Cultural Trauma and the Media

Abstract

In recent decades, cultural trauma has become a widely accepted form of collective identity in images and narratives transmitted through mass media and information networks. The idea of cultural trauma can be traced at least back to Freud and has been associated with many events including the Holocaust and 9/11. Cultural trauma narratives tell stories about heroes and martyrs but this can falsify the reality of modern mass death in which most individuals are given no opportunity to act heroically. The essay explains the development of cultural trauma as a concept over the past 100 years and how this idea became linked with visual media. The essay argues that cultural trauma has been aligned with the perceptual habits and psychological reflexes of the media viewer through the experience of shock. Cultural trauma is a new experience of collective identity in a technologically mediated society. The essay also considers the political implications of this mediated experience of trauma.