scholarly journals Social Changes and the Generational Differences in the Formation of Collective Memories (Dissertation, 2012)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Vuckovic Juros

The present study examined how collective memories on a recent difficult past were formed among young people coming of age in a society transitioning from a totalitarian regime through an authoritarian state to a nascent democratic society. I used textual analysis to examine the presentations of the communist Yugoslavia institutionalized in the Croatian history textbooks and newspapers in 1991-2007, and I compared them to the accounts of the Yugoslav past among the Croatian transitional (born 1978-81) and post-communist generation (born 1989-91). These two generations were distinct in their childhood and formative years’ experiences of Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav Croatia, but both depended on secondary sources such as parents, school and the media for their evaluations of the Yugoslav period. The present study found that the textbook and newspaper presentations, primarily shaped by the 1990s nation-building elites, mainly portrayed Yugoslavia in negative political, economic and ethnic terms. However, findings from 72 in-depth interviews with the two young Croatian generations suggested that the influence of the dominant negative re-evaluations was limited, particularly among the vocationally educated individuals who were least exposed to the institutionalized presentations of the Yugoslav past. In contrast, the young Croats, independently of their differences, generally dominantly evaluated Yugoslavia in positive social terms, which was a perspective obtained from their parents and older people recounting their good lives in Yugoslavia. This perspective was appropriated not only because its sources were emotionally available and credible, but also because the social lens on Yugoslavia helped the young Croats make sense of their lives in the social insecurities of the contemporary Croatian society. Therefore, the present study showed how different beliefs on the Yugoslav past, available from different sources, were appropriated and used by the young Croats. I also proposed Interactional Model of Collective Memories Formation, which elaborated how the influences on the beliefs of the past were formed at the macro, micro and the level of social interaction. Finally, this study also illuminated how active actors reinterpreted the presentations of the past, thus demonstrating how individuals can use culture in diverse and adept ways.

Author(s):  
Chaang-Iuan Ho ◽  
Jui-Yuan Chu

Since the launch of Facebook (FB) in 2006, social media participation has grown rapidly during the past decade. Although FB and YouTube (YT) still occupy the most prominent positions in the social media landscape, Instagram (IG) is rapidly gaining ground, and now has a market share of 35%. It is not uncommon for users to have more than one account. New social media platforms have been developed and gained some popularity, some major concerns have been raised. Displacement–reinforcement effects, such as changes in attitude and loyalty, may appear in relation to both new and old media. In addition, age appears to influence the platform usage and preference. These matters led us to our research question: Is the Internet generation more likely than other generations to switch from FB to YT or IG? Keywords: Social media choice, generation gap, niche theory


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brady Robards ◽  
Brendan Churchill ◽  
Son Vivienne ◽  
Benjamin Hanckel ◽  
Paul Byron

For LGBTIQ+ people, the internet and social media are key channels for communicating and connecting with queer peers, and learning about queer life and queer experiences. While digital social spaces have evolved over the past 20 to 30 years, many of the motivations for using these platforms remain the same. This paper draws on data from the Scrolling Beyond Binaries study, centred on a national Australian survey of 1,304 young LGBTIQ+ people. We present key findings from the study examining generational differences across our four age cohorts of our young respondents: 16–20, 21–25, 26–30 and 30–35. Even among this group of young people, we find stark differences by age in self-identification related to gender and sexuality, and also patterns of difference in the social media platforms they use. Our younger respondents identify with much more fluid forms of gender and sexuality, and also tend to favour dating and hook-up apps that are more inclusive. We seek to foreground the ways in which the internet continues to be significant for our respondents for social connection and learning. We also add to our understandings of the complex and evolving ways in which young LGBTIQ+ people use and thus (re)produce digital social spaces, returning to Nina Wakeford’s (2000 [1997]) consideration of ‘cyberqueer spaces’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-323
Author(s):  
Hesti Miranda

This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer is a historical novel about Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. This paper was aimed to find and describe the social stratification in the past that is written in the This Earth Mankind novel. This paper carried out with only one research question: How is social stratification of This Earth Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Novel?. This paper was qualitative research, specifically in document analysis. The main source of this paper was This Earth of Mankind, the 9th edition publishes by Hasta Mitra in 2002. The total page of this novel was 405. In addition, secondary sources are also needed such as online information about the writer and previous researcher who has been conducted similar research. This paper found that there were three social classes of society in the Dutch era, the Dutch group with privilege, enjoyed the lavish life, and live comfortably. The Native group with privilege, who was born from regent or governor, they can attend education where Dutch and Indo attended to such as E.L.S and H.B.S and the last, native group without privilege, they had low status in the society. 


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles B Stone ◽  
William Hirst

How communities forge collective memories has been a topic of long-standing interest among social scientists and, more recently, psychologists. However, researchers have typically focused on how what is overtly remembered becomes collectively remembered. Recently, though, Stone and colleagues have delineated different types of silence and their influence on how individuals and groups remember the past, what they termed, mnemonic silence. Here we focus on the importance of relatedness in understanding the mnemonic consequences of public silence. We begin by describing two common means of investigating collective memories: the social construction approach and the psychological approach. We subsequently discuss in detail a psychological paradigm, retrieval-induced forgetting, and demonstrate how this initially individual memory paradigm can and has been extended to social contexts in the form of public silence and may provide insights into larger sociological phenomenon, in our case, collective memories. We conclude by discussing avenues of future research and the benefits of including a psychological perspective in the field of collective memory.


Author(s):  
James J. Coleman

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Zachary Nowak ◽  
Bradley M. Jones ◽  
Elisa Ascione

This article begins with a parody, a fictitious set of regulations for the production of “traditional” Italian polenta. Through analysis of primary and secondary historical sources we then discuss the various meanings of which polenta has been the bearer through time and space in order to emphasize the mutability of the modes of preparation, ingredients, and the social value of traditional food products. Finally, we situate polenta within its broader cultural, political, and economic contexts, underlining the uses and abuses of rendering foods as traditional—a process always incomplete, often contested, never organic. In stirring up the past and present of polenta and placing it within both the projects of Italian identity creation and the broader scholarly literature on culinary tradition and taste, we emphasize that for so-called traditional foods to be saved, they must be continually reinvented.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.


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