infobong.com

Chutry points to an older Henry Jenkins piece that relates to my favorite class to blog about this semester, "Media/History/Collective Memory." In the piece, Jenkins relates how the the movie Contact depicts a spacecraft picking up broadcast signals from historical moments, stretching back to FDR's "Fireside Chats" of the 1930s, yet ignores the historical moment when radio's radical potential was most fulfilled, the amateur era from the turn of the century to the 1920s. Jenkins suggests this is ironic, saying " this erasure of broadcast history is perplexing when you consider how often Contact returns to the image of ham radio, although its operators are more interested in communicating with the dead or with space aliens than with each other."

Flexing my fledgling theoretical muscles, I'd suggest that this demonstrates how popular memory and history can often come into conflict. Popular memory - the memory of ordinary folks formed through personal memories and media representations of the past - often ignores significant historical moments and events. From Jenkin's description, it sounds like the historical events Contact recalls - the Beatles, "All in the Family," the Iran hostage crisis - are moments significant to the lives of Baby Boomers. Yes, the Fireside Chats and World War II predate the Baby Boomers, but they would be significant to their parents and likely reside in their understanding of the past, much as Watergate and Vietnam preceded my generation, but strongly influence our understanding of our nation's past. Earlier events from the teens and twenties might be too far back for personal memories. In this case, Contact's version of history would be in line with the popular memory of its audience.

I do agree with Jenkins' argument that understanding the past of technological policy and development is critical for understanding contemporary debates about technology. Jenkins says,

Of course, he's thinking of the Internet and other peer-to-peer digital communication technologies, and I wholeheartedly agree that many of the policy debates we see today echo debates from the early days of broadcasting or even earlier.