History TV and Popular Memory
“A remarkable and misguided consensus exists among both historians and media critics regarding television’s unsuitability for the construction of history. Notwithstanding The History Channel’s promise to provide access to “All of History – All in One Place,” television viewers are often characterized as victims in an epidemic of cultural amnesia for which television is both disease and carrier. TV, so the argument goes, can produce no lasting sense of history; at worst, it actually impedes viewers’ ability to receive, process, or remember information about the past.”
This essay examines an array of television shows, ranging from Star Trek and Quantum Leap to Meeting of Minds and You Are There, to argue against prevailing assumptions about TV and history and the culture of amnesia that television is supposed to produce.
Steve Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Director of the Ph.D. program in Media Arts & Practice in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He co-Edits the interdisciplinary online journal Vectors and is the creator of the fair use advocacy site Critical Commons. As a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, culture and technology, his research interests include historiography, the theory and history of emerging technologies, documentary and experimental film and video, and interactive media design.