HOLDSWORTH: ‘Medium-specific interrogations of memory’

This has implications for what Amy Holdsworth calls ‘medium-specific interrogations of memory’
(Holdsworth, A. (2008) ‘“Television Resurrection”: Television and Memory’, Cinema
Journal 47(3): 137–44.)

In a world of archival and semiotic abundance, memory has become subject to renewable configurations and articulations within the cultural terrain.

If ‘new technologies have consistently rendered the past more richly variegated and dense’ (Straw, 2007: 12), media corporations like the BBC have sought to translate this density for its own corporate ends.

Through promos like the Elvis ad, the BBC has projected an archival imaginary that reflects an institutional moment where the Corporation’s broadcasting past – especially its back-catalogue of television and radio programmes – has become a newly significant asset accessible because of the changes brought about by digitization, DVD and online archives.

Cited in:

Elvis sings for the BBC: broadcast branding and digital media design

Paul Grainge

Media Culture Society 2010 32: 45

DOI: 10.1177/0163443709350097