The concept of collective memory was initially developed by the French philosopher and sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs, in his writings on the social construction of memory at the beginning of the twentieth century. Halbwachs’ primary assertion was that human memory can only operate within the context of the group, be it smaller or larger communities, as it is wholly dependent on the so-called frameworks of social memory—family, religion, and social class. But what about technology? How has it affected the way we perceive, experience, and remember the outside world, with its shared pasts and futures?

     Individuals adopt patterns of encoding new experiences and information, as well as recalling the past, not only via social interaction, but also through the media they use. Ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the cultural memory of American society has been continuously shaped by technology, the media in particular. Thus, often triggered by external factors ranging from films and live news broadcasts to the internet, new modes of remembering have begun to emerge in modernity and post modernity.

      The rise of photography as a new documentary medium, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, newsreels, and the flourishing of television all add up to what the communication theorist, Marshal McLuhan, called the “electronic village,” in the 1960s. Last but not least, the advent of film in the first half of the twentieth century rendered numerous images and historical narratives an integral part of the spectators’ collective memory, as can be illustrated by films such as Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the Wind (1939), JFK (1991), or Pearl Harbor (2001).

     Memory is central to the interface between experience and identity. Nowadays, the study of the relationship between culture and memory has become a remarkably interdisciplinary field, involving approaches from areas as diverse as history, philosophy, political science, literary and media studies, psychology, and neuroscience. Thus, in the face of rapid political changes, widespread social and geographical mobility, cultural diversity (let’s not trot out the old melting-pot-versus-salad-bowl cliché!) as well as the increasingly developing technological advances of today’s world, the need to bring focus to new approaches towards remembrance has been necessitated.

     In her 2004 book, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Alison Landsberg advocates the beneficial effects of America’s commodified mass culture and modern technological innovations on public memory. The new form of cultural memory that emerges is the so-called prosthetic memory—a mode of remembering that allows individuals to develop personal memories of past events through which they themselves did not live.

     Prosthetic memories, then, derive from a person’s engagement with experiential spaces created by modern technologies and attempt to generate subjective, sensuous memories of past events that do not restrict themselves to fixed social or political frameworks. In light of Jean Baudrillard’s speculations on the simulacra and simulation, however, advanced technologies of reproduction threaten to annihilate the difference between authentic and mass-mediated memories. Landsberg’s response to Baudrillard’s treatment of experience and reality would be a shift of emphasis from the authentic to the experiential.

      Despite their simulated nature, experiential sites of memory—ranging from Civil War reenactments to experiential museums such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and film—offer a kind of direct experience of history, as well as strategies for assimilating it into personal memories. Most importantly, prosthetic memories are by no means bound to be biologically or ethnically associated with an individual’s personal background, and thus go beyond borders of class, race, and gender. Whatever the implications, the powerful effects of technology on cultural identity and collective memory of a nation cannot be underestimated.

Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.