, while the real
innovation of personal memory machines most likely lies in the combination
of new sensorial mind frames with innovative cultural uses.
Finally, most contemporary memory machines (except for Lifestreams)
understate the importance of connectivity in their designs of storage and
retrieval systems. When Bell introduces MyLifeBits, he states that the
human mind ought to work like the World Wide Web—the most efficient
and effective navigation environment emerging from the digital age. He
suggests Google, Silicon Valley’s celebrated search engine, as the prime
conceptual model for running and activating the human mind. Yet on
closer inspection, MyLifeBits designers interpret Google as a mere retrieval
tool capable of recovering pieces from a vast but static environment, be-
traying a rather modernist notion of human memory as well as a remark-
ably limited understanding of the capabilities of search engines. In Bell’s
conceptual model, memories are fixed entities patiently awaiting their re-
trieval from the shelves of the mental library, triggered by a coincidental or
conscious thought. Today, these assumptions have been discredited in fa-
vor of memory as a complicated encoding process, where memories are
preserved through and affected by elaborate mental, social, and media
schemata. Specific needs, interests, or desires on the part of the remem-
berer significantly structure the content of memories while at the same
time they define communication and expression. Human memory is a
flexible agency through which identity development, and thus personal
growth, is made possible. Microsoft engineers ignore the inherent trans-
gressive qualities of human memory; they stress the functionality of mem-
ory as a storage machine, at the expense of its creative, communicative,
and connectionist capabilities. Moreover, Bell’s metaphorical equation of
memory to an intelligent software agent (that is, Google) does not do jus-
tice to the transformative power inscribed in this search engine; Google’s
power lies not in its ability to search fixed sets of databases, but in its abil-
ity to navigate a person through a vast repository of mutant items, yielding
different content depending on when and how they are retrieved, reshap-
ing the order of its data upon each usage. Two unique Google qualities—
its navigability and its constantly changing inventory—are conspicuously
absent in MyLifeBits and other projections of future memory machines.
Ignoring the inherent mutability of human memory may seriously
hamper the high ambitions set by Microsoft and other designers. Projects
like Shoebox, the Living Memory Box, and MyLifeBits tend to regard soft-
ware programs as self-contained nostalgia machines—jukeboxes of individ-
ual memory—that perform a mnemonic function: retrieve that particular
song or recall that image. But thanks to the networked computer, memory
becomes more of a topological skill: to navigate personal memory not only
highlights the process of remembering but also allows the user to make
connections that would have never been discovered without the computer.
For instance, a person may detect patterns in his or her musical preference
or a specific development in the family’s vacation photographs over the
years, particularly if relating personal items to historical trends. Chapter 6
explained how various types of home movies and videos, after being juxta-
posed and connected to publicly available documents via digital media
technology, led to ambiguous interpretations and innovative representa-
tions of a family’s past records. Topology and navigation, in addition to
retrievability, make the memory process a more intriguing effort than ever
before; the networked computer is a performative agent in the act of re-
membering. Reconnection is perfectly compatible with recollection, as in-
dividual memories are always inherently embedded in cultural contexts.
The googlization of memory, in Microsoft terms, is a callow conceptualiza-
tion of what networked modalities may produce; the emergence of new
genres that connect private memories to reflections of others or to public
resources—and thus produce new thoughts—is the true innovative poten-
tial of a digital memory machine.
Contemporary designs for personal memory machines assume tech-
nological innovations to provide a new model for human memory, such
as the computer or the World Wide Web, but they fail to acknowledge the
mutual shaping of human memory and machine. A basic flaw in the dig-
ital machine’s software design is that it models the brain after the com-
puter and assumes the private mind to be searchable like the World Wide
Web is searchable; personal memory is thus considered a repository that is
completely separate from collective memory. Projects like Shoebox and
the Living Memory Box concentrate on the collection of personal mem-
ory items only. Lifestreams and MyLifeBits duly acknowledge the inter-
lacing of personal and public records (or records sent by others), but at
best they address the issue of ubiquitous connectivity in terms of privacy
infringement and personal integrity. However, they fail to recognize the
innovative potential of new digital environments; the World Wide Web
opens up space for new cultural practices fulfilling a social need for con-
necting the self to larger contexts of community, society, and history.
Memory is neither exclusively cemented in the recall of individual experi-
ences nor in the remembrance of collective experiences, but a human be-
ing has a vested interest in connecting both poles if he or she wants to
pursue personal growth.
Networked digital technologies have the ability to link up personal

memory to public mediated materials, hence eliciting insights in the inter-
connection between self and the world. For example, the diary or the scrap-
book in its analog form serve as a reflexive instrument in the contained
universe of a person’s life. The new potential of the networked computer is
not, as Bell would have it, scanning all words into the computer in order to
render one’s personal testimony searchable via keywords. The real innova-
tion of the computer is its ability to allow a new type of diary (for instance
a lifelog), which networked materiality preconditions the linking of pri-
vate reflections to public scrutiny, opening up personal reflexivity to invite
reciprocation by others. As illustrated in Chapter 3, privacy and publicness
are not mutually exclusive concepts in the lifelogs of teenagers, and
Alzheimer’s patients even strive for publicity and intimacy. In other words,
the working of personal cultural memory changes in the face of networked
machines, a transformation that calls for a renewed awareness of the rela-
tion between personal and collective memory.26
Let us return finally to the problem of my friend, cited at the begin-
ning of this chapter, facing the storage and retrieval of innumerable memory-
infested digital files. Would he be significantly helped by projects like
Shoebox, the Living Memory Box, Lifestreams, and MyLifeBits? Would these
software projects help him restore order in the plethora of digital memora-
bilia and allow him more time to relive captured moments? Confirming my
hypothesis, my friend answered that he was not exactly waiting for sophis-
ticated programs or intelligent agents to assist him in finding particular
items and turn them into smooth multimedia presentations. “The funny
thing is,” he said, “I am not very keen on retrieving the experiences I
recorded. The value of my personal digital collection is situated first and
foremost in the fun of recording and collecting and perhaps second in
knowing that these files are somehow stored, in coding, even if I will never
retrieve them.” His conclusion that he treasures the act of collecting more
than his actual collection is not something unique to life recorders in the
digital age; rather, it is quite analogous to the woman who keeps her love
letters wrapped in ribbon in an attic but never or almost never looks at them.
My friend’s digital recordings, apparently, had already served their pur-
pose in the act of memory, even though as objects of memory, they may
never materialize beyond their coded stage. While building his new digital
environment, he had noticed how new tools had helped him to organize
his everyday world and to find a new way to inscribe his personal life in di-
mensions of time and order.
The performative nature of memory is, I believe, much under-
exposed in current research on memory machines. Memories are narratives
as well as artifacts, performances as well as objects—things that work in
every day lives and cultures of people. In their search for the perfect digi-
tal memory machine, engineers and entrepreneurs have systematically fo-
cused on the products of memory and ignored the role of technologies in
the active staging of memory. They assume mind and machine to be sepa-
rate entities, one serving as the model for the other, generally disregarding
their perpetual mutual encroachment. Computer engineers, as designers
of digital tools, could profit from neuroscientific research to obtain in-
sights in how autobiographical memory works and evolves; they could also
benefit from the wealth of ethnographic inquiries into the individual’s use
of both material and digital memories in the process of collecting, storing,
and retrieving.27 Working at the crossroads of various disciplinary perspec-
tives, we may try to find out how digital materiality impinges on our
everyday habits of preserving and presenting personal heritages. Digital
technologies seem to promote a different materiality that both complements
and partially replaces analog objects embodying memory; most important,
they shape the very nature of remembering as they become (literally) incor-
porated in our daily routines of self-formation. In spite of current project
designers’ projections, the ultimate goal of memory is not to end up as a
Powerpoint presentation on your grandchild’s desktop; the ultimate goal
of memory is to make sense of one’s life.
8
Epilogue
I must have been around twenty years old, when I saw Francis Pi-
cabia’s painting The Acrobat in a Scandinavian museum—I cannot remem-
ber whether it was Oslo or Stockholm. What struck me in the painting
were the thick brush strokes accentuating the unnatural upside-down pos-
ture of the acrobat. The poster I bought of this picture unfortunately at-
tenuated the brush strokes, but it nevertheless covered the wall of my
student room for some time. More than ten years later, while browsing in a
bookstore in Los Angeles, I hit upon a reproduction of Picabia’s painting in
an art book. I only remember that particular browsing experience—as dis-
tinct from hundreds of hours of browsing in American bookstores—because
of the reproduction. Not until recently, almost twenty-five years after first
seeing the painting, did these two moments come back to me via an old
photograph of myself on a couch in my student room, in which the poster
on the wall figures as background. The friend who had taken the picture
had kept it in her shoebox for many years; when she found the photo-
graph, she scanned it and e-mailed it to me. I looked on the Internet for a
clean reproduction of my beloved acrobat and reworked both images into
a humorous story about my peculiar run-ins with this painting, which I
then e-mailed back to my friend.
Mediated memories, as proposed in the first chapter, are the activi-
ties and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technolo-
gies for creating and re-creating a sense of our past, present, and future
Epilogue 171
selves in relation to others. Photographs, posters, and digital reproductions

of the Picabia painting all played a role in my memory act, involving a va-
riety of material mediations and triggering a number of mental activities
and affects. Rather than being mere relics, they serve as input in a contin-
uous memory discourse with variable output at different moments. In
Chapters 1 and 2 of this book, I designed a model to analyze the interlock-
ing of media and memory as moving along two major axes. The horizontal
axis—the axis of relational identity—places the manifestation of cultural
memory at the crossroads of self and others, individual and collective, pri-
vate and public. The vertical axis laid out the dimension of time: the inte-
gration of past and future in the present, the mixture of recollection and
projection, and the fusion of preservation and creation. In Chapters 3
through 7, this dual model was applied to concrete mediated memories at
a time of technological and cultural transformation. Here I sketch some
tentative conclusions with regard to the model.
Evaluating the Model
Mediated memories are reciprocal in nature; they mediate between

self and others. Media technologies involved in creating personal memories
are not simply used to build up a personal reservoir of memories, but their
function is concurrently formative, directive, and communicative. They en-
able the self to grow and mature, to give meaning and direction to one’s
past and present, while at the same time they allow a person to communi-
cate with others and test common grounds. Whereas the Picabia poster and
art book reproduction once reified my experience of viewing the painting,
the photograph of the poster became the catalyst of a memory experience.
The photograph served as a mnemonic device helping to imagine my for-
mer self; it also had a directive function in the formation of identity; and it
engendered a communicative meaning as exemplified by the online image
exchange. Digital environments, by nature of their networked condition,
amplify and encourage connections between self and others (and culture at
large). Chapter 3 showed how lifelogs offer a new hybrid form that com-
bines formative, mnemonic, and directive functions, particularly in sup-
porting teenagers’ and Alzheimer’s patients’ volatile sense of self.
Mediated memories also form the linchpin between individual and
collective culture. Acts and objects of memory, as argued in Chapter 1, have
172 Epilogue
always been a playground for sorting and appropriating cultural items. Dig-
ital technologies empower consumers of culture, arming them with ad-
vanced means to construct collective identities. Taking photographs and
buying posters are both acts of appropriation: by defining their idiosyn-
cratic choices in the sea of cultural products, individuals mark their pref-
erences but also communicate a sense of belonging to a (peer) group or a
(sub)cultural league. Chapter 4 described how digital music files lend
themselves to easy exchange of pop songs and thus contribute to the for-
mation of one’s personal taste in relation to collective musical heritage. In
more than one way, the distinction between individual and collective mem-
ory evaporates as individuals obtain and wield the (digital) instruments that
lie at the heart of cultural production. Home movies inspire television se-
ries as much as feature films inspire home video productions (Chapter 6).
In short, personal and collective cultural products are almost seamlessly in-
terwoven into the symbolic fabric of everyday life.
Memories also mediate between what is private and what is public,
concurrently modifying the meanings of privacy and publicness. The de-
velopment of every new medium—beginning with print—has reconsti-
tuted the boundaries between public and private life. Dissemination of
personal memory is increasingly an online activity: from the creation of
lifelogs to the distribution of virtual images, the already thin line between
private and public has only become more diffuse. Personal cultural mem-
ory, of course, was never squarely located within the private realm, because
individuals made conscious decisions to publish their shoebox contents.
That private shoebox is gradually integrated in a global, digital bazaar of
documents, music, and pictures, where files appear almost indistinguish-
able. So when I put my picture of the Picabia poster on the Internet, cut-
ting and pasting freely from digitized museum reproductions, I should not
be surprised by claims of copyright infringement. The opposite is also true:
a specific entry in your lifelog or a picture sent by a camera phone (Chapter 5)
may later show up in public contexts as a result of having shared it via a
public forum, even if unwittingly. Personal and collective cultural items
thus become progressively interwoven in memory discourses.
The vertical axis in the proposed model signifies how memories
mediate between past and future. One of autobiographical memory’s
most important functions is that of self-continuity: in spite of the body
being a constant physical transmutation of cellular tissue, appearance, and
Epilogue 173
thoughts, we always look for continuities in our identity—to reassure our-

selves that the trunk of our present life tree has historical roots and future
branches. And yet, we can only gain access to the past through the present;
my memory of the Picabia image is an act in the present, even though the
objects that trigger my memory were made a long time ago. As elucidated
in Chapter 6, memory objects such as home movies move up and down
the time line. People may create movies as future memories, and they edit
moving images shot in the past to attune them to current views of family.
Our memories of the past change along with our expectations of the fu-
ture; memories are constantly prone to revision just as memory objects are
constantly amenable to alteration.
Recollection and projection are essential ingredients of our present
construction of memory and identity. Mental images of who we are result
from a combination of recall and desire, which are in turn incentives to re-
model our past and fashion our futures. Even if I chose the Picabia poster
because I simply wanted to decorate my sparsely furnished student room,
the story written twenty-five years later presented my choice as a sign of
my emerging preference for European avant-garde painting. Partly recall,
partly projection, I construct an image of my former self in the present:
I want to remember myself as an art lover because it fits my current self-
image. Chapter 5 showed how personal photographs and memory narratives
could be easily manipulated, particularly in the digital age, as photoshop
software allows for untraceable modifications in our (physical) appearance.
The digital collections on our desktops are brimming over with constant
reminders of our former selves, but by the same means they provide the
tools to help us shape our idealized image—a projection of who we want
to be and how we want to be remembered.
Mediated memories in the digital age are creative reconstructions as
much as documentary scenarios of what happened. Memory has become
an interesting amalgamation of preservation and creation: that which re-
mains stored in shoeboxes or other containers serves as input for the in-
vention of new memories. Interlacing my memory narrative with digital
images of an old photograph and some Picabia reproductions enhanced
my pleasurable experience of mixing preservation and imagination. In
constructing my memory of the Picabia painting, I am not exactly inter-
ested in which aspects of my narrative are accurate and which are false. Pic-
tures, diaries, home movies, and recorded music were never plain evidence
174 Epilogue
of our former states of being or past experiences anyway. Memory objects

created in the past provide input for current interpretations of present and
future life, a status to which digital media objects lend themselves better
than their analog precursors. Memories are creative material, as they lead
to therapeutic and productive new insights into our selves and may result
in innovative cultural forms, such as DVD recordings of a family dispute.
Software designers are very slow to pick up on the creative side of autobi-
ographical reminiscence, as they keep stressing the importance of memory
preservation and storage in preformatted scrapbooks.1
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Memory
The model proposed and advocated in this book, a model structured

