PB2 – 1/3 – OLD MEDIA BUILDS THE MEMORY

THERE IS NO MEMORY WITHOUT MEDIA

 

Media, after all, are not only “things”; they are also cultural constructions that shape our everyday experience, and provide us with meanings and narratives to make sense of the transformations and changes experiences throughout life. (Natale, forthcoming; Natale & Balbi, 2014)

When I was a little girl, one of my daily routine is reading comics from every day’s newspaper, because the comics was serialized, it also made me to expect next day’s newspaper. When I was a little girl, my mother used to buy me a lot of story tapes, such as Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Aesop’s fables and the Thousand and One Nights. I had my own silver Walkman which accompanied with me for a long time. When I was a little girl, I used to listen to the radio with my grandfather. Sometimes, I cannot understand the content and my grandfather would explain to me. Kid’s channel was always my favourite, there were some nursery rhymes I still could sing now. When I was a little girl, there was no way expect the television to watch the cartoons. If you miss the time, you will miss your favourite cartoon. I think cartoon builds everyone’s childhood. My homestay’s baby Zoe loves watching The Pig Peggy, but in my time, I watched many Japanese cartoons rather than English cartoons. Even now, I still feel quite involved when I watch the cartoons I watched many years ago. When I was older to go to the primary school and the secondary school, I felt in love with different kinds of magazines, magazines about the idols, magazines about jokes and stories, magazines about the school’s life. I loved to read and collect them. There were too many of them so that I created a specialized bookshelf for them until now.

There were plenty of memories about media in my head, although the story tapes stop selling today, my grandfather cannot listen to the radio with me anymore, Chinese government does not allow to play the Japanese cartoons on the television, and I hardly read the old magazines, but I still have the memory. Almost all my high school friends and classmates chose to study business and economics in the university, I still chose to improve my media knowledge, because I know with all those media memory, the interests about media would support me to go further.

 

Cited by:

O’Hagan, Sean (2016, July 3). ‘The digital age reshapes our notion of photography. Not everyone is happy…’ The Observer.

Wei, L., & Hindman, D. (2011). Does the Digital Divide Matter More? Comparing the Effects of New Media and Old Media Use on the Education-Based Knowledge Gap. Mass Communication and Society, 14(2), 216-235.

Neiger, M., Meyers, O. and Zandberg, E. (2011). On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age. Palsgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, England

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