Some Sense of Time: Remembering Television

Although television has been with us, at least in the Western world, for fifty years or more, we know little of its effects on memory, both individual and collective. How does television shape memory? What is remembered? Events, places, people, specific programs? Media research has shown little interest in these questions, and only for specific programs, mainly news, or specific periods, especially the early years of television. ¹ Research on television news has discussed the short term retention of news content. ² But the broader problem of the relation between television and memory formation in the long term has not been addressed, even though, over a lifetime, television is a continuous source of information; it is consumed on a daily basis and discussed in various contexts (private conversations, public discussions), as well as in the media, including, of course, television itself.

This very pervasiveness of television in our daily life is probably a major obstacle to the study of its relation with the formation of memory. Despite problems of comparison over time and space due to different methods, we know that viewing time has been constantly growing in all countries where television has been introduced. Another dimension, no less important, is the fact that television, which has been called an allpurpose medium, has become the only all-age medium. In the Western world, most citizens were born with television and have grown up with it. In France, in 1997, a national survey reported a weekly viewing time of no less than 16 hours in all age groups (probably an underestimation), reaching a peak of 28 hours above 65. By contrast, according to the same source, cinema is the medium of teenagers and the educated, radio is important for teenagers and adults, much less for children and the elderly, while the newspapers--disregarding their uneven social penetration--reach mostly the adults. ³

Given such pervasiveness, the relation of television to memory has usually been the subject of commentaries that propose two contradictory models of television memories: a destructive model, and a hyper-integrative model based on a single program type: media events. In the destructive model television is seen as promoting "forgetting, when it chases after the next �big story' or inundates us with images of little personal relevance." ⁴ By contrast, in the integrative, media-event-based model, television is seen as a major instrument in the shaping of collective memory, especially national, and sometimes global. According to Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, live television events such as funerals of heads of state, the Olympics or royal weddings have the power of providing "a sense of common past," bridging "between personal and collective history"-- "through association with either the traumas to which they are responses or the exceptional nature of the gratifications they provide." ⁵ In short, in its relation to memory, television appears either as a major "disturber" or "sustainer" of social reality, to use Roger Silverstone's terms, ⁶ and there seems to be no chance of bridging the gap between those two views or providing other, less radical models of relations between television and memory.

This is precisely my aim: to propose models of the influence of television on memory other than the destructive or hyper-integrative ones. As a prerequisite, I have to specify the meaning I attach to the notion of memory, a still very popular but vague notion in the social sciences, and to clarify what I mean by television memories. I will discuss the results of my fieldwork: a study conducted in France in 1993, based on life stories of television viewers. This will lead me to propose a typology of television memories that requires, beyond generalizations about the medium, an analysis of the way television viewing is embedded in daily life.

What Notion of Memory?

Beyond the obvious fact that memory consists of the accumulation of what people remember, beyond the incredible popularity the notion has enjoyed in recent years, in a variety...