along the two axes of identity and time, strongly promotes a multidiscipli-
nary approach to memory. Mediated memories means our memories are
embodied by individual brains and minds, enabled by the technologies
and material objects that render them manifest, and embedded in social
practices and cultural forms. But why do we need such a complex model?
What are the advantages of combining diverse and seemingly irreconcil-
able definitions of memory? Why would academics from various back-
grounds want to engage with such a broad and multilayered model before
they have answered all or even most of the pressing questions emanating
from their disciplinary perspectives? Why would it be advantageous for
neurobiologists or cognitive psychologists to turn to cultural theorists or
social constructivists (or vice versa) to deepen their insights in how mem-
ory works? My answer to these questions is simple: academics cannot af-
ford to ignore each other’s research paradigms in developing new horizons
on memory in the digital age. Because we are facing new challenges posed
by complex technical-cognitive-cultural phenomena, we can hardly rely on
old models and metaphors to advance our thinking. The mutual shaping
of mind, technology, and culture is an important premise of the proposed
model; its modest goal is to pull together relevant findings from these var-
ious perspectives to see how they can help redefine immanent multifaceted
problems in memory research, such as the problems of morphibility, mul-
timediatization, and networked connectivity.
The reconsolidation theory, developed by neuroscientists and explained
in Chapter 2, takes as its premise the mutant nature of autobiographical
Epilogue 175
memory; personal memory is tweaked and turned whenever an object cre-

ated in the past is recalled through the mindset and conditions of the pres-
ent. Forgetting and remembering are functions of the mind’s inclination to
produce creative recollections mingled with projections. Cognitive psychol-
ogists, for their part, have convincingly proven how memory not only
morphs but can also be morphed. As argued in Chapter 5, exposure to ma-
nipulated misinformation or doctored photographs can change an individ-
ual’s recollection in powerful ways. But memory morphing can hardly be
studied apart from the phenomenon of media morphing—a term that
refers to digital multimedia’s capacity to smoothly convert one coded
representation into another. Media morphing may pertain to the software
accommodating the invisible makeovers of photographs in digital video
footage; it may also apply to the technical ability to make old footage look
pristine or blend personal and public images. The morphibility of human
memory is not simply supported by media technologies, but also, to a large
extent, it is enabled by and inscribed in digital tools. My Picabia memo-
ries, of course, emanated from the brain-mind, where I had conjured up
specific (even if changing) mental images of The Acrobat. Due to my “dig-
ital memory machine,” I could effortlessly merge former images with con-
temporary reproductions from posters, photographs, and web images,
thus creating an interesting amalgam of recall and projection.
New digital tools thus engender new types of memory, or, mutatis
mutandis, cognitive mechanisms give rise to new technological manifesta-
tions of memory. For instance, computers and software promote the multi-
modality of memory: the combination of different sensory modalities such
as visual, auditory, and haptic impressions. Multimediality refers to the si-
multaneous use of multiple media formats, such as text, graphics, anima-
tion, pictures, videos, and sound, to present information. Research into the
multimodality of memory—an area largely contingent upon the use of
multimedia computers—is becoming a fruitful subject for cognitive psy-
chologists and neuroscientists involved in memory research. For the design
of human-computer interfaces, engineers rely heavily on cognitive research
into multimodal perception. Few, if any, insights in this area of multi-
modality have yet been applied to the study of personal memory. As dis-
cussed in Chapter 7, computer scientists working on new memory machines
still generally depart from the assumption that we need these machines
to store accurate complete memories, and they have only barely started to
176 Epilogue
discover the creative potential of hardware and software into their new ma-
chines. It will be interesting to experiment with the multimodal potential
of the new technologies in terms of memory enhancement.
Another major omission in the design of these digital memory ma-
chines is their remarkable indifference to contextual use; personal memory
is always embedded in sociocultural forms and practices, which are partly
responsible for its shaping. When we store a picture for later retrieval, this
act is part of a social custom to save and store photographs for later remi-
niscence; the photo album or shoebox is the conventional cultural form in
which we preserve memories. The photograph of my student room featur-
ing the poster was preserved in somebody else’s shoebox, but was recol-
lected because of a new connective custom: to electronically distribute
pictures to friends—a social practice grounded in the networked condition
of connectivity. It may be safe to assume that the current transformation
of technology in conjunction with sociocultural forms and practices poses
a challenge to the human mind and how it selects, understands, and re-
members information about the self and relates this information to others
and to culture at large. A camera phone, as elucidated in Chapter 5, liter-
ally merges the functions of memory and communication; the resulting
image-text is neither an exclusive memory object nor an ephemeral by-
product of a casual conversation. New social practices and cultural forms
emerge at the crossroads of memory and media, and even if we cannot yet
label them, it is important to mark their appearance. It is too early to tell
how cultural forms will develop further into the digital age, but there is no
denying that the functions of memory, communication, and identity for-
mation are becoming evermore intertwined.
Recognizing the connection between memories’ embodiment, their
enabling technologies, and their embedding in social practices and cultural
forms motivates my call for an interdisciplinary approach to memory. Rather
than considering technology the engine of a multifaceted transformation,
this book opted for a more complex analysis of personal cultural memory,
one that advocates neither the teleology of change nor a compartmentalized
patchwork of separate evolutions. Instead, I show how results from neurobi-
ological and cognitive research may complement social-constructivist para-
digms concerning media technologies and how software designers may
profit from insights in sociocultural patterns of media use. By defining mem-
ory as a phenomenon that needs biological-cognitive, material-technological,
Epilogue 177
and sociocultural scrutiny, I do not mean to discount research paradigms

pursued in each of these respective academic disciplines. On the contrary,
my prime intention is to transfer insights in one area onto the next, to bring
about connections that would otherwise remain unnoticed, and perhaps
inspire new and innovative conceptualizations of personal memory. Cul-
tural theorists thus far largely ignore the great advancements in neurobio-
logical theory and cognitive psychology; neurobiologists show little interest
in the meaning of material-technological objects as agents of memory; and
social constructivists emphasize technology but have a lukewarm appetite
for including cultural dimensions of change.
This book has no pretension whatsoever to provide a manual for col-
laborative research projects involving neuroscientists, sociologists of technol-
ogy, and media theorists. Its inventory of shoebox objects, each representing
a prism onto the process of cultural and technological transformation, is an
exercise in expansive thinking, theorizing the object of memory across con-
ventional disciplinary boundaries. As we are entering the digital age, collab-
oration and cross-fertilization may become increasingly more urgent, because
we are faced with phenomena that concurrently involve various levels of
memory research. Phenomena such as morphibility, multimediatization,
and connectivity (or googlization, see Chapter 7) can no longer be under-
stood as either mental or technological or cultural manifestations of mem-
ory. A profound understanding of these phenomena requires the help of
multifocal lenses instead of monocles.
Memory Studies in the Future
One of the challenges of scientists is to open up well-defined prob-

lems to ever more complex questions. The more narrowly neurobiologists
and cognitive scientists identify the question of how human memory works
on the genetic, molecular, and organic levels, the more challenging it is to
expand the focus to memory’s interaction with machines, objects, and soci-
ocultural schemes. But how can we reconceptualize the problem of mem-
ory in a way that accounts for evolving transformations in the areas of
(neuro)cognition, digital technology, and culture? The acknowledgment of
morphibility, multimediatization, and connectivity as emerging and press-
ing themes in memory studies may have considerable consequences for its
epistemology and ontology, warranting further interdisciplinary efforts.
178 Epilogue
The morphibility and multimediatization of memory and media are

not distinct phenomena, as they are interwoven at every imaginable level.
Much of the current research on memory is grounded in parameters of au-
thenticity versus artificiality, of truthful recollection versus manipulated or
false remembrance, of comprehensive versus selective memory. If we ac-
cept the morphing and multimodal nature of memory, defined as a bio-
cognitive process entwined with its technological-material manifestations
and sociocultural practices, then we can no longer build upon these bipo-
lar frameworks. Every memory is mediated by a self, with the help of arti-
ficial instruments. Truthful memories are naturally morphed; even the
most vivid, detailed, and documented memory is necessarily a selection of
modalities and thus never comprehensive. To such a concept of memory,
terms such as “true” and “false” no longer apply (if they ever did), because
memory is intrinsically a mediated phenomenon—mediated by the va-
garies of mind, technology, and culture. Rather than judging memory’s
truthful content by asking what happened, a necessary corollary to that
question is to assess its specific manifestation and (in)consistency as it
evolves over time and as it is exposed to alternative versions of true mem-
ories. Perhaps we should slightly change our focus to questions such as:
How do we know in the age of digital media which information is coming
from whom and with what intent? How do we recognize and judge infor-
mation that presents itself as personal memory or historical fact? For in-
stance, cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus cautiously introduces such
expansive definition when claiming that memory is not the sum of what
people have done but also encompasses “what they have thought, what
they have been told, what they believe.”2 I would add to this definition
that personal cultural memory is also what people have selected to record
and perceive; what they have documented and how they chose to docu-
ment it; what stories, sounds, and images they were exposed to and how
they have re-created them; how they want to remember and be remem-
bered; and how and in what form they have presented and communicated
these acts of remembrance to others.
The unlimited potential of digital technologies to combine and fuse
sensory modalities may also redefine our research questions. I already
noted the ongoing cooperation between cognitive scientists and computer
engineers in the area of human-computer interfaces, but cultural theory
plays virtually no role in this joined effort. Some of the most promising
Epilogue 179
products resulting from this collaboration are the designs of new virtual
environments that serve as simulations of real experiences.3 Multimodal
3-D environments are currently tested in the field of psychotherapy, for in-
stance to treat phobic disorders, or in courtroom settings to reconstruct ac-
tual crime scenes.4 In both cases, digital apparatuses help human memory
to perform. The vulnerability of autobiographical memory to guided
imagination in addition to the capabilities of new digital media to paint
memories in digital multimedial productions may necessitate new stan-
dards for litigation or successful therapy. Will we accept a multimedia re-
construction in the courtroom, for instance a graphic 3-D reconstruction
of a crime scene or the scene of an accident, knowing that a multimedial
representation also imposes and induces a certain version of what hap-
pened? How is human recollection affected by multimedial input? How do
cultural forms, such as televised crime-scene investigations, influence con-
crete personal memories of criminal scenes? How do computer games fea-
turing virtual chases and enemy shoot-outs affect (or interfere with) the
treatment of post-traumatic stress disorders?
If morphibility and connectivity are becoming the default mode of
mediated memories in the digital age, we need to adjust our research ques-
tions accordingly. The ontology of memory, like the ontology of media,
used to be firmly rooted in metaphors such as the archive or the repository.
Memory was considered something we have or lack, retain or lose, but it
was never a state of becoming. In conjunction with this metaphor, we speak
of retrieving or recalling past events, implying that the thing to be recalled
is already there waiting to be retrieved. But with the implementation of dig-
ital media tools in the everyday construction of memory, our very concept
of how memory functions is technically and metaphorically grounded in
different parameters. Does this mean we should now define autobiographi-
cal memory by its “track changes” mode in addition to its “save file” mode?
Acknowledging the track changes mode as a valid mindset may boost the
appreciation of new cultural practices, such as the lifelog and the photo-
blog, which favor the dynamics of recording over the desire to freeze the
past. Adjunct to its morphibility, the networked lifelog emphasizes mem-
ory’s connective function in addition to its commemorative use. A collec-
tion of digitized personal files stands in perpetual dialogue with the infinite
basin of files on the Internet—a repository that is by definition dynamic.
Instead of retrieving memories, we may now speak of navigating memory
180 Epilogue
files, concurrently changing the emphasis from static sources to mutant

items and from a closed mental space to an endless, open reservoir of (pri-
vate and public) dossiers. Indeed, accepting the mutability and connectivity
of memory items entails we recognize the ability of the mind and our navi-
gational instruments to change and be changed, and this in turn affects the
content and status of memories. Memories are never a simple inheritance
from the past: people make media to shape memories, and memories shape
people to make media. Recollection is also a form of reconnection, as men-
tal and cultural processes are involved in the digital restructuring of per-
sonal memory.
Facing contemporary phenomena such as morphibility, multimodal-
ity, and connectivity augments the urgency to rethink research questions
and conceptual models to study human memory. Through the prism of me-
diated memories, I offer an analytical tool that supports cross-disciplinary
thinking. So far, academic approaches to memory have focused either on au-
tobiographical or on collective memory; academics have examined memory
either as a mental activity or as a cultural activity, generally regarding media
as instrumental aids to support these activities. The proposed model tries to
bridge these schisms by defining memory as an intrinsically mediating ac-
tivity: it acts as a go-between between individual and collective identity, be-
tween mental and cultural imaging processes, and between the past and
future. It is remarkable how some of the central terms used in memory re-
search, terms such as “identity,” “trauma,” “manipulation,” “heritage,” “ex-
perience,” and “images,” are appropriated very differently in divergent
disciplines. And yet their interrelatedness is crucial to neurobiologists,
psychologists, media theorists, and historians alike, and it becomes even
more so as their changing meanings epitomize larger historical transfor-
mations.
The morphibility or changeability of identity as a feature not only
of our minds but also of our bodies can hardly be confined to its mental
or technical strata only. The volatility of cultural identity—as a result of
migrant flows and increased mobility—is immanent to this same condi-
tion, as people’s psychological and physical view idea of self can hardly
be separated from their idea of belonging to a group (ethnic, genera-
tional, and so forth). Most ardently illustrated by the artwork of Nancy
Burson’s race machine, introduced in Chapter 5, which promotes the
morphing of racial features in bodies, pictures, and cultural identities all
Epilogue 181
at the same time, I have argued how the morphing of memory is part of a
more general cultural condition—a tendency to control and stimulate the
active shaping of identity. People identify themselves and the way they
look by studying the looks of ancestors, relatives, and peers, creating con-
tinuity by discovering roots. Media technologies are a means to help us
discover and create, reconstruct and re-create a sense of self in the context
of historical continuities.
Trauma is another term monopolized by psychiatrists and psycholo-
gists but inevitably appropriated by historians and cultural theorists to the-
orize the propensities of human memory. Psychologists, for instance, are
interested in how the experience of war or violence in a child’s past may
affect that person’s present and future state of mind, whereas historians
transfer the term trauma to study collective wounds caused by war or vio-
lence and how we cope with them in revising our histories. The proposed
connectionist model encourages the study of trauma as a mediated experi-
ence: the Afghan refugee’s angst or Somalian war child’s trauma are both
mediated by the (lack of) personal photographs showing a happy family
and by the news photographs documenting scenes of continuous warmon-
gering. The exposure to—but also the manipulation of—public photo-
graphs with the help of media technologies creates building blocks in the
construction of personal identity and cultural heritage. By the same token,
the (manipulability of) pictures and personal narratives may be a creative
tool in the process of healing and coming to terms with traumatic memo-
ries. “Connectivity” and “communicating” may be new key words in the
definition of personal cultural memory, terms that remind us of the rele-
vance of memory to our well-being as humans.
When researchers face new phenomena and thus new challenges,
they tend to look for common ground that may help them test proven hy-
potheses against new paradigms. In the future, memory research may in-
clude horizons that currently escape a scientist’s immediate disciplinary
scope. That is why I never attempted to define what memory is but instead
focused on its mediatedness. In designing an expansive model for memory
research, I worked from the assumption that memory always serves a pur-
pose and that it works toward a certain goal: we remember because we
want to make meaning out of life. Memory makes meaning by mediating
between disparate abstract and concrete entities: the self and the world, the
mortal individual and the immortal collective, the family’s past and the
182 Epilogue
future generation. Memory is only purposeful if it mediates and thus con-

