Mediated Collective Memory and the Political Process Towards Democracy in Spain

Abstract

If we understand the concept of collective memory to be a social process for the construction and reconstruction of the past lived by a certain group, community or society in order to guarantee their cohesion and preserve their identity (Halbwachs, 1968), we must admit that today, reconstruction depends less than ever before on a specific collectivity, and more on the media that play an informative role in its use. Thus, not only do they mediate in the conveyance of the current reality, but they also have a decisive influence in forging a mythical past with which this collectivity may identify itself. This point has been made, for example, by Thompson (1995, p. 34), who admits that, even when ‘oral tradition and face-to-face interaction continue to play important roles in shaping our sense of the past […], they operate increasingly in conjunction with a process of understanding which draws its symbolic content from the products of the media industries’; or by Sampedro and Baer (2003, p. 94), who note that ‘since media are display windows for the dissemination of information about the past and the typical socialization vehicles of current societies, they play an increasingly important role in the consolidation or destruction of collective memories, especially when generational memories decrease over time.’ Hoskins (2001, p. 336) goes even further by talking about a ‘new memory’ to refer to this collective memory, which has been ‘mediated’ especially by television, and, in his opinion, has changed from being merely its electronic support to become also ‘the medium of its production’ [italics in original].