By: Brian F. Clark, Dr. William Thompson, Jeffrey Matlak
The high school or college yearbook functioned as a form of public memory, a yearly memorial in print by which institutions constructed an approved visual and print master narrative of an institution and its members. Yearbook recipients traditionally created elaborate marginalia, a ritualized act of transgression (writing in a book) that transformed an institutional artifact into a more personalized one and created carnivalesque private counter narratives (pace Bakhtin) to an institution’s master one. The traditional yearbook is now nearly extinct—and nothing has quite replaced it as a site of institutional memory. Today, people memorialize themselves on the web using personal web pages, blogs, and social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace, and Bebo to name but a few. Whereas traditional yearbooks memorialized the many (the institution), social networking sites celebrate the personal and attempt to create ad hoc group identities, i.e. “groups.” Paradoxically, FaceBook has institutionalized the carnivalesque, draining it of much of its transgressive power. This presentation will examine the ways in which the distinction between public memory and private memory, between, for instance, diaries and yearbooks, has been blurred to the point of erasure. Diaries in the form of blogs or social networking sites have become as public as yearbooks—and as institutionalized. What has been lost in this shift? What gained? And who, or what, benefits?
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The Sixth Int'l Conference on the Book, 25-27 October 2008
The high school or college yearbook functioned as a form of public memory, a yearly memorial in print by which institutions constructed an approved visual and print master narrative of an institution and its members. Yearbook recipients traditionally created elaborate marginalia, a ritualized act of transgression (writing in a book) that transformed an institutional artifact into a more personalized one and created carnivalesque private counter narratives (pace Bakhtin) to an institution’s master one. The traditional yearbook is now nearly extinct—and nothing has quite replaced it as a site of institutional memory. Today, people memorialize themselves on the web using personal web pages, blogs, and social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace, and Bebo to name but a few. Whereas traditional yearbooks memorialized the many (the institution), social networking sites celebrate the personal and attempt to create ad hoc group identities, i.e. “groups.” Paradoxically, FaceBook has institutionalized the carnivalesque, draining it of much of its transgressive power. This presentation will examine the ways in which the distinction between public memory and private memory, between, for instance, diaries and yearbooks, has been blurred to the point of erasure. Diaries in the form of blogs or social networking sites have become as public as yearbooks—and as institutionalized. What has been lost in this shift? What gained? And who, or what, benefits?
Read More Join the conversation! Comment below.
The Sixth Int'l Conference on the Book, 25-27 October 2008
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