nects unknown entities to known ones; we trace memory as a dynamic
mechanism, moving between ends and manifesting in changing forms.
That is why I chose to examine mediated memories at a time of techno-
logical and cultural transition: not because digital technology is in any way
more conducive to memory than analog technology, but because a state of
transformation is better able than a steady state to show how mental, tech-
nical, and cultural aspects of memory alter in conjunction. In the future
of memory research, it will be a challenge to attune any model to mutual
interests and insights of collaborating researchers.
Memory is no longer what we remember it to be, but then, memory
probably never quite was how we remembered it and may never be what it
is now. The present is the only prism we have to look through to assess
memory’s past and future, and it is important we look through this con-
temporary prism from all possible angles to appreciate memory’s com-
plexity and beauty. As I have tried to show in the preceding chapters,
neurobiological and cognitive psychological theories of autobiographical
memory are surprisingly akin to social-constructivist and humanities ap-
proaches to cultural memory, and yet there is little incentive for collabora-
tion until new phenomena call for new tactics. Mediated Memories in the
Digital Age lays the groundwork for an interdisciplinary approach, with
the hope that its framework will be built upon and expanded.
Notes
chapter 1
1. Although there are some subtle differences between the words “personal”
and “autobiographical” in connection to memory, most psychologists and neuro-
scientists use them interchangeably. For stylistic reasons I alternate between the
terms “autobiographical” and “personal,” yet I strongly prefer the term “personal”
in connection to cultural memory, for reasons to be explained later in this chapter,
toward the end of the second section.
2. For more information on the development of the autobiographical self (in
relation to the biological self) see Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens:
Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1999),
222–33. I further elaborate on this theory in Chapters 2 and 4.
3. Susan Bluck, “Autobiographical Memory: Exploring Its Functions in Every-
day Life,” Memory 11, no. 2 (2003): 113–23.
4. Katherine Nelson, “Narrative and Self, Myth and Memory: Emergence of
the Cultural Self,” in Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative
Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Robyn Fivush and Catherine
Haden (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003), 3–25. In this article, Nelson lists
the different levels of self-understanding psychologists have long recognized: in
addition to a cognitive and social sense of self, experts have distinguished repre-
sentational and narrative levels of understanding. See also Katherine Nelson, “Self
and Social Functions: Individual Autobiographical Memory and Collective Nar-
rative,” Memory 11, no. 2 (2003): 125–36.
5. Nelson, “Narrative and Self,” 7.
6. Nelson, “Self and Social Functions,” 127.
7. See Qi Wang and Jens Brockmeier, “Autobiographical Remembering as
Cultural Practice: Understanding the Interplay between Memory, Self and Cul-
ture,” Culture and Psychology 8, no. 1 (2002): 45–64, 45.
8. Cultural differences of remembering between parents and children of Chinese
and American descent have been studied by Wang and Brockmeier, “Autobiograph-
ical Remembering as Cultural Practice,” 54–60. Differences between American and
184 Notes to Chapter 1
Japanese ways of memory recording—in this case amateur photography—is the

subject of Richard Chalfen and Mai Murui, “Print Club Photography in Japan:
Framing Social Relationships,” Visual Sociology 16, no. 1 (2001): 55–73.
9. My definition comes close to what Annette Kuhn terms “memory work” in
“A Journey through Memory,” in Memory and Methodology, ed. Susannah Rad-
stone (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 183–96. She defines “memory work” as an “active
practice of remembering which takes an inquiring attitude towards the past and
the activity of its (re)construction through memory” (186). Memory work is in
fact a series of activities (inscribing or recording, interpreting, narrating, recalling,
and so on) that may involve a number of memory products (ranging from strings
of hair or a child’s tooth to pictures, videos, and diaries). For reasons explained
later in this chapter, I restrict my focus (unlike Kuhn) to memory objects result-
ing from the interference of media tools.
10. Analyzing the nature of (digital) pictures on our mindset and cultural ac-
tivity, Ron Burnett in How Images Think (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005) ob-
serves that “the intersections of creativity, viewing, and critical reflection are
fundamental to the very act of engaging with images in all forms’ defying the
myth of the passive viewer” (13).
11. Think, for instance, of popular cultural products like the Bridget Jones’s Di-
ary and America’s Funniest Home Videos, which both expound on personal mem-
ory forms, even if some of these forms are fictional.
12. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press 1992), 34. Halbwachs’s famous work was originally written in 1925 as Les
cadres sociaux de la memoire and published in 1950 as La memoire collective by
Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.
13. The reprint of La memoire collective, in 1968, also contained Halbwachs’s
unfinished essay “La memoire collective chez les musiciens.”
14. See, for instance, Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
15. Such connections can also be built around archival systems; these so-
called communities of records signify how collectivity is construed by means of
(re)positioning documents in archives. See Eric Ketelaar, “Sharing: Collected
Memories in Communities of Records,” Archives and Manuscripts 23 (2005):
44–61.
16. David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern
Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).
17. According to Gross, in Lost Time, the individual is still free to remember
outside these general frames and create a divergent or oppositional memory that
would “recall things about the past that are not commonly thought about and per-
haps not even missed in the population at large” (134).
18. The observation that individual narratives, or stories of personal experi-
ences, have become increasingly important in twentieth-century Euro-American
Notes to Chapter 1 185
culture is corroborated by quite a few psychologists. For instance, Katherine Nel-

son, in “Self and Social Functions,” remarks that in current culture “the vanishing
of common communal narratives is replaced with a cacophony of personal sto-
ries, which makes it necessary for individuals to each add their own unique self
story” (134).
19. Andrew Hoskins, “Signs of the Holocaust: Exhibiting Memory in a Medi-
ated Age,” Media, Culture and Society 25, no. 1 (2003): 7–22, 10.
20. Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History
Foundation right after completing his film Schindler’s List. The mega-project ini-
tiated and supervised the audio-visual recording of over fifty thousand testimonies
of Holocaust survivors from fifty-seven countries and in thirty-two languages.
More information on the project can be found at http://www.vhf.org (accessed
December 21, 2006).
21. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amne-
sia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 255.
22. Assuming its representational nature, Huyssen firmly locates memory in
the realm of culture rather than in the realm of cognition or sociality. He ipso
facto rejects a potential distinction between living and artificial memory; if mem-
ory is by nature a representation of the past, it can only be examined by means of
its discursive or material manifestations. Considered as representations of the
past, the distinction between individual and collective memory becomes less dis-
tinct. Although I am largely sympathetic to the idea of memory as inherently a
representation of our individual and collective pasts, I also find this concept lack-
ing. Collective memory is often caught in terms of content or message, whereas I
prefer to regard it as a stilled confrontation between individuality and collectivity
in which intention and control are keywords.
23. See Ernst van Alphen, “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory,
and Trauma,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal,
Jonathan Crew, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New En-
gland, 1999), 24–38.
24. Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Iden-
tity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–133, 126.
25. Aleida Assmann, “Four Formats of Memory—From Individual to Collec-
tive Forms of Constructing the Past” (lecture, presented at the conference “The-
atres of Memory,” University of Amsterdam, January 28, 2004).
26. I should note here that Aleida Assmann pairs off individual with social
memory on one end and groups political with cultural memory on the other; as a
historian, she is mostly interested in the latter. The term “social memory” is more
or less appropriated by sociologists, who have delineated the field of social mem-
ory studies as their turf, even if recent theories insist on the close interrelation-
ships between various types of memory research. For an illuminating overview,
see Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From Collective
Memory to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of

Sociology 24 (1998): 105–40. Olick and Robbins define social memory studies as
“a general rubric for inquiry into the varieties of forms through which we are
shaped by the past, conscious and unconscious, public and private, material and
communicative, consensual and challenged. We refer to distinct sets of mnemonic
practices in various social rites, rather than to collective memory as a thing” (112).
27. On the idea of the Anne Frank museum as an act or “performance” of col-
lective memory, see Sonja Neef, “Authentic Events: The Diaries of Anne Frank
and the Alleged Diaries of Adolf Hitler,” in Sign Here! Handwriting in the Age of
Technological Reproduction, ed. Sonja Neef, José van Dijck, and Eric Ketelaar
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006): 23–50.
28. Instead of speaking about “retention” or “loss,” Andrew Hoskins, in “New
memory: Mediating History,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21,
no. 4 (2001): 333–46, concludes that it is more appropriate to consider our relation
to the past “in terms of its mediation or remediation in the global present” (335).
29. Francis Yates, in The Art of Memory (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1966), points at the significance of photography in the devaluation of memory.
The advent of mechanically reproduced images was thought to lead to the de-
struction of truth and was therefore thought to undermine human memory.
30. Media theorist Walter Ong, in his renowned book Orality and Literacy:
The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), argues that a memory
stilled in words, whether spoken or written, is just as “technologized” as a memory
packaged in electronic images; both combine external technologies and internal
techniques to help structure our remembrance.
31. See, for instance, Mitchell Stephens, The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the
Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Stephens argues that the popu-
larity of the image could only rise at the expense of the written word. Elsewhere,
I have extensively countered Stephens’s and others’ assumption that writing and
imaging should be defined as opposites in a communicative system. See José van
Dijck, “No Images without Words” in The Image Society. Essays on Visual Culture,
ed. Frits Gierstberg and Warna Oosterbaan (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2002),
34–43.
32. For a basic introduction to McLuhan’s ideas on memories as extension of
the body, see Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), particularly
chapters 1, 2, 28, 30, and 31.
33. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de memoire,”Repre-
sentations 26 (1989): 69–85.
34. Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1992).
35. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. 1, Past and Present in Contempo-
rary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), 25.
36. This double take is not unlike the modernist tendency, observed by
Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993), to simultaneously insist on hybridity and purification—holding on
to the ontological division between human and nonhumans (things, machines)
while also canceling out their separation. The invincibility of these arguments is
possible only because they hold on to the absolute dichotomy between the order
of Nature and that of Society, a dichotomy that “is itself only possible because
they never consider the work of purification and that of mediation together”
(40). On the theory of technology and social change, see Latour’s Aramis, or the
Love of Technology (London: Harvard University Press, 1996).
37. Kuhn, “A Journey through Memory,” 183.
38. Steven Rose, The Making of Memory (London: Bantam Press, 1992),
91–96.
39. Richard Chalfen, “Snapshots ‘R’ Us: The Evidentiary Problematic of
Home Media,” Visual Studies 17, no. 2 (2002): 141–49, 144.
40. John Urry, “How Societies Remember the Past,” in Theorizing Muse-
ums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, ed. S. Macdonald
and G. Fyfe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 45–68.
41. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular
Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 5.
42. For a very interesting historical exploration of the notion of time in indi-
vidual remembering, see the work of Douwe Draaisma, particularly his book
Waarom de tijd sneller gaat als je ouder wordt (Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij,
2001). For a specific study on the (historical) use of metaphors in relation to mem-
ory, see Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
43. I am referring here to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s renowned the-
ory of metaphors as described in Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago Uni-
versity Press, 1980).
44. John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Me-
dia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
45. Thompson, in The Media and Modernity, is obviously concerned with the
double-bind that constitutes the process of self-formation in modernity—where
the self is caught between an increasing dependency on media and an increasing
need for self-reflexivity to define itself as part of a larger world (233).
46. The obvious theoretical link to Gilles Deleuze’s theory on the relation be-
tween time, movement, and image comes to mind. I extensively elaborate on this
theory in Chapter 6.
47. Besides sight and sound, other sensory perceptions, such as smell or touch,
form a trigger for later recall. Few contemporary theorists have stressed the role of
the senses in cultural memory. See, for instance, C. Nadia Seremetakis, ed., The
Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (Boulder,

CO: Westview Press, 1994).
48. Thomas Elsaesser “ ‘Where Were You When . . . ?’ or, ‘I Phone, Therefore
I Am,’ ” PMLA 118, no. 1 (2003): 120–2, 122.
49. Marita Sturken, in Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epi-
demic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997), defines cultural memory as “the memory that is shared outside the avenues
of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued
with cultural meaning” (3).
50. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 5–6.
51. Sturken argues in Tangled Memories: “I therefore want to distinguish be-
tween cultural memory, personal memory, and official historical discourse. I am
not concerned in this book with memories insofar as they remain individual” (3).
52. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Re-
membrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press,
2004), 21.
53. People build up special relationships with the television programs they tape
and the music they rerecord for themselves. For an interesting view on the mean-
ing of self-taping television programs, see Kim Bjarkman, “To Have and To
Hold: The Video Collector’s Relationship with an Eternal Medium,” Television
and New Media 5, no. 3 (2004): 217–46.
chapter 2
1. Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel
Gondry (Universal City, CA: Focus Features, 2004).
2. The movie’s producers have created a mock website of the company Lacuna
Inc., available at: http://www.lacunainc.com (accessed December 23, 2006).
3. See John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
4. For an eminent and thorough historical analysis of metaphors of memory,
see Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The library and archive as meta-
phors are described in chapter 2, “Memoria: Memory as Writing.”
5. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1911). Originally published in 1896. The original manuscript of Matter and Mem-
ory was published in 1896.
6. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 197.
7. Of course this view is widely disputed as the age-old distinction of mind
and brain remains a hotly contested issue. For a neuroscientific take on this issue,
see Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Or-
lando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), chapter 5.
8. For an illuminating introduction to neuroscientific and genetic “machines”

