Social Media facilitates an entirely new way to create, preserve, and interpret memory. Bloggers document their lives in diary-style posts, Flickr users upload and aggregate photos from events, Facebook users chronicle their lives through statuses, posts and photos, and Twitter users tweet about anything and everything. All of these activities, while on a micro level are quite ordinary, together create a paradigm shift in memory.
In a more primitive, pre-social media world, the desire to preserve still existed. The ways a person could do so, though, were considerably different. As an illustration of this now past age, I offer the song “Coconut” by Fever Ray. The song, while written only a few years ago, offers a quaint illustration of the traditional model of the creation and sharing of memory.
The narrator, who sings about being told stories she “now dream[s] of,” only experiences the memories in her dreams, which is to say on a micro level. The lines “Open atmosphere / Take me anywhere / Take me there,” suggest a physical and mental distance from whatever memories she references.
Where as “Coconut” offers a simple tale about memory, Laurie Anderson’s “The Beginning of Memory” conjures up a wildly different image.
Anderson’s visual of the “deafening” sound of “songbirds everywhere” serves as an illustration of the chaos presented by the vastness of human experiences. Even though the natural desire to share and preserve memory has always existed, the tools to capture and organize memory continue to be re-imagined with social media. Without a doubt the most important mechanism to organize and collect memory is tagging. A fundamental element of Flickr and Twitter, the ability to tag content not only organizes the chaos of millions of users’ content, it also allows others to easily find it. As Anderson puts it in her song, “...before this no one could remember a thing / They were just constantly flying in circles / Constantly flying in huge circles.”
“The Beginning of Memory” specifically mentions another crucial element of social media sites. In the song, the lark protagonist decides to bury her father in the back of her head in order to remember him. In much the same way, sites such as Facebook allow users to collectively memorialize the dead. As Max Kelly explains, putting content online to memorialize a deceased person helps reinforce and preserve current memories. While much more personal than aggregating photos from an event on Twitter, it still serves as a compelling example of social media’s role in changing the way we experience memory.
When many people come together to memorialize somebody, collective perspectives and experiences are created. Intentionally or not, Kate Bush illustrates this pattern of behavior in her song “King Of The Mountain,” which reflects on the enigmatic nature of Elvis.
The second verse, in which Bush sings “And there’s a rumor that you’re on ice / And you will rise again someday. / And there’s a photograph / Where you’re dancing on your grave,” suggests the creation of a collective memory of one person based on the aggregation of individual experiences. Even though in the case of Elvis the experiences appear to be made-up, the idea illustrates the main tenants of collective memory. This memory aggregates into the metaphor of the wind whistling through the house.
SONGS FEATURED IN THIS POST:
ARTICLES FEATURED IN THIS POST:
Kelly, M. (2009, October 26). Memories of Friends Departed Endure on Facebook. Retrieved December 3, 2011, from http://www.facebook.com/blog.php?post=163091042130
McCarthy, Caroline (2009 October 26). With 'memorialized' profiles, Facebook sees dead people. Retrieved December 3, 2011 from http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10383015-36.html
van Dijck, José (2010). Flickr and the Culture of Connectivity. University of Amsterdam: Memory Studies
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