Page 153 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 140

140 Consuming Media

is a remediation of time, juxtaposed to many other mediations of time that affect
contemporary practices of media consumption. Media are at the core of late-modern
time comprehensions, as technologies mediating syntactical structures and narratives,
and as founders of everyday routines. Their tools for time management range from
filofaxes and digital electronic almanacs to media equipment with timesaving prop-
erties, including DVD recorders with time settings. Such tools give a sense of an
increased flexibility in the management of abstract time, increasing people’s capa-
bility to adapt their media time to other time layers, at the same time as the homo-
geneous quality of the abstract clock time loosens some of its grip. The ‘time-shifting’
property of DVD recorders is also a good example of how media use is both struc-
tured by and structure time and space. At a more basic level, this dual-time structure
of media use on the one hand lets media impose a certain order on daily routines, but
on the other hand makes media use dependent on such routines.
Media use is habituated through the daily, weekly, monthly and annual periodicity
of media contents: the morning and evening papers, the weekly and monthly jour-
nals, the seasonal TV serials and annual televised events. The Donald Duck Christmas
Show broadcast by Swedish public service television at precisely 3 p.m. on Christmas
Eve for the last forty years is an example of the latter. First broadcast in 1963, the
programme has established itself as an intrinsic part of the Swedish Christmas tradi-
tion – a true ‘invention of tradition’. 33 Some older traditions are less obviously
‘invented’ and commonly regarded as stretching back for many centuries, but even
though the Swedish Christmas Donald Duck tradition is commonly understood as
‘invented’, it nevertheless serves as a binding tradition. Traditions are increasingly
34
dependent on communication media. Although often seen as a threat to traditional
ways of living, media contribute to maintain, reconstruct and ‘invent’ new traditions.
The same goes for history in general, which must also always be transmitted from
each generation to the next in order to become part of collectively preserved memo-
ries, with media as essential tools. Media prolong the past into the present and save
it from vanishing.
New media technologies make possible new ways to actualize history and collec-
tive memories in the present. An example is the recycling of voices of deceased
popular singers on recordings with contemporary artists, for instance Natalie Cole
singing duet on recordings with her long-since deceased father Nat King Cole. But
media also constantly revive collective or public memories of the recent past, illus-
trating Benjamin’s effort in the Arcades Project to ‘fix the image of history in its most
insignificant existence, at the same time keeping its refuse’. 35 Collective memories
that fade when gone out of fashion live on unnoticed and refused, balancing between
recognized public history and mere private memories, until they are revived by media
retrospectives or flashbacks, whether in nostalgia or as ‘new’ retro-styles. Fredric
Jameson has critically argued that the electronic media and the commodity culture of
late capitalism have founded ‘a new and original situation in which we are
condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that
36
history, which itself remains forever out of reach’. Benjamin instead emphasized the