of memory, see Rusiko Bourtchouladze, Memories Are Made of This: How Mem-
ory Works in Humans and Animals (New York, Columbia University Press, 2002).
9. The metaphor of “hardware” to describe the matter of memory may be as
tricky as the book retrieval metaphor. It presumes that the brain is a fixed set of
neurons and genes that remains unaltered when “software” is run on its electron-
ically wired system. Yet the living cells a brain is composed of are constantly
changing due to external and internal stimuli. Brain and mind work in tandem to
produce mental images, moods, and feelings, and they mutually inform their al-
tered states. Rather than deploying the term “hardware,” I resort to the metaphor
of “mindware,” a concept introduced by Andy Clark, in Mindware: An Introduc-
tion to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
to counter the potential misconception anchored in the computer metaphor.
10. The metaphor of the orchestra describing the mind’s functions comes from
Antonio Damasio, who coins the image in his book The Feeling of What Happens:
Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1999),
216. However, whereas Damasio restricts the use of this metaphor to the neurosci-
entific aspects of the mind, I expand its meaning to include objects external to the
body as well as cultural aspects that affect the mind’s memory functions.
11. For psychological studies on autobiographical memory and reminiscence,
see, for instance, Susan Bluck and Linda J. Levine, “Reminiscence as Autobio-
graphical Memory: A Catalyst for Reminiscence Theory Development,” Aging
and Society 18 (1998): 185–208. See also Linda J. Levine, “Reconstructing Memo-
ries for Emotions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 126 (1997): 176–77.
12. Steven Johnson, “The Science of Eternal Sunshine: You Can’t Erase Your
Boyfriend from Your Brain, but the Movie Gets the Rest of It Right,”Slate, March
22, 2004, available at: http://www.slate.com/id/2097502/ (accessed April 18, 2006).
13. Christopher Nolan, Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan (Los Ange-
les: Newmarket Films, 2000). The film is based on Christopher Nolan’s brother
Jonathan Nolan’s short story Memento Mori.
14. See also Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience
of Everyday Life (New York: Scribner, 2004); Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the
Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
15. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 88–98.
16. Experiments in which subjects were asked to invoke a particularly strong
emotional episode from their personal memory confirmed Damasio’s theory; certain
invoked feelings corresponded to certain changes of neuroactivity spotted in specific
regions of the brain. For a description of the experiment, see Damasio, Looking for
Spinoza, 95–101. The mapping of body states significantly altered during the process
of feeling, evidenced by the electrical monitors of positron-emission tomography
(PET) scans registering the seismic activity of emotion in all experimental subjects
before the actual experience of feeling (sadness, joy) had begun.
17. Strictly speaking, the destruction of physical objects patients bring into
Lacuna’s office should be redundant, because the internal, mental pictures from
which the unpleasant memories derive no longer constitute the link between the
brain and the feeling or emotion proper.
18. Don Slater, quoted by Deborah Chambers in Representing the Family (Lon-
don: Sage, 2001), refers to the results of a market research survey in which 39 per-
cent of respondents claimed their family photos to be their most treasured
possessions (82).
19. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Verso, 1979).
On Benjamin’s writings on memory objects, see also Esther Leslie, “Souvenirs and
Forgetting: Walter Benjamin’s Memory-Work,” in Material Memories, ed. Marius
Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 107–23.
20. Belinda Barnet, “The Erasure of Technology in Cultural Critique,” Fi-
breculture 1 (2003), http://journal.fibreculture.org/ (accessed December 23, 2006).
21. John Sutton, “Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things,” in Pre-
figuring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, ed. Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson,
and Alessio Cavallara (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 130–41, 138.
22. Clark, Mindware, 141.
23. L. H. Martin, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault
(London: Tavistock, 1988), 16.
24. My notion of sociocultural practices finds a middle ground between what
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1977), refers to as “habitus” and what philosopher Michel
de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984), rearticulates as “the practice of everyday life.” Bourdieu’s “habitus” is
associated with the internalized, practical knowledge by which people operate in
stable, social structures and situations; De Certeau uses the term “practice” to em-
phasize the dynamics of people evolving in social structures, changing them and
adapting to new ones. When I use the term “sociocultural practices,” I am refer-
ring to both static structures and dynamic changes. However, I am much more
specific in my denotation of the word “practice,” referring to a set of practical,
technical, social, and cultural skills needed to operate the “technologies of self”
Foucault identifies. These sociocultural practices are grounded both in materiality
and technology (in this case media technologies) as well as in the knowledge of
their practical use (e.g., social norms and discourses).
25. Hartmut Winkler, a German media scholar, presents a theory of cultural
continuity by explaining the translation of certain cultural practices into “deposits”
(defined by technology and its use) that turn back into practices. Through constant
reinterpretation and reshaping of practices and objects, the continuity of culture is
secured, even if constantly morphing. See “Discourses, Schemata, Technology,
Monuments: Outline for a Theory of Cultural continuity,” Configurations, 10
(2002): 91–109.
26. Anthropologist Edwin Hutchins, in Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1996), argues in contrast to the standard view that culture affects
the cognition of individuals, that cultural activity systems have cognitive proper-
ties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals
who participate in them.
27. Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch, and David Morley, “Information and
Communication Technologies and the Moral Economy of the Household,” in
Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, ed. Roger Sil-
verstone and Eric Hirsch (London: Routledge, 1992), 14–31.
28. Notions of self and family, as I argue Chapter 6, are constructed and re-
flected through media technologies. Media technologies, as Silverstone, Hirsch,
and Morley argue in “Information and Communication Technologies,” are never
fixed instruments, just as media objects are never immutable items. Video cameras
may be appropriated differently by various members of a household, and it is not
uncommon that each member of a household composes his or her own individual
photo album in addition to the family album kept by a parent.
29. Positron-emission tomography (PET) is a scanning technology that with
the help of radioactive isotopes allows one to study the brain functions in vivo;
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) makes it possible to record static
images of activity in the brain that subsequently can be turned into a moving film.
30. With the digitization of medical diagnostics came a stronger articulation
of images as transparent indicators of ailments, even though it has been abun-
dantly argued that (medical) imaging has rendered the body opaque rather than
transparent. For an elaboration of this argument, see José van Dijck, The Trans-
parent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Seattle: University of Wash-
ington Press, 2005), chapter 1.
31. For an insightful analysis of how brain images like those from PET scans
have served in courts and popular culture as “objective” evidence of mental illness
and abnormality, see Joseph Dumit, “Objective Brains, Prejudicial Images,” Sci-
ence in Context 12, no. 1 (1999): 173–201. See also Brent Garland, ed., Neuroscience
and the Law: Brain, Mind, and the Scales of Justice (New York: Dana Press, 2004).
32. Neurologists’ and neuroscientists’ infatuation with fMRI as a way to de-
termine pathological and criminal behavior is also touted as the new “phrenology”
of medicine; see William R. Uttal, The New Phrenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2003).
33. Many science fiction movies, from The Matrix to The Thirteenth Floor,
prophesy the future of human bodies to be one where uploading the mind into
the computer helps transcend the flesh, ushering into a kind of wired universe
where the mind-machine survives autonomously. The merger of brain and com-
puter implicitly hails the triumph of informatics over flesh, of software and
hardware over “wetware.” N. Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman:
Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999), rightly criticizes theorists such as Hans Moravec and Ray
Kurzweil whose affection for “disembodied minds” and “virtual brains” seems to
dispose of the body as a locus for mental activity. “Posthumanists,” as Hayles calls
them, are blind to the materiality of informatics and indifferent to the embodi-
ment of digital media. The idea of human memory being digitized and transposed
to a locus outside the brain is an immensely popular trope in the twenty-first cen-
tury, informing both visionary science projects and science fiction movies like
Brain Destroyer and Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain.
34. Eugene Thacker, “What is Biomedia?” Configurations 11 (2003): 47–79.
35. Ibid., 76–77.
36. Genomics is a case in point: the computations of genetic sequences are car-
ried out by computers, and thus digital information becomes an impetus for re-
dressing our knowledge of genetic defects. For a detailed explanation of how
genomics and information interact, see José van Dijck, ImagEnation: Popular Im-
ages of Genetics (New York: New York University Press, 1998), chapter 6.
37. For an extensive analysis of how ultrasound imaging not just works to re-
configure our conceptualization of the fetus, but also affects pregnancy and the
development of the fetus, see Van Dijck, “Ultrasound and the Visible Fetus,” in
The Transparent Body, 100–117.
38. There is a hilarious scene in Eternal Sunshine where Dr. Mierzwiak asks Joel
to unleash his painful memories of Clementine by talking about her into the micro-
phone of an old-fashioned cassette recorder. Later in the movie, Joel and Clemen-
tine are confronted with their embarrassing monologues when the magnetic tapes
with their voices are returned to them through a disgruntled, revengeful secretary
after she has discovered the “erased” love affair with her boss, Dr. Mierzwiak.
39. Gregory Ulmer, for instance, treats (digital) memory as a reservoir for cre-
ative invention and intervention—new media technologies allowing the reorder-
ing and reshaping of digital imprints of the past, whether pictures, sounds, or
texts. See Gregory Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
40. A concise and insightful article in the New York Times provides an
overview of the many problems involved in storing, preserving, and retrieving
digital memory files for the next generation. See Katie Hafner, “Even Digital
Memories Can Fade,” New York Times, November 10, 2004 (online edition,
www.nytimes.com).
41. See Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Me-
dia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
chapter 3
1. Susan Herring, an American sociologist from Indiana University specializing
in computer-mediated communication, in a 2005 presentation, quotes the number
of weblog users from the statistics of the Perseus group at 4.12 million. This num-
ber of bloggers also includes hosted weblog services; 34 percent of these logs are
used actively. Herring, “Weblog as Genre, Weblog as Sociability,” available at:
http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/ssc.ppt (accessed April 19, 2006).
2. Initially, blogs were either personal homepages operated by individuals,
mostly people who were interested in sharing technical and personal knowledge,
or they were websites consisting of chronological lists of links, interspersed with
information and editorialized and personal asides. For a description of the early
development of weblogs, see, for instance, We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are
Changing Our Culture, ed. John Rodzvilla (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishers,
2002); see also Charles Cheung, “A Home on the Web: Presentations of Self on
Personal Homepages,” in Web Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age,
ed. David Gauntlett (London: Arnold, 2000), 43–51.
3. Researchers of the blogosphere distinguish lifelogs from linklogs; linklog-
gers primarily post links to other websites, whereas lifeloggers primarily post de-
tails about their personal lives and everyday experiences. See Frank Schaap,
“Links, Lives, Logs: Presentation in the Dutch Blogosphere,” in Into the Blogo-
shphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs, ed. Laura Gurak, Smiljana
Antonijevio, Laurie Johnson, Clanoy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 2004), http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/ (accessed
April 18, 2006).
4. German media theorist Andreas Kitzmann, in his article “That Different
Place: Documenting the Self within Online Environments,” Biography 26, no. 1
(Winter 2003): 48–65, proposes to study media change in the context of the much
wider phenomenon of “material complexification” to understand the continuities
and changes between old and new media such as diaries and weblogs. He argues
that change is not cumulative “but [measured by] structural shifts that may lead
to growth, contraction, stasis, or a combination of all three” (51).
5. For an extensive elaboration of this theory, see Antonio Damasio, The Feel-
ing of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Orlando,
FL: Harcourt, 1999), 308, chapter 2.
6. Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (New York: Springer, 1962),
quoted by Anna Gibbs in “Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemi-
ology of Affect,” Australian Humanities Review 24 (2001). Available at: http://www
.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-December-2001/gibbs.html (accessed April
18, 2006).
7. See Gibbs, “Contagious Feelings.”
8. The diary genre has been defined as therapy or self-help, as a means of con-
fession, as a chronicle of adventurous journeys (both spiritual and physical), and
as a scrapbook for creative endeavors. Thomas Mallon, author of the standard
work, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries (New York: Ticknor and
Fields, 1984), distinguishes at least seven types of diaries and labels the various
types according to their author’s profession or character: chroniclers, travelers,

creators, confessors, and so on. Philip Lejeune, in Le pacte autobiographique (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1993), inventories various types of autobiographical writing (di-
ary, letters, autobiography) by their “morphological” features, whereas French lit-
erary theorist, Beatrice Didier, in Le Journal Intime (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1976), articulates a more general classification, based on the content of entries, be-
tween the personal or private diary (le journal intime) and the more public or fac-
tual journal. Yet another French literary scholar, Eric Marty, in L’ecriture du jour:
Le journal d’André Gide (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985), classifies diaries by their
addressees: are they strictly secret or also written for others?
9. The lifelog is as polymorphous as its paper precursor, and yet when re-
searching new functions and forms of the diary in the digital era, the old typology
in terms of content and directionality continues to inform the epistemology of the
lifelog. For instance, a Japanese study of weblogs departs from notion that they
can be classified according to their contents as “records of fact” or “expression of
sentiment” or according to their directionality as “written for oneself” or “written
for others.” See Yasuyuki Kawaura, Yoshiro Kawakami, and Kiyomo Yamashita,
“Keeping a Diary in Cyberspace,” Japanese Psychological Research 40, no. 4 (1998):
234–45. Many studies classify weblogs along binary axes of self and others, or of
personal and public, even though some recent studies tend to acknowledge how
the multiple ancestry of weblogs precludes such dichotomous classification.
10. I thank Janelle Taylor for pointing me toward several Alzheimer’s patients’
lifelogs.
11. One of the initiators of Alzheimer’s patients’ blogging efforts, Friedell was
diagnosed with AD in September 1998. A retired professor of sociology at Uni-
versity of California–Santa Barbara, he began writing and publishing about his
symptoms on his personal webpage, available at: http://members.aol.com/MorrisFF
(accessed April 18, 2006). DASNI is an Internet-based dementia advocacy and
support group whose members share and exchange their experiences and tested
remedies. Friedell’s weblog is linked to a number of patients’ weblogs.
12. Morris Friedell extensively describes this discussion, as the scans of his
brain offer anything but a conclusive diagnosis. Available at http://members.aol
.com/morrisff/Diagnosis.html (accessed December 23, 2006). He refers to a 2004
Newsday article quoting Dr. Ronald Petersen, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic:
“You can’t take any individual scan and say this person has Alzheimer’s. We have
an ethical and moral obligation not to cause undue worry or even a misdiagnosis.
The technology is evolving, but we’re not there yet.”
13. Anita Blanchard, “Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of
Community in the Julie/Julia Project,” Into the Blogoshphere: Rhetoric, Community
and Culture of Weblogs, ed. Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevio, Laurie Johnson,
Clanoy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004),
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/ (accessed April 18, 2006).
14. Chip Gerber, “My Journey,” March 2005, part 2, available at: http://
www.zarcrom.com/users/alzheimers/chip.html (accessed April 18, 2006).
15. See Mary Lockhart’s blog, available at: http://www.angelfire.com/ok4/
mari5113/index.html (accessed April 18, 2006).
16. Robert Payne, “Digital Memories, Analogues of Affect,” Scan: Journal of
Media Arts Culture 2 (2004), http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal
_id=42 (accessed April 18, 2006).
17. The term “community of records” is used by Eric Ketelaar in the context
of collective archiving. See Eric Ketelaar, “Sharing: Collected Memories in Com-
munities of Records,” Archives and Manuscripts 33 (2005): 44–61.
18. Gerber, “My Journey,” March 2005, part 3.
19. See Friedell’s weblog, available at: http://members.aol.com/MorrisFF?.
20. For a detailed description of the authenticity debate concerning Anne
Frank’s manuscript in contrast to the fabricated Adolf Hitler diaries that were dis-
covered in the 1980s, see Sonja Neef: “Authentic Events: The Diaries of Anne
Frank and the Alleged Diaries of Adolf Hitler,” in Sign Here! Handwriting in the
Age of Technological Reproduction, ed. Sonja Neef, José van Dijck, and Eric Kete-
laar (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 23–50.
21. As Canadian archivist Jane Zhang claims in “The Lingering of Handwritten
Records,” Proceedings of I-Chora Conference (International Conference on the His-
tory of Records and Archives, University of Toronto, October 2–4, 2003), 38–45, an
individual’s handwriting is habitually viewed as “his own personal mark, which dis-
tinguishes him not only from others, but also from his own past and future” (43).
22. Sonja Neef, “Die (rechte) Schrift und die (linke) Hand,” Kodikas/Ars
Semiotica 25, no. 1 (2002): 159–76.
23. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995).
24. Friedrich Kittler, in his famed Film, Gramophone, Typewriter (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), states that the typewriter disrupted the inti-
macy of handwritten expression, as it “tears writing from the essential realm of
the hand, i.e., the realm of the word” (198). It should be noted, though, that this
idea does not originally stem from Kittler; he is referring to Martin Heidegger’s
Parmenides lecture.
25. For an intricate philosophical explanation of how technology and body are
intertwined in the digital act of writing, see Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis:
Technology beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
26. Emily Nussbaum, in “My So-Called Blog,” New York Times Magazine,
January 11, 2004, online version at (www.nytimes.com), states: “A LiveJournal is a
Blurty is a Xanga is a DiaryLand.”
27. However, there is another side to this techno-cultural transformation that of-
ten is underemphasized. The culture of reciprocation is not solely based on linking the
self to the Internet, but it is also based on linking the Internet to the self. Tracing
cultural or political preferences of other bloggers, one can decide to connect to people
with similar tastes and preferences; it is precisely this technological feature that makes
weblogs interesting for marketers. With the use of fairly simple software applications
like AllConsuming.net, it becomes increasingly easy to find correlations between blog-
gers and the cultural products they mention via links or sidebars: books, music, televi-
sion programs, movies, and so forth. On the interlinking of weblogs for commercial
purposes, see Erik Benson, “All Consuming Web Services,” O’Reilly Webservices,
May 7, 2003, http://www.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/05/27/allconsuming.html (ac-
cessed April 18, 2006).
28. Tracking software allows a glimpse of the patterns and trends that emerge
out of the topics shared by a group. Coupled with vast databases like those of Ama-
zon and Google, the possibilities for polling and marketing research are endless, ex-
plaining Google’s eagerness to buy start-up companies like Blogger. Google bought
Pyra labs, one of the first start-up companies that designed blogger software, in
2003. For details on this transaction, see Leander Kahney, “Why Did Google Want
Blogger?” Wired News, February 22, 2003, http://www.wired.com/news/technology.
29. Mallon, A Book of One’s Own, xvi.
30. On the importance of the addressee in diaries, see Marty, L’ecriture du
jour, 87.
31. William M. Decker, in Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before
Telecommunications (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), theorizes
the evolution of epistolary writing in the United States; he observes that letters,
much like diaries, carry the aura of a private genre, whereas the diary genre en-
codes itself according to public standards: “What we identify as the private life is
a conventionalized and hence public construction” (6).
32. Elizabeth Yakel, in “Reading, Reporting, and Remembering: A Case Study
of the Maryknoll Sisters Diaries,” Proceedings of I-Chora Conference (International
Conference on the History of Records and Archives, University of Toronto, Oc-
tober 2–4, 2003), 142–50, describes an intriguing account of how the Maryknoll
Sisters, a religious community active between 1912 and 1967, adapted the genre as
a collective means of expression to record and exchange spiritual and intellectual
journeys to each other. Their record-keeping practices suited various goals, from
expressing individual beliefs to communicating information across time and space
with like-minded congregations. As Yakel phrases it: “The diaries had multiple
audiences—they were a means of internal communication within the community
and also served as a mechanism for external communication to Catholics and oth-
ers interested in their mission activities” (143).
33. Michael Piggott, archivist at the University of Melbourne, discovered
Australian archives to contain many such collective ego-documents, chronicling
important episodes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries through the
eyes of transient groups. See Michael Piggott, “Towards a History of the Aus-
tralian Diary,” Proceedings of I-Chora Conference (International Conference on
the History of Records and Archives, University of Toronto, October 2–4,

