Media Studies

Answer ONE of the given questions, ensuring that you introduce and analyse your own examples as well as referencing the relevant literature.
1) With detailed reference to the memory practices of at least two generations of your own family, critically reflect on how changing media technologies have figured in the telling (or archiving) of your family history.

2) How would you assess the conflicting claims that the digital age will mean the ‘end of forgetting’ (as we move towards the ‘total archive’) or that it will mean the ‘end of remembering’ (as we outsource our memories to technological prosthetics)?

3) How might the construction of collective memory be changing in the move from ‘mass’ media to more ‘personalised’ media?

4) ‘Nostalgia is the child of crisis’. Critically reflect on this statement in relation to a contemporary example of nostalgia in popular culture.

5) ‘Newspapers write the history of tomorrow’. To what extent do you agree with this statement?

6) Do representations of the past tell us more about the time in which they were produced than the time they represent? Answer with reference to the changing media representation of one key historical event of your choosing.

7) What role does the representation of anniversaries in the media play in the construction of national identity? Your answer should centre on at least one specific example (e.g. the centenary commemorations of the First World War).

8) With reference to specific examples, critically compare online memorials with offline commemorative practices.

9) The media are ‘functionally integral to a sense of pastness’ (Gitelman, 2006, p.5). Discuss, illustrating your discussion with specific examples.

10) Do you agree there should be a ‘right to memory’ (Reading, 2011)? Justify your answer with reference to a particular example, and the role of media communication within the debate.

11) Taking an iconic historical event of the 20thCentury as an example, explore some of the ways in which the media coverage of the time (press, radio, newsreel or TV) has been ‘remediated’ in later re-tellings.

12) Is the prospect of a ubiquitous, instantly accessible and permanent digital archive a promise or a threat?

13) With reference to a specific example of your choice, describe and evaluate contrasting positions in debates about representing traumatic or contested histories.