Television as regards the recent past: how to study the link between TV and social memory?

• Autor(a) principal: Feld, Claudia
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Anos 90 (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/anos90/article/view/30810
• topic: Televisión; Memoria; Imagen; Dictadura; Represión; Televisión; Memoria; Dictadura; Argentina; Television; Memory; Image; Dictatorship; Repression

This article aims to examine the ways in which television represents Argentina’s recent past, through three specific links between TV and social memory. Three approaches for research are proposed, which are different in analytical terms. These approaches allow us to focus on the role this medium plays in configuring public agendas (that is, television is approached as an entrepreneur of memory); its effectiveness as a medium which communicates past events to new generations (i.e., as a vehicle of transmission among generations); or its role as a constructor of meanings through images, sounds, and words (that is to say, television is approached as a stage for memory). All of these roles co-exist and are intertwined, but there  is also tension among them. This article especially focuses on the experience of state terrorism in Argentina, in the framework of the military dictatorship in 1976-1983, as well as on the constructed memories about the disappearance of persons. The analysis of the links between TV and memory allows us to think how the obstacles to narrate an extreme experience are combined, in complex and not easily intelligible ways, with the sale of a product and entertainment.