2003), 68–75.
34. As some theorists have explained, the construction of self on the Internet of-
ten results in various forms of self-glorification or narcissism, in addition to creating
multiple identities and deliberately testing those in the partial anonymous waters of
online blogging communities. See, for instance, Joanne Jacobs, “Communication over
Exposure: The Rise of Blogs as a Product of Cybervoyeurism” (paper presented at
the ANZCA conference at Brisbane, “Designing Communication for Diversity,” July
2003), available at: http://www.joannejacobs.net/pubs.html (accessed December 23,
2006).
35. As Australian sociologist David Chaney observes in Cultural Change and
Everyday Life (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002), everyday life is a creative project
“because although it has the predictability of mundane expectations, it is simultane-
ously being worked at both in the doing and in retrospective reconsideration” (52).
36. Jan Fernback, in “Legends on the Net: An Examination of Computer-
Mediated Communication as a Locus of Oral Culture,” New Media and Society 5,
no.1 (2003): 29–45, remarks that “as mediated human communication becomes
more and more non-linear, decentralized, and rooted in multimedia, the distinc-
tion between orality and literacy becomes less evident and less important” (29).
37. Nussbaum, “My So-Called Blog.”
38. Susan Herring provides this statistic in her powerpoint presentation (see
note 1), available at: http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/ssc.ppt.
39. Esther Milne, “Email and Epistolary Technologies: Presence, Intimacy,
Disembodiment,” Fibreculture 2 (2004), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue2/
issue2_milne.html (accessed April 18, 2006).
40. Fernanda Viegas, “Blog Survey: Expectations of Privacy and Accountabil-
ity,” MIT Media Lab Survey, 2004, http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/survey/
blog/results.htm (accessed April 18, 2006).
41. It may be instructive to compare blogs and blogging to the use of the mo-
bile phone. Alex Taylor and Richard Harper, in their study of teenagers’ use of
cell phones, “The Gift of the Gab? A Design-Oriented Sociology of Young Peo-
ple’s Use of Mobiles,” Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work 12, no. 3
(2003): 267–96, note how phone-mediated activities resemble established social
practices such as gift giving; the ritual of gift exchange is now extended to sym-
bolic messages (SMS or spoken), and, like the material equivalent, it is rooted in a
mental scheme of obligation and reciprocation. Through a subtle system of shared
norms for exchanging phones, rationing access to personal messages, and obliga-
tions to respond, users assign symbolic value to tangible or virtual objects.
42. In their illuminating analysis of the phenomenon, sociologists Miller and
Shepherd argue that blogging should be regarded as social action—a “new rhetori-
cal opportunity” that needs to be examined in terms of its use. See Carolyn Miller
and Dawn Shepherd. “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog,”
in Into the Blogoshphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs, ed. Laura
Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevio, Laurie Johnson, Clanoy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004). Available at: http://blog.lib.umn
.edu/blogosphere/ (accessed April 18, 2006).
43. In the case of phone conversations and text messaging, Taylor and Harper,
in “The Gift of the Gab?” found that some teenagers express the wish to store
each SMS exchange on a memory card in order to recall the experience later: the
message’s physical properties (form, content, and time and date stamp) all work in
combination to instill meaning onto the physical object.
44. According to Viegas’s “Blog Survey,” almost 75 percent of all bloggers in-
deed edit their past entries, with changes varying from punctuation and grammar
to contents and names.
45. Nussbaum notes in “My So-Called Blog” that bloggers have a “degraded
or relaxed sense of privacy,” depending on your perspective: “Their experiences
may be personal, but there is no shame in sharing . . . [and they get back] a new
kind of intimacy, a sense that they are known and listened to.”
46. Not surprisingly, more than one-third of all bloggers have gotten into
trouble because of things they have written in their blogs and the majority forgets
about defamation or liability when writing about others in networked environ-
ments. As the aforementioned MIT Media Lab Survey by Viegas shows, bloggers
are hardly concerned with the persistent nature of what they publish; the over-
whelming majority of them publish private information about themselves or
other people without thinking about legal or moral consequences.
chapter 4
1. There have been a number of psychological and cognitive studies of the
connection between emotion and individual meanings attached to music, and sev-
eral of the more important ones are surveyed in the course of this chapter. One of
the oldest and often cited studies in this respect is Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and
Meaning in Music (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961).
2. The list of studies on popular music and cultural memory and identity is re-
markably long. Most studies on collective memory and identity cover recorded mu-
sic as part of popular culture. See, for instance, George Lipsitz, Time Passages:
Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1990). For an extensive bibliography and an overview of academic
work on popular music and collective identity, see John Connell and Chris Gibson,
Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity, and Place (New York: Routledge, 2003).
3. This chapter concentrates on popular (rather than classical or experimental-
artistic) music and its affective commitment to memory, because pop music is
probably more conducive to the kind of mental mapping and narrative recall fun-
damental to the argument developed here. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to
theorize how these processes would extend to other kinds of music, which may
create a different connection to identity and memory.
4. See Jeffrey Prager, Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of
Misremembering (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 215.
5. Timothy Taylor, in Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (New
York: Routledge, 2001), puts more emphasis on the sociotechnical systems from
which recorded music emanates and how this becomes part of its history and col-
lective memory. See also David Morton, Off the Record: The Technology and Cul-
ture of Sound Recording in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 2000). Morton defines recording culture as follows: “The recording of mu-
sic is an activity that combines a very old form of cultures, the performance of
music, with a variety of technological processes to create a new form of cul-
ture. . . . What we are concerned with here is not only music captured on record
as an example of mass-produced culture but also recording as a cultural process;
not only the meaning of the content of a record, but the meaning of the practices
which developed around the act of recording” (13).
6. Started as a onetime millennium event in 1999, the Dutch national public
radio station (Radio 2) invited listeners to send in their personal top-five favorite
songs of all time, resulting in a collective Top 2000. (Available at: http://top2000
.radio2.nl/2005/site/page/homepage.) The response to this event was so over-
whelming that the station decided to repeat it the next year, and a tradition began.
In December 2004 and 2005, the national Top 2000 was selected by well over one
million Dutch citizens who sent in their personal top-five songs. The number of
public participants is unprecedented in the history of mediated events in The
Netherlands. In 2004, almost 6.5 million people listened to the radio broadcast,
5 million people watched the accompanying daily television shows, and the web-
site registered 9.2 million page views in just five days. Cast against a population of
16 million, the event engaged more than half of all Dutch people twelve years and
older. The comments used in this chapter are derived from the 2004 database; this
database is no longer publicly available but is archived by Radio 2. Comments
were originally in Dutch; they were translated by me and I have identified the re-
spondents in the same way they identified themselves on the (public) website. I
thank Kees Toering, station manager and initiator of the Top 2000 for making all
statistics and archives available to me.
7. Music turns out to be an important contextual element in human recall; clin-
ical research shows that recall is optimal when people hear the same music during
the experiencing and recalling of events. See W. R. Balch and B. S. Lewis, “Threads
of Music in the Tapestry of Memory,” Memory and Cognition 21 (1996): 21–8.
8. Thomas Turino, in “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A
Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music,” Ethnomusicology 43, no. 2 (1999): 221–55, ar-
gues that identities are at once individual and social and that music is a key re-
source for realizing personal and collective identities at the same time.
9. Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 14.
10. Friedrich Kittler, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999) describes the historical tendency to regard the gramophone
as an instrument of repetition and faithfulness; Freud took this very literally by ex-
plaining how “the unconscious coincides with electric oscillations” (89).
11. Lisa Gitelman, “How Users Define New Media: A History of the Amuse-
ment Phonograph,” in Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, ed.
David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 61–80, 65.
12. American neuroscientist Rusiko Bourtchouladze argues in Memories Are
Made of This: How Memory Works in Humans and Animals (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002) that all memories start as episodic, but only unique expe-
riences survive as time goes by. “Those that do not have freshness and characteris-
tic flavor tend to go downhill with time” (28).
13. For a detailed explanation of this argument, see H. Baumgartner, “Re-
membrances of Things Past: Music, Autobiographical Memory, and Emotion,”
Advances in Consumer Research 19 (1992): 613–20.
14. I have tried to paraphrase the points Antonio Damasio makes about emo-
tions and feelings with regard to memory in The Feeling of What Happens: Body
and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1999),
183–94.
15. See Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 188.
16. See Turino, “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience,” 224.
17. See also Simon Frith, who, in Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular
Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), observes that music, especially
during adolescence and teenage years, tends to be retained in connection to in-
tense personal experiences; particular recordings are often considered “our songs”
by a group or collective focused on identity building and enhancement.
18. See Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 123–24.
19. A few cognitive psychological studies have shown how older adults’ mem-
ory grows more positive over the years. As Quinn Kennedy, Mara Mather, and
Laura Carstensen show in “The Role of Motivations in the Age–Related Positivity
Effect in Autobiographical Memory,” Psychological Science 15, no. 3 (1994):
208–14, older adults are more motivated than younger adults to remember their
past in emotionally satisfying ways, and older adults’ positive bias in reconstruc-
tive memory reflects their motivation to regulate emotional experience.
20. Geoffrey O’Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imag-
ined Life (New York: Counterpoint, 2004), 16.
21. American clinical psychologists Matthew Schulkind, Laura Hennis, and
David Rubin, in “Music, Emotion and Autobiographical Memory: They’re Playing
Your Song,” Memory and Cognition 27, no. 6 (1999): 948–55, tested how various age
groups remember through music. For their experiment, the researchers tested two
groups of adults: younger adults between eighteen and twenty-one years of age and
older adults between sixty-five and seventy years of age. They made them listen to a
series of songs that were popular between 1935 and 1994 but only appeared on the hit
lists during a defined period (in contrast to evergreens). The subjects were asked
whether each song reminded them of a general period or a specific event from their
lives.
22. Connell and Gibson, Sound Tracks, 222–23.
23. At this point, I will not enter the discussion whether this intergenerational
longing concerns a generation or a specific time frame, such as a decade. Joseph
Kotarba, in “Rock ’n’ Roll Music as a Timepiece,” Symbolic Interaction 25, no. 3
(2002): 397–404, argues that the concept of cohort is more useful than the con-
cept of the decade for an interpretive analysis of musical reminiscence.
24. See Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza. Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling
Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), 93–96. Also see the more detailed descrip-
tion in Chapter 2.
25. Barbra Misztal, in Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead UK: Open
University Press, 2003) identifies this as generational memory: “As generation fol-
lows generation, each receives an inheritance from its predecessor, and this intergen-
erational transmission, or tradition, is a foundation of societal continuity” (84).
26. Mark Katz, in Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) and Eric W. Rothenbuhler and
John Durham Peters, in “Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory,”
Musical Quarterly 81, no. 2 (1997): 242–64, all discuss the significance of (vinyl)
materiality in the age of phonography in contrast to the pre-phonographic and
post-phonographic era. Like Katz, Rothenbuhler and Peters emphasize the impor-
tant role of technology in the history of recorded music.
27. On the material temporality of recording, see the discussion on “triple
temporality” in chapter 6 of Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2003).
28. In chapter 4 of his book Television: Technology and Cultural Form
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1974), Raymond Williams ex-
plains the term “private mobilization.”
29. Joe Tacchi, in his article “Radio Texture: Between Self and Others,” in Ma-
terial Cultures: Why Some Things Matter, ed. Daniel Miller (London: UCL Press,
1998), 25–45, points at how hearing favorite songs on the radio is different than
playing them on your own stereo. Hearing a song on the radio, as Eric W. Rothen-
buhler argues in “Commercial Radio as Communication,” Journal of Communica-
tion 46 (1996): 125–43, is a moment when the symbolic activity of the other enters
into the field of contingencies of the self.
30. Joseph Auner, “Making Old Machines Speak: Images of Technology in Re-
cent Music,” ECHO: A Music-Centered Journal 2, no. 2 (2000), http://www.humnet
.ucla.edu/echo (accessed April 19, 2006).
31. At the earliest stages of digitization, Alan Goodwin, in “Sample and

Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction,” Critical Quarterly 30, no.
3 (1988): 34–49, already argued for a new postmodernist theory of musical cre-
ativity, based upon the new digitally based cultural practice of sampling. How-
ever, the politics and aesthetics of sampling fall outside the boundaries of this
chapter.
32. Katz, Capturing Sound, 171.
33. Tia de Nora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 46–74.
34. See, for instance, Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular
Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
35. Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management
of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg 2000), 40.
36. Websites offering mix-and-burn software (such as iTunes, Blaze Audio, The
Music Tablet) display a tendency to address users as “interactive creators” who
“transform music buying into an instant creative experience.” Art of the Mix, a web-
site that promotes the swapping of mixed CDs, lists a large number of personal mo-
tivations for creating playlists and burning them onto a CD, including “the romantic
mix, the break-up mix, the hangover mix, the airplane mix, and the sick-in-bed
mix,” to match fleeting moods and personal circumstances. See Art of the Mix, avail-
able at: http://www.artofthemix.org/writings/history.asp (accessed April 19, 2006).
37. A number of studies using undergraduates as research objects point out
how current mood influences memory. See, for instance, Gordon Bower and
Joseph Forgas’s article “Affect, Memory, and Social Cognition,” in Cognition and
Emotion, ed. Joseph Forgas, Eric Eich, and Gordon Bower (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 87–168. On the relation between age and (positive) remem-
bering, Mara Mather, in “Aging and Emotional Memory,” in Memory and
Emotion, ed. Daniel Reisberg and Paula Hertel (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), 272–307, concludes that among younger adults, negative mood increases
the likelihood of remembering negative information.
38. Jonathan Sterne contends in his article “MP3 as Cultural Artifact,” New
Media and Society, 8, 5 (2006): 825–42, that the MP3 is a cultural artifact in its own
right; in line with Sterne’s thinking, I argue that music recorded on digital files and
played by MP3 players triggers sociocultural practices that deserve to be regarded
in their own right rather than as a derivative of earlier portable technologies.
39. On the significance of continuation and change in historical transforma-
tions of sound technologies and their accompanying collective sociocultural prac-
tices, see Lisa Gitelman, “How Users Define New Media.”
40. William H. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and
Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xix.
41. In December 2005, a national discussion erupted in newspapers around the
country when listeners voted a new number-one song to top the ranking—“Avond,”
a song in Dutch, composed and sung by Dutch artist Boudewijn de Groot—

