ABSTRACT
When museums picked up where churches left off, they retained the role of a public clearinghouse and continued to regulate with socially accepted standards the status and signifi cance of their collections, thus marking each of their exhibits with a particular discursive claim. In the words of its founder, the collectibles of the Museum of Television and Radio present a “national memory” of America’s past, which recalls the broadcasts’ original function of “recording” socially and culturally relevant events.1 In her study Tangled Memories, Marita Sturken created the term “cultural memory” as specifying an in-between of individual recollection and social discourses of the present. From her perspective, pictures of the past evade pure historical status, since individual arrangements of memory are always entangled with the present. According to her outline, the ground fl oor of the television museum comprises a “technology of cultural memory,” because, like all museums, it represents a society’s handling of the past through a restaging of selected collectibles in showcases, thereby also regulating everything that should be forgotten.2 But as much as Sturken’s concept of cultural memory explores the grey area between individual and collective memory, and as much as it suits the nature of the museum’s collectibles, it cannot account for their full potential. There can be no doubt, for example, that pictures of past news and other television shows are also understood and enjoyed when seen for the fi rst time. There is thus a difference between recollecting an act of past television watching and the notion of reseeing or even seeing and understanding for the fi rst time what was broadcast decades ago. Furthermore, the concept of memory implies that pictures stimulate signifi cance the way reality does. But although television may feed individual recollection in similar ways to experience gathered in everyday life, the very possibility of manufacturing and presenting pictures to people also points to the difference between memory and visual literacy. Unlike memory, visual literacy accounts not only for a passive recollection of pictures of the past, but also for an active managing of pictorial terms, and thus for the very possibility to understand the narrative structure of pictures in the fi rst place.
