Terry L. Britt, Missouri School of Journalism

1. NEWS ARCHIVES AS CORNERSTONES
OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY
Terry L. Britt
Missouri School of Journalism

2. TIME AND SPACE
AS COGNITIVE EXPERIENCE
• Our daily experiences are encoded
by the brain and stored for later
retrieval as episodic memory
(Tulving, 1972), which is content
built upon the past as the
individual has experienced and
perceived it.
• We cannot be everywhere and
know everything at any given point
in time, so we depend largely upon
the media to inform and interpret
events outside our field of
perception. This content becomes
mediated memory (van Dijck,
Source: telegraph.co.uk

3. MEDIA ARCHIVES AS
COLLECTIVE MEMORY
• Among the functions of media is the
transmission of social and cultural
heritage (Lasswell, 1948). News archives
are a vital component in the media’s
ability to perform that function.
• Archival content thus becomes a tool for
building and reinforcing collective
memory (Halbwachs, 1941), the concept
by which groups or societies remember
past events and places. It allows us to…
Commemorate
Memorialize
Celebrate
Source: AP Images

4. WHY OUR ARCHIVING
EFFORTS MATTER
As time passes, we lose living witnesses carrying episodic memory
of any event. The media archives of those events thus become the
only remaining representations of the event in question. They are
key in reconstructing and reinforcing collective memory.

5. terry.britt@mail.missouri.edu
Twitter: @terry_britt
Facebook: terrybritt
#mediatimespacememory
#thefuturedrbritt
Thank you for
attending Dodging
the Memory Hole
2016