thus defeating the longtime English number-one song (Queen’s “Bohemian Rhap-
sody”).
42. Paul Grainge, in his article “Nostalgia and Style in Retro America: Moods,
Modes and Media Recycling,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23,
no. 1 (2000): 27–34, considers nostalgia for music of the past as a “socio-cultural
response to forms of discontinuity, claiming a vision of stability and authenticity
in some conceptual ‘golden age’ ” (28).
43. See Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a
Connected World (New York: Vintage, 2002).
44. Quite a few clones of the Top 2000 have been initiated by competing
commercial stations in The Netherlands, but none of these imitations gather
nearly as much clout as the public event. None of these clones have a compara-
ble investment in public participation and exchange via websites and chat
forums.
chapter 5
1. I prefer the term “personal photography” over commonly used terms like
“amateur photography” or “family photography.” The word “personal” is meant
to distinguish it from professional photography, but it also avoids the troubling
connotation of “amateurish” in relation to camera use. Family photography mis-
takenly presupposes the presence of a familial context, whereas photography has
always been and is increasingly used for personal identity formation.
2. Norwegian researcher C. M. Stuhlmiller, in “Narrative Picturing: Ushering
Experiential Recall,” Nursing Inquiry 3 (1996): 183–84, argues that narratives of re-
membering always involve elements of imagining and picturing, feeding verbal
stories.
3. Susan Sontag’s On Photography (New York: Delta, 1973) and Roland
Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang,
1981) were not the first but were certainly the most notable theories of photogra-
phy. Both essayists claim memory to be the most important function of personal
photography, but they also acknowledge photography’s material, ritual, and com-
municative meaning in the everyday lives of people.
4. “My pictures are my memories” is a cliché still resonant in many anthropo-
logical and sociological studies of family photography. See, for instance, Richard
Chalfen, “Snapshots ‘R’ Us: The Evidentiary Problematic of Home Media,” Vi-
sual Studies 17, no. 2 (2002): 141–49.
5. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80.
6. According to neurobiologist Steven Rose in The Making of Memory (Lon-
don: Bantam Press, 1992), the still photograph is not a fixed object, but it forms
the input of a constantly changing and evolving autobiographical memory.
7. For a very insightful overview of research in this area, see Deryn Strange,
Matthew Gerrie, and Maryanne Garry, “A Few Seemingly Harmless Routes to a
False Memory,” Cognitive Process 6 (2005): 237–42.
8. There are a large number of research groups reporting on the issue of false
memory as it is related to both narrative and visual evidence. For instance, see He-
lene Intraub and James Hoffman, “Reading and Visual Memory: Remembering
Scenes that Were Never Seen,” American Journal of Psychology 105, no. 1 (1992):
101–14. See also Elisabeth Loftus, “The Reality of Repressed Memories,” Ameri-
can Psychologist 48 (1993): 508–37; Elisabeth Loftus and J. Pickrell, “The Forma-
tion of False Memories,” Psychiatric Annals 25 (1995): 720–25. On the role of true
pictures in the creation of false memories, see Stephen Lindsay, Lisa Hagen, Don
Read, Kimberley Wade, and Maryanne Garry, “True Photographs and False
Memories,” Psychological Science 15, no. 3 (2004): 149.
9. Research by cognitive psychologists focusing particularly on the role of
doctored photographs in relation to false memory is also widely available. See, for
instance, Maryanne Garry and Matthew Gerrie, “When Photographs Create False
Memories,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 14 (2005): 321. See also
Kimberley Wade, Maryanne Garry, Don Read, and Stephen Lindsay, “A Picture
Is Worth a Thousand Lies: Using False Photographs to Create False Childhood
Memories,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 9, no. 3 (2002): 597–603. In their ar-
ticle, Wade and her colleagues confronted experimental subjects with doctored
pictures of the subjects as children in hot-air balloons; half the adults were per-
suaded into believing they actually remembered the balloon ride.
10. For the ongoing debate on whether narratives or pictures are more con-
ducive to false memories, see Maryanne Garry and Kimberley Wade, “Actually, a
Picture Is Worth Less Than 45 Words: Narratives Produce More False Memories
Than Photographs Do,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 12, no. 2 (2005): 359–66.
11. See, for instance, Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think: Essential Insights
into the Mind of the Market (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003). An ex-
periment has shown how easy it is for advertisements to plant false memories: re-
searchers presented participants with fake ads for Disney that feature them
meeting Bugs Bunny at a Disney Resort (although Bugs Bunny is a Warner Broth-
ers character). Most participants believed this was a true experience. See Kathryn
Braun, Rhiannon Ellis, and Elizabeth Loftus, “Make My Memory: How Adver-
tising Can Change Our Memories of the Past,” Psychology and Marketing 19
(2002): 1–23.
12. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 13.
13. Sontag, in On Photography, also touches upon this issue when she explains
how retouching techniques were prominent in commercial portrait photography
from the onset: “People want the idealized image: a photograph of themselves at
their best. They feel rebuked when the camera does not return an image of them-
selves as more attractive than they really are” (85).
14. Jacques Aumont, in The Image (London: British Film Institute, 1997), pro-
vides a semiotic model that expands Barthes’s theory of the photographic image to
the contextual level, including the relationship between not only image and viewer
but also image and its referent in terms of aesthetics and of representation. For a
subtle critique of Barthes’s paradoxes concerning his control and lack of control
over the photographic image, see Ron Burnett, Cultures of Vision: Images, Media
and the Imaginary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 32–71.
15. Strange, Gerrie, and Gary, “A Few Seemingly Harmless Routes to a False
Memory,” 237.
16. In recent years, there has been an explosion of theory on the semiotics and
ontology of the digital image, but it is beyond the scope of this chapter to review
the literature in this area. As a general introduction to the digitization of visual
culture in general and photography in particular, consult The Photographic Image
in Digital Culture, ed. Martin Lister (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Warwick
Mules, “Lines, Dots and Pixels: The Making and Remaking of the Printed Image
in Visual Culture,” Continuum, Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 14, no. 3
(2000): 303–16. A more philosophical introduction to ontology of the image can
be found in D. N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Me-
dia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Lev Manovich, in The Language
of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), addresses digital photography
as a technical-cultural construct. One notable exception to the negligence of cog-
nitive perspectives by humanists is the work of Canadian art and design scholar
Ron Burnett, who weaves cognitive perspectives into his semiotic approach to dig-
ital photography. In his recent book How Images Think (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2004), Burnett scrutinizes mental-cognitive processes (with a specific em-
phasis on memory) in relation to digital technology.
17. William J. T. Mitchell, in The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-
photographic Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), identifies the pictorial tra-
dition of realism with the essence of photographic technology, and he identifies
the tradition of montage and collage with the essence of digital imaging. Lev
Manovich, in his essay “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography,” published in
Photography after Photography, Exhibition catalogue, Germany 1995 (available
at http://www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital_photo.html, accessed December 26,
2006), refutes this claim, countering that both traditions existed before photog-
raphy and that “normal” or “straight” photography never existed.
18. For a more technical and institutional exploration of photography’s move
toward digitization, see Fred Ritchin, In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution
in Photography (New York: Aperture, 1999).
19. For an interesting introduction to issues of image manipulation and stock
photography, see, for instance, Paul Frosh, The Image Factory: Consumer Culture,
Photography, and the Visual Content Industry (Oxford: Berg, 2003). In chapter 7,
Frosh quotes directors from stock photography firms, who estimate that in the
late 1990s, 80 percent to 90 percent of all photographs they promoted had been
digitally manipulated. As Frosh concludes: “Stock photographers and their clients
in design forms and advertising agencies assume that consumers, long accustomed
to the formal conventions and promotional goals of advertising images, do not ex-
pect such fidelity from their photographs” (175).
20. See, for instance, the software offered by VisionQuest Images, available at:
http://www.visionquestimages.com/index.htm (accessed April 8, 2006).
21. The photoblog of Chris Line, available at: http://a.trendyname.org/archives/
category/personal/ (accessed April 8, 2006).
22. For more details on the work of Nancy Burson, see http://www.nancyburson
.com/human_fr.html (accessed April 8, 2006). Her Human Race Machine featured
in many magazines and television programs in the spring of 2006, most notably on
the Oprah Winfrey Show.
23. For instance, a package called Picture Yourself Graphics (available at:
http://www.pygraphics.com) encourages playful collages and manipulation of pic-
tures on wedding announcements, featuring the bride and groom as five-year-olds
holding hands; other software design favors the use of personal pictures in combi-
nation with snapshots of famous tourist sites. For software that encourages the mix
of personal photographs with general stock photography, promoting playful per-
sonalization of tourist snapshots, see http://www.fotosearch.com/photodisc/picture-
yourself-here (accessed April 8, 2006).
24. Burnett, How Images Think, 28.
25. For a more elaborate argument on how ultrasound helps to turn the fetus
into an object to be worked on, see José van Dijck, Manufacturing Babies and Pub-
lic Consent: Debating the New Reproductive Technologies (New York: New York
University Press, 1995), chapter 5.
26. Sontag, in On Photography, already called attention to photography’s ma-
terialness by pointing at the logic of consumption underpinning the need to pho-
tograph things and people, converting sights into tangible, mobile objects: “To
consume means to burn up—and therefore, the need to be replenished” (179).
27. Don Slater, “Domestic Photography and Digital Culture,” in The Photographic
Image in Digital Culture, ed. Martin Lister (New York: Routledge: 1995), 129–46, 130.
28. Barthes, in his Camera Lucida, already noticed how we tend to look
through the laminated object because only the referent adheres, but he stresses
how it is chemistry and light that turn a picture into a fetish-object to be looked at
and to hold on to (p. 80).
29. For an interesting anthropological perspective on the materiality and ritu-
ality of photographs, see Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographs as Objects of Mem-
ory,” in Material Memories, ed. Markus Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy
Aymsley (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 221–48; see also Chris Wright, “Material and
Memory. Photography in the Western Solomon Islands,” Journal of Material Cul-
ture 9, no. 1 (2004): 73–85.
30. For an interesting take on the material objects accompanying virtual desk-
tops, see Anna McCarthy, “Cyberculture or material culture?” Etnofoor 15, no. 1
(2002): 47–63.
31. There are a number of articles, most written by computer engineers, that
grapple with the (new) performative meanings of digital photo management. See
for instance, Kerry Rodden and Kenneth Wood, “How Do People Manage Their
Digital Photographs?” Computer Human Interaction 5, no. 1 (2003): 409–16. See
also Nancy Van House, Marc Davis, and Yuri Takhteyev, “From ‘What’ to ‘Why’:
The Social Uses of Personal Photos” (paper presented at the CSCW Conference
in Chicago, November 6–10, 2004).
32. In reaction to Sontag’s pejorative interpretation of the touristic photographic
experience, Steve Garlick argues in “Revealing the Unseen: Tourism, Art, and Pho-
tography,” Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2002): 289–305, that tourist photography is “a
mechanism that leads the subject to engage with the world in a creative act that
opens and re-opens spaces, each time people take or review their pictures” (296).
33. Sontag, On Photography, 8.
34. Quite a few cultural theorists and anthropologists have taken up Sontag’s
insights to write about photography and family. See, for instance, Marianne Hirsch,
Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1997); P. Holland, “Introduction: History, Memory, and
the Family Album,” in Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photography, ed. J.
Spence and P. Holland (London: Virago, 1991): 1–14; and Deborah Chambers,
Representing the Family (London: Sage, 2001).
35. Barbara Harrison, in “Photographic Visions and Narrative Inquiry,” Narra-
tive Inquiry 12, no.1 (2002): 87–111, notices a recent shift in photography’s social use:
“Images that have a place in everyday life have become less bound up with memory
or commemoration, but with forms of practice that are happening now. . . . Self-
presentation rather than self-representation is more important in identity forma-
tion” (107). Testifying to these trends is the pin board, where private pictures are
often combined with public ones and personal pictures are put on display.
36. Barbara Harrison, “Photographic Visions,” 107.
37. According to the New York Times, American sales of digital cameras sur-
passed the sales of analog film cameras for the first time in March 2003. See Katie
Hafner, “Recording Another Day in America, Aided by Digital Cameras,” New
York Times, May 12, 2003 www.nytimes.com.
38. Diane Schiano, Coreena Chen, and Ellen Isaacs, “How Teens Take, View,
Share, and Store Photos,” in Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported
Co-operative Work (New York: ACM, 2002). Interestingly, the researchers con-
clude that teenagers are less inclined than adults to label pictures with captions, ei-
ther because they don’t think it is relevant or because they put great trust in their
future memory capacity; they feel confident they will always be able to remember
what is in the pictures.
39. The American study is corroborated by a Japanese report identifying simi-

lar patterns among young users of digital cameras; a new preference for photogra-
phy as an interpersonal tool for communication whose main function is to exchange
“affective awareness” prompts hardware and software developers to redirect their
frameworks for design. See Oliver Liechti and Tadao Ichikawa, “A Digital Pho-
tography Framework Enabling Affective Awareness in Home Communication,”
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 4, no. 1 (2000): 6–24.
40. For an incisive ethnographic study of photoblogs, see Kris Cohen, “What
Does the Photoblog Want?” Media, Culture and Society 27, no. 6 (2005): 883–901.
41. See, for instance, Tim Kindberg, Mirjana Spasojevic, Rowanne Fleck, and
Abigail Sellen, “I Saw This and Thought of You: Some Social Uses of Camera
Phones,” Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM,
2005), 1545–48.
42. A field study by a group of Finnish researchers yields this interesting com-
parison of the pictures sent by mobile phone to postcards. See Turo-Kimmo
Lehtonen, Ilpo Koskinen, and Esko Kurvinen, “Mobile Digital Pictures—The
Future of the Postcard? Findings from an Experimental Field Study,” in: Postcards
and Cultural Rituals, ed. V. Laakso and J-O Ostman (Korttien Talo: Haemeen-
linna, 2002), 69–96.
43. For ethnographic research on the use of camera phone pictures, see Nancy
Van House, Marc Davis, and Morgan Ames, “The Uses of Personal Networked
Digital Imaging: An Empirical Study of Cameraphone Photos and Sharing,” Con-
ference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2005), 1853–56.
44. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is a The-
atre and Every Business a Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School, 1999).
45. Ron Burnett, in How Images Think, uses the term “microcultures” to de-
scribe places “where people take control of the means of creation and production
in order to make sense of their social and cultural experiences” (62). Like the in-
vention and distribution of the Xerox machine gave rise to new methods of infor-
mation dissemination, the digital camera allows new communicative and formative
uses of photography.
46. The pictures were first made public in the press by journalist Seymour
Hersh who wrote the article “Torture at Abu Ghraib: American Soldiers Brutal-
ized Iraqis. How Far Up Does the Responsibility Go?” New Yorker, May 4, 2004,
http://www.newyorker.com/.
47. Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” New York Times Maga-
zine, May 23, 2004, 25–29.
48. As Marita Sturken has shown in “The Image as Memorial: Personal Pho-
tographs in Cultural Memory,” in The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 178–95, digital enhance-
ment is part of the message’s rhetoric; personal pictures are malleable and open to
absorb an infinite number of public meanings, depending on the context in which
they appear: as victims of AIDS, casualties of war, or as missing children on milk

cartons.
49. Of course, the loss of power over one’s public image has long been a mat-
ter of debate in political circles; politicians’ personal pictures have always been
used and abused in election campaigns and political image making. See, for in-
stance, Kiku Adatto, Picture Perfect: The Art and Artifice of Public Image Making
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
chapter 6
1. For an interesting exploration of the discussions concerning the construc-
tion of family in film and television, see Shooting the Family: Cultural Values and
Transnational Media, ed. Patricia Pisters and Wim Staat (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2005), particularly the introduction.
2. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the
Making of Consciousness (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1999), 11.
3. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003). Originally published as Cinema 2: L’ímage-temps (Paris:
Athlone Press, 1989).
4. There are a large number of books explaining the importance and meaning
of Deleuze’s philosophical concepts for film theory. See, for instance, Gregory
Flaxman, ed., The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze
and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2000); and Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2003).
5. Patricia Pisters, in The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in
Film Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), provides an in-
sightful analysis of Deleuze’s theory and film, particularly his conjecture that the
apparatus of cinema and the dynamics of brain activity and neural patterns are
fundamentally interlaced.
6. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, 52.
7. For a detailed critique of Deleuze’s work, see Mark B. Hansen, New Philos-
ophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). A more elaborate theory
of “virtual embodiment” particularly in relation to virtual environments can be
found in Mark B. Hansen, Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (New
York: Routledge, 2006).
8. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 194.
9. One of my criticisms of Deleuze’s theory concerns his disregard of movies as
cultural forms and watching movies as a sociocultural practice. I am not saying,
though, that Deleuze completely ignores culture and politics in his writings; the
micro-politics of culture are discussed more generally in his works A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 1988) and, with Felix
Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2003).
10. The Matrix, written and directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wa-
chowski (Los Angeles: Warner Bros, 1999); Strange Days directed by Kathryn
Bigelow, written by James Cameron (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 1995).
11. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, 262.
12. A second storyline in the movie narrates the protests of a violent anti-
implant group who opposes any form of biotechnological recording; two activists
chase Hakman in order to obtain the Bannister files, which would provide a dam-
aging blow to the implant industry.
13. James M. Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2002).
14. Ibid., 59.
15. Ibid., 103.
16. Patricia Zimmerman, states in Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur
Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995): “Home movie-making, then,
synchronized with the elevation of the nuclear family as the ideological center of
all meaningful activity in the fifties” (134).
17. Besides Zimmerman, Richard Chalfen, in Snapshots Versions of Life (Bowl-
ing Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1987), also ignores the his-
torically changing connection between technological substrates and sociocultural
concepts of family.
18. Ozzie and Harriet, for instance, also formed a couple in real life. On the
role of families on American television from the 1950s onward, see for instance
Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar Amer-
ica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
19. Contrary to popular belief, American networks have always produced por-
traits of dysfunctional families as a counterpoint to idealized family series. A
number of series that featured family lives represented the struggles and conflicts
inherent to the postwar generation raising families in middle class, suburban
America. As George Lipsitz argues in Time Passages: Collective Memory and Amer-
ican Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990) in his
chapter on family in early network television: “One might expect commercial tele-
vision programs to ignore the problems of the nuclear family, to present an idyllic
view of the commodity-centered life. But the industry’s imperial ambition—the
desire to have household watching at all times—encouraged exploitation of real
fears and problems confronting viewers” (56). For a detailed history of nuclear
and alternative American families on television, see also Ella Taylor, Prime-Time
Families: Television Cultures in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1989).
20. Sean Cubitt, Timeshift: On Video Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 37.
21. On the change of the nuclear family in the 1960s, see for instance Arlene
Skolnick, Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty (New
York: Basic Books, 1991).
22. As Moran aptly observes in There’s No Place Like Home Video, “Each
medium attempts to provide a home audience’s hankering for audiovisual images
of themselves, borrowing from each other over time, thus inventing and reinvent-
ing each other’s conventions of representation and patterns of interpersonal com-
munication” (106).
23. On the new genre of family portrait and documentary techniques, see Jim
Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2002), 94–95.
24. Jeffrey Ruoff, An American Family: A Televised Life (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2002), xvii.
25. The series was exhaustively reviewed in the press when it aired in 1973 and
afterward; there have also been numerous academic and scholarly articles written
that deal with An American Family and its documentary mode. For an overview, I
refer to the extensive bibliography included in Ruoff’s An American Family.
26. Ruoff, An American Family, 29.
27. Ibid., 88.
28. All family members, but most notably Pat Loud and her oldest son Lance,
conceded in hindsight that the presence of a film crew in their house forever
changed family life, even decades after the series was aired. Pat Loud wrote a book
on her experiences and frequently appeared on television, including when the fam-
ily was revisited by camera crews ten, fifteen, and twenty years after the actual
shooting. Lance Loud, who became a filmmaker himself, even furbished the last
episode in the series: WNET/PBS aired a production of his struggle with, and
eventual succumbing to, HIV/AIDS in 2001.
29. On the use of webcams in the private sphere, see Sheila Murphy, “Lurking
and Looking: Webcams and the Construction of Cybervisuality,” in Moving Im-
ages: From Edison to Webcam, ed. John Fullerton and Astrid Söderbergh Widding
(London: John Libbey, 2000), 173–80. See also Michele White, “Too Close to See:
Men, Women, and Webcams,” New Media and Society 5, no. 1 (2003): 7–28.
30. According to Australian film theorist Keith Beattie, in Documentary Screens:
Nonfiction Film and Television (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), the digi-
tal camcorder is “creating new visual styles that situate the viewer in an intimate
relationship with the subject of autobiography” (105).
31. Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video, 47.
32. See the Jacobs Family Website, available at: http://jacobsusa.com/main/
(accessed April 13, 2006).
33. This peculiar manifestation of what Arild Fetveit, in “Reality TV in the
Digital Era: A Paradox in Visual Culture?” in Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse
on the Real, ed. James Friedman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2002), 119–37, has called the “ambiguous coexistence of digital manipulation and
‘reality footage’ can be explained by a desire to reclaim a sense of reality that is vir-
tually absent in any static collage of digital photos and texts” (130).
34. Jacobs Family Website, http://jacobsusa.com/main/.
35. The Osbournes was produced and broadcast by MTV. Subsequent DVD
versions of the various seasons’ series were distributed by Miramax Home Enter-
tainment. Not the entire Osbourne family participates in the series: one of their
three children refused to appear on television. The first season premiered in 2003.
36. Although real life usually does not present itself thematically, each twenty-
minute episode of The Osbournes is organized as a fast-paced edited sequence cap-
italizing on a single theme, such as “like father, like daughter” or “won’t you be
my neighbor.”
37. For an early discussion on the construction of reality in documentary, see Bill
Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: In-
diana University Press, 1991). In postmodern television culture, the conventions of
reality are increasingly informed by standards of so-called reality TV, where a con-
trived family—whether ten people living in a Big Brother house or a group conven-
ing on a deserted island—is captured on a reality show by ubiquitous cameras. The
legacy of home movie and video is still at work in documentary, just as the legacy of
documentary is still at work in reality TV. In coming to terms with these new forms
of reality on the screen, media theorist John Corner has coined the term “postdocu-
mentary” to describe new forms of tele-factuality. See John Corner, “Performing the
Real: Documentary Diversions,” Television and New Media 3 (2002): 255–69.
38. Moran, in There’s No Place Like Home Video, appropriately describes this
difference: “Digital icons undermine the authority of the video image and dis-
tance the artist from the actual process of image creation: whereas analogue video’s
aesthetic has been valued as immediate, literal, and naturalistic, digitized video is
more often construed as contrived, synthetic, and analytic” (13).
39. The documentary Capturing the Friedmans, directed by Andrew Jarecki
(New York: Magnolia Pictures) came out in 2003. In that same year, the DVD
containing two discs with the documentary and lots of extra materials was distrib-
uted by HBO Video.
40. While David had bought and frequently used the video camera, his
brother Jesse had a habit of audio-taping the family’s rows at the dining table.
Some of these audio-taped fights can be heard in the documentary.
41. In the interview with Andrew Jarecki featured on the DVD, the director
relates how in the middle of shooting the film, David Friedman came up with
twenty-five hours of taped home video and consented to its being used for the
documentary.
42. Andrew Jarecki, in an interview also included on the DVD, states that by
making this film, he took an explicit stance against currently reigning notions of
reality TV: “We are so tuned now to reality on television, but you watch the
Friedmans for a minute and you see the incredible power of ‘real’ reality as op-
posed to that reality on CBS-TV where you see people starving on an island, but
you know all the while they are surrounded by cameras.”
43. In this quote, Deleuze echoes Antoni Artaud’s beliefs in cinema and the
world. See Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 167. For an extensive explanation
and commentary on this observation, see Patricia Pisters, From Eye to Brain. Gilles
Deleuze: Refiguring the Subject in Film Theory (Ph-Diss, University of Amsterdam,
1999), 76–85.
44. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media, 270.
45. Kyle Veale has meticulously described this phenomenon in “Online Memo-
rialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape for Remembering the
Dead” Fibreculture 3. Online journal available at: http://journal.fibreculture.org/
issue3/issue3_veale.html (accessed December 28, 2006).
46. Life on Tape, a Dutch producer, specializes in memorial videos, available
at: http://www.lifeontape.nl (accessed December 28, 2006). Precious Memories
and More, an American company, offers memorial DVDs to “help survivors memo-
rialize their loved ones.” Available at: http://www.preciousmemoriesandmore.com
(accessed December 28, 2006).
chapter 7
1. See Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representations, Memory, Time
and Space in the Age of the Camera (London: Sage, 1998), 127–38.
2. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716), a German philosopher and mathe-
matician, was the inventor of differential calculus; he wanted to design a universal
language, which would facilitate communication via a network of universities. Leib-
nitz’s cylindrical computer, though never built, signified an important step forward
from dead mechanical calculations to a flexible “ars combinatoria,” which would
differentiate between the feeding in of data and the calculation itself. Leibniz also
philosophized about a computer based on a binary numerical system. Charles Bab-
bage (1791–1871), a British engineer, is known as the “Father of Computing” for his
contributions to the basic design of the computer through his “analytical engine.”
His previous “difference engine” was a special-purpose device intended for the pro-
duction of tables. He never turned his prototypes into working devices.
3. Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) was president of the Carnegie Institute in
Washington, DC (1939) and chair of National Advisory Committee for Aeronau-
tics (1939) before he became the director of the Office of Scientific Research and
Development. This last role was a presidential appointment and made him re-
sponsible for the six thousand scientists involved in the WWII effort.
4. Vannevar Bush’s famous, canonized article “As We May Think” first appeared
in Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, 101–8. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/
doc/194507/bush, accessed December 30, 2006.
5. Bush, As We May Think, section 3 (no page numbers in electronic version).

6. Ibid., section 6.
7. For an inventory of critical assessments of Bush’s fantasies, see Andreas
Kitzmann, “Pioneer Spirits and the Lure of Technology: Vannevar Bush’s Desk,
Theodor Nelson’s World,” Configurations, 9 (2001): 441–59.
8. See Charlie Gere, “Brains-in-Vats, Giant Brains and World brains: The
Brain as Metaphor in Digital Culture,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Bi-
ological and Biomedical Sciences 35 (2004): 351–66.
9. Hartmut Winkler, “Discourses, Schemata, Technology, Monuments: Out-
line for a Theory of Cultural Continuity,” Configurations 10 (2002): 91–109, 103.
10. Canadian media theorist Michelle Kendrick, in “Interactive Technology
and the Remediation of the Subject of Writing,” Configurations 9 (2001): 231–51,
has critically analyzed how notions of hypertext are structured analogously to the
mind, promoting the “connection between a technology of links and nodes and
the presumed associative ability of the mind” (231).
11. Timothy Mills, David Pye, David Sinclair, and Kenneth R. Wood, “Shoe-
box: A Digital Photo Management System,” http://www.uk.research.att.com/dart/
shoebox/(accessed September 2004). (The Shoebox website is no longer available.)
Shoebox is part of a larger project, DART (Digital Asset Retrieval Technology) con-
cerned with the management of digital media such as text and hypertext documents,
images, audio and video recordings.
12. Image-based indexing is a technique to mechanically recognize images
based on rough drawings by the user. For instance, if the user draws a girl in a
dress and the software will search for that particular figure.
13. Ernst van Alphen, in “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and
Trauma,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan
Crew, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999),
24–40, distinguishes narrative memory to underline the discursive basis of experi-
ences; human memory is inherently mediated and discursive, and it is exactly this
quality that helps people make sense out of experience.
14. Mills, Pye, Sinclair, and Wood, “Shoebox.” Although the Shoebox website
is no longer available, the conclusion is shared by follow-up research initiated by
Microsoft engineers in cooperation with the Computer Science department of the
University of Cambridge. See Kerry Rodden and Kenneth Wood, “How Do Peo-
ple Manage Their Digital Photographs?” Computer Human Interaction 5, no. 1
(2003): 409–16.
15. Molly Stevens, Gregory Abowd, Khai Truong, and Florian Vollmer, “Get-
ting into the Living Memory Box: Family Archives and Holistic Design,” Personal
Ubiqutous Computing 7 (2003): 210–16, 212.
16. Ibid., 213.
17. Peculiarly, designers of the Living Memory Box acknowledge the cyclic
function of memory objects in a family’s lifetime, but the various stages involved
in this cycle of memories—collect, relate, create, donate—somehow remain alien

to the box’s design.
18. See Nicholas Carriero, Scott Fertig, Eric Freeman, and David Gelernter, “The
Lifestreams Approach to Reorganizing the Information World,” http://www.cs.
yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html (accessed April 14, 2006).
19. Ibid.
20. This observation is shared by Chris Locke in “Digital Memory and the
Problem of Forgetting,” in Memory and Methodology, ed. Susannah Radstone
(Oxford: Berg, 2000), 25–36, who explains: “Vannevar Bush’s Memex has ceased
to be a technological system that supplements human memory. Instead it has
given birth to a system which is coming to characterize contemporary human
memory. Ironically, a system that was intended to aid the fallible, forgetful hu-
man memory has instead become a metaphor for postmodern defintions of hu-
man memory itself” (35).
21. The scientific premises of the MyLifeBits project can be found in Jim
Gemmell, Gordon Bell, Roger Lueder, Steven Drucker, and Curtis Wong,
“MyLifeBits: Fulfilling the Memex Vision,” ACM Multimedia, December 2002,
http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.aspx (accessed April
14, 2006). Various other articles on the MyLifeBits project are also available at this
website.
22. See, for instance, Julia Scheeres, “Saving Your Bits for Posterity,” Wired
News, December 6, 2002, htttp://www.wired.com/ (accessed April 20, 2006);
Arthur Hissey, “Your Life—On the Web,” Computer Research and Technology,
company website available at: http://www.crt.net.au/etopics/mylifebits.htm (ac-
cessed April 20, 2006).
23. I took this quote from the news article “Software Aims to Put Your Life on
a Disk, New Scientist, November 20, 2002, http://www.newscientist.com (ac-
cessed December 27, 2006).
24. Scheeres, “Saving Your Bits for Posterity.”
25. N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002).
26. Google’s algorithms will of course never be inculcated in human memory,
but the fact that Google recently acquired Blogger.com (one of the first start-ups
to design weblog software) indicates the company has a sharp eye for the individ-
ual’s potential to navigate the baffling complexity of public and private crossroads
paving the digital world.
27. There is already an interesting body of research on the cultural meaning
of material types of collecting and storing them for later remembrance. On the
functions and practices of collecting, see for instance Brenda Danet, “Books, Let-
ters, Documents: The Changing Aesthetics of Texts in Late Print Culture,” Jour-
nal of Material Culture 2 (1997): 5–38; Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An
Unruly Passion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Susan
Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition

(New York and London: Routledge, 1999).
chapter 8
1. See, for instance, some marketers of preformatted scrapbooks (digital and pa-
per) such as Creative Memories (available at: http://www.creativememories.com,
accessed December 30, 2006) whose mission statement says: “Creative Memories
believes in and teaches the importance of preserving the past, enriching the pres-
ent, and inspiring hope for the future. We promote the tradition of historian/story-
teller and the importance of memory preservation and journaling for future
generations. We offer quality, photo-safe scrapbook and album-making products
and information.”
2. Elisabeth Loftus, “Make-Believe Memories,” American Psychologist (2003):
867–73, 872.
3. Cockpits of Starfighter jets or surgical units help students train their skills in
handling harrowing situations that involve all possible senses: sight, touch, smell,
sound.
4. See, for instance, Francesco Vincelli, “From Imagination to Virtual Reality:
The Future of Clinical Psychology,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 2, no. 3 (1999):
241–48. See also Barbara Rotbaum and Larry Hodges, “A Controlled Study of
Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for the Fear of Flying,” Journal of Consulting
and Clinical Psychology 68, no. 6 (2000): 1020–26.
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Index
Abu Ghraib, 116–117, 120 Bluck, Susan, 3, 4

Acrobat, The, 170 Bourdieu, Pierre, 190n24
Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The, 133 Bourtchouladze, Rusiko, 200n12
AIDS Memorial Quilt, 22 Brady Bunch, The, 134
All in the Family, 134, 136 Braun, Katryn, 204n11
Alphen, Ernst van, 214n13 Brockmeier, Jens, 4
Alzheimer’s disease (AD), 55, 58–60, 74, Bull, Michael, 92
161; patients of, 59–62, 68, 72, 75, 168, Burnett, Ron, 106, 205n16, 208n45
171 Burson, Nancy, 106, 180, 206n22
American Family, An, 134–136, 211n28 Bush, Vannevar, 149–154, 158–159, 213n3
American Office of Scientific Research
and Development, 150 camera: Easy Share, 111; Instamatic, 111;
America’s Funniest Home Videos (AFHV), Kodak’s Brownie, 111; Polaroid, 111
19, 184n11 camera phone, 110, 114–115, 176
Anne Frank Foundation, 63 Capturing the Friedmans, 140–147
Artaud, Antoni, 213n43 Carstensen, Laura, 200n19
“As We May Think,” 150 Certeau, Michel de, 190n24
Assmann, Aleida, 12, 14, 22, 185n36 Chalfen, Richard, 17
Assmann, Jan, 12 Chaney, David, 197n35
AT&T Labs, 154 cinema verité, 135
Augustine, 29 cinema-of-the-brain, 127
Aumont, Jacques, 205n14 cinematic hindsight, 128, 131, 144, 147
Auner, Joseph, 89 Clark, Andy, 38
commons, creative, 97
Babbage, Charles, 150–151, 213n2 Connell, John, 84
Barnet, Belinda, 26 Corner, John, 212n37
Barthes, Roland, 100–103, 106, 206n28 Creative Memories, 216n1
Beattie, Keith, 211n30 Cubitt, Sean, 133
Bell, Gordon, 159, 165–166 Cyclops Camera, 151
Benjamin, Walter, 36
Bergson, Henri, 9, 29–30, 125–126 Damasio, Antonio, 34, 35, 81–82, 86,
biomedia, 45 125–126, 189n10
Blogger, 65 DearDiary, 67
230 Index
Decker, William, 196n31 Gilbert, Craig, 135

Deleuze, Gilles, 123, 125–128, 131, 139, Gilmore, James, 115
145, 147, 209n9 Gitelman, Lisa, 80
Dementia and Alzheimer’s Support Net- Gondry, Michel, 28, 44
work International (DASNI), 58, Goodwin, Alan, 202n31
194n11 Google, 166, 215n26
Derrida, Jacques, 64 googlization, 150, 162, 167, 177
Descartes, René, 29 Grainge, Paul, 96, 203n42
Diary of Anne Frank, The, 58 Graner, Charles, 116
DiaryLand, 65 Gross, David, 10, 12, 184n17
Didier, Beatrice, 194n8
digitization, 42–45, 49, 108, 162–163 habitus, 190n24
direct cinema. See cinema verité Halbwachs, Maurice, 9–12
Draaisma, Douwe, 17, 187n42 Hansen, Mark B., 123, 127–128, 130–131,
Durkheim, Emile, 9 139, 146–147, 209n7
Harper, Richard, 197n41, 198n43
Elsaesser, Thomas, 21 Harrison, Barbara, 113, 207n35
England, Lynndie, 116 Hayles, N. Katherine, 161, 191n33
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Hennis, Laura, 200n21
27–34, 37, 40, 44–46, 51, 128 Herring, Susan, 193n1
Hirsch, Eric, 41
family film. See home movie Hogan, Patrick Colm, 80
family movie. See home movie Holocaust, 11, 13
Fernback, Jan, 197n36 home mode, 131–132, 136–137, 140–141, 146
Fetveit, Arild, 211n33 home movie, 123, 128–130, 133, 135, 141,
Final Cut, The, 128–130, 147 144–146
fly-on-the-wall cinema. See cinema verité home video, 131, 133, 135; digital, 139–141,
Foucault, Michel, 39 144–146, 175
Frank, Anne, 13, 57, 62–63, 68–69 Hoskins, Andrew, 11, 12, 186n28
Frank, Otto, 13 Human Race Machine, 106, 206n22
Freud, Sigmund, 64, 158 Hume, David, 29
Friedell, Morris, 58, 60–61, 194n11 Hutchins, Edwin, 191n26
Frith, Simon, 200n17 Huyssen, Andreas, 11, 185n22
Frosh, Paul, 205n19
image: action, 126; affection, 126; move-
Garlick, Steve, 207n32 ment, 126; perception, 126
Garry, Maryanne, 204n9 Imperial War Museum, 11
genomics, 192n36 Instamatic. See camera
Georgia Institute of Technology, 156
Gerber, Chip, 59, 61 Jarecki, Andrew, 141–142, 212n41
Gerrie, Matthew, 204n9 Johnson, Steven, 32
Getty Foundation, 105
Gibbs, Anna, 56, 59 Katz, Mark, 90, 201n26
Gibson, Chris, 84 Kaufman, Charlie, 28
Gide, André, 68 Kendrick, Michelle, 214n10
Index 231
Kennedy, Quinn, 200n19 171; autobiographical, 2–5, 9, 18, 31–32,

Kenney, William, 95 56, 77–78, 81, 89, 99–101, 105, 119, 124,
Kitzmann, Andreas, 193n4 162, 169, 172, 179; collective cultural,
Kotarba, Joseph, 201n23 8–14, 16, 19, 22, 25, 77–78, 82, 91, 94,
Kuhn, Annette, 16, 184n9 97, 99–100, 117; institutions, 10; media-
tion of, 15–21; objects, 28, 35, 37, 41, 51,
Lacuna Inc., 27 112, 168, 171; personal cultural, 1, 6–11,
Landsberg, Alison, 23 13, 17, 19, 22, 25, 46–47, 78, 82, 94,
Latour, Bruno, 187n36 99–100, 121, 124, 148, 168, 172, 178; so-
Le Goff, Jacques, 16 cial, 10, 185n26
Leave It to Beaver, 133 microcultures, 208n45
Leibnitz, Gottfried, 150–151, 213n2 Microsoft, 105, 166–167
Lejeune, Philip, 194n8 Microsoft Media Presence Lab, 159
Lessig, Lawrence, 97 Miller, Carolyn, 197n42
Life on Tape, 147 Milne, Esther, 71
lifelog, 53–54, 59–69, 73–75, 179 mindware, 34–35, 42, 45, 189n9
Lifestreams, 157–159, 161–162, 165, 167–68 Misztal, Barbra, 201n25
Lipsitz, George, 17, 198n2, 210n19 MIT MediaLab, 71, 198n46
LiveJournal, 66, 70, 76 Mitchell, William J. T., 205n17
Living Memory Box, The, 154–157, modifiability, condition of, 107
160–161, 165–168 Moran, James, 123, 131–132, 136–139, 147,
Locke, Chris, 215n20 210n22, 212n38
Lockhardt, Mary, 60 Morley, David, 41
Morton, David, 199n5
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), movies-in-the-brain, 125–126
27; functional (fMRI), 27, 42, 45, 58, multimediatization, 150, 162, 175, 177–178
191n29 MyLifeBits, 154, 159–161, 163, 165–168
Mallon, Thomas, 67, 193n8
Manovich, Lev, 205n17 Naim, Omar, 128, 130–131
Marty, Eric, 194n8 Neef, Sonja, 63
Mather, Mara, 200n19 Nelson, Katherine, 3, 4, 183n4, 185n18
Matrix, The, 128 Nora, Pierre, 16
Matter and Memory, 30, 125 Nora, Tia de, 91
McLuhan, Marshall, 15 “Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’
McQuire, Scott, 150 A,” 64,
media: digital 26, 178–179; home 18, 19; Nussbaum, Emily, 66, 70, 198n45
mass 16–19; morphing, 175,
Memento, 32–33, 128 O’Brien, Geoffrey, 84
memex, 149, 151–153 Olick, Jeffrey K., 185n26
memories: embedded, 28, 38, 79, 90; em- Ong, Walter, 15, 186n30
bodied, 28–29, 38, 79, 123; enabled, OpenDiary, 65–67
28, 35, 38–41; mediated, 2, 21–25, 28, Osbournes, The, 138, 212n35
38–39, 49–52, 55, 94, 126, 136, 145, 164,
173–174; 180, 182 Partridge Family, The, 134
memory: acts of, 6, 7, 13, 47, 49, 127, 168, Payne, Robert, 60
232 Index
Peirce, Charles, 82 Sterne, Jonathan, 93, 202n38

photoblogs, 114, 179 Strange Days, 128
photography, personal, 98, 101, 106–108, Stuhlmiller, C. M., 203n2
110, 112–114, 117–120, 203n1; digital Sturken, Marita, 22, 188n49, 208n48
104–105, 109–110, 112, 115, 118–120; subjectivity, affective, 55–56, 59–61
phone, 114–115 Sutton, John, 29, 38
Picabia, Francis, 170–173
Picture Yourself Graphics, 206n23 Tacchi, Joe, 201n29
Piggott, Michael, 196n33 Taylor, Alex, 197n41, 198n43
Pine, Joseph, 115 Taylor, Timothy, 199n5
Pisters, Patricia, 209n5 technologies: of affect, 46, 72; of mem-
plasticity, condition of, 107 ory, 127, 31; of self (Foucault), 39, 48,
Plato, 15 51, 72, 162, 190n24; of truth (Fou-
Polaroid. See camera cault) 39, 162
Positron Emission Tomography (PET), technostalgia, 86–87
42–43, 58, 189n16, 191n29 Thacker, Eugene, 45
Precious Memories, 147 Thompson, John, 18, 25, 187n45
privacy, 72–74, 76, 168 Time-Image, The, 125
private mobilization, 88, 201n28 Tomkins, Silvan, 56
punctum, 103 Top 2000, The Dutch National, 78,
80–82, 84, 87–97, 199n6
Random Access Memory, 60 trauma, 180–181
Raymond, Alan, 135 Turino, Tomas, 79, 82, 85, 88, 199n8
Raymond, Susan, 135
reconsolidation theory, 32–33, 47, 174 Ulmer, Gregory, 192n39
remediation, 47, 49 Urry, John, 17
Robbins, Joyce, 185n26
Rose, Steven, 17, 203n6 Vietnam Memorial, 22
Rothenbuhler, Eric, 201n26, 201n29 VisionQuest Images, 106
Rubin, David, 200n21 Vocoder, 151
Ruoff, Jeffrey, 135
Wade, Kimberley, 204n9, 204n10
Samuel, Raphael, 16 Wang, Qi, 4
Schiano, Diane, 207n38 Wells, H. G., 44
Schulkind, Matthew, 200n21 Williams, Raymond, 88
Seventh Symphony (Gustave Mahler), 31 Winkler, Hartmut, 152, 190n25
Shepherd, Dawn, 197n42
Shoah Visual History Foundation, Xanga, 66, 70, 76
185n20
Shoebox, 154–156, 160–161, 166–168 Yakel, Elizabeth, 196n32
Silverstone, Roger, 41 Yates, Francis, 186n30
Slater, Don, 108
Sontag, Susan, 112, 116, 204n13, 206n26 Zhang, Jane, 195n21
Spielberg, Steven, 185n20 Zimmerman, Patricia, 132
Stephens, Mitchell, 186n31 Zoe Eye Tech Implant, 128–129, 151
Cultural Memory in the Present
Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes From the Latin

American Sixties
Bella Brodzki, “Can These Bones Live?”: Translation, Survival, and Cultural
Memory
Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature
Sara Guyer, Romanticism after Auschwitz
Gerard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from
Damaged Life
Alison Ross, The Aesthetic Steering of Philosophy
Rodolphe Gasché, The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy
Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film
Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World
Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory
Michael G. Levine, The Belated Witness
Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory
Christoph Menke, Reflections of Equality
Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage
Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies
David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad
and his Interlocutors
Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories
James Siegel, Naming the Witch
J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of
Painting
Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul: On Justice
Richard Rorty and Eduardo Mendieta, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will
Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty
Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine
Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of
Perception
Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art
Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern
China
James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry
Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience
István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism
Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger
Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art
Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the
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Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine
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Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue
Elisabeth Weber, Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber
Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques
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Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing
Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century
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Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul
Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible
Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany
Anne Freadman, The Machinery of Talk: Charles Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis
Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes
Stuart McLean, The Event and its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity
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Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses
Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends Of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy
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the Public Arena
Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks
Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader,
edited by Rolf Tiedemann
Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film
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Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
Dorothea von Mücke, The Rise of the Fantastic Tale
Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism
Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape
Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology
Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics
Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of
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Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and
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mediated memories in the digital age

Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

José van Dijck

stanford university press

©2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dijck, José van.

Typeset by Westchester Book Group in 11/13.5 Garamond

1. Mediated Memories as a Conceptual Tool 1

In the summer of 2003, I bought myself a digital camera; not exactly

expected to map its mechanisms. Academics from a variety of disciplinary

media in its formation. Media are pivotal to the construction of individual

understated communicative and public functions. The Internet, with its

memory apparatus. I conclude by sketching how digitization, multimedia-

Some chapters in this book have roots in journal articles or collec-

Many people nurture a shoebox in which they store a variety of items

emphasizes the value of items as “mediators” between individuals and col-

Personal Cultural Memory

The study of what constitutes personal memory has traditionally

that evolves over the years. The development of an autobiographical self is

culturally framed consciousness, where personal narratives constantly inter-

account help to interpret the event and communicate its signiﬁcance to

record or what to remember without records, often being unaware of the

prejudiced assessments that characterize these genres as boring, pre-

Individual versus Collective Cultural Memory

Collective memory, like its autobiographical penchant, is commonly

complementary: each partaker may retain vastly different interpretations of

The recent institutionalization of personal memory items can be

self-evident relationship between individual and collective memory is in-

of collectivity—past and present—as it is always a response to all previous

The Mediation of Memory

In recent years, cultural theorists have observed an irreversible trend

enhancement of human perceptual capacities: photography and television

arrow: could our development and use of various media technologies be

Mediated Memories as Objects of Cultural Analysis

Private Mediated Memories Public

There is one more aspect in my proposed concept that I wish to

family or with complete strangers, exchanging self-recorded items is also a

Because we are currently in the midst of a transition from analog to digital

Memory Matters in the Digital Age

Embodied Memory: “Personal Memory Is in the Brain”

Ever since memory entered scientiﬁc discussions, it has been caught in

to connectionist concepts.3 Metaphors such as the library and the archive

a momentary performance. Each member of the orchestra plays his or her

in the mainstream of the brain sciences today.”12 In Memento, the main

neurological circuits in his brain as well as the circuits in the technician’s

Enabled Memory: “Personal Memory

Consider for a moment this all too familiar hypothetical question:

Embedded Memory: Personal Memory

Mediated memories are material triggers for future recall—produced

movie, or taping recorded music are practices shaped by an internalized

proportional to the pleasure of building up communal preferences. More

hence limited to the interior body, and it cannot be “disembodied,” because

The Digitization of Personal Memory

Up to this point, I have deliberately focused on cultural memory in

scans as pieces of irrefutable evidence.31 In popular discourse, like maga-

In many respects, digital imaging technologies turn the brain into a