Visual, Visibility and Memory

Abstract

This chapter presents part of the findings of a wider empirical study to understand ‘memory’ by investigating two generational groups, their access to and reception of television and how it affected the construction of their memories related to television. Theoretically, it moves away from the ongoing ‘effect studies’ framework to pose questions in the shift from oral to visual memory and how people articulate their association with television in everyday life? Can mediation through television create a memory? What kind of memory does it create? How is it different from oral memory? And finally, can we conceptualize a term called televisual memory? These are some of the questions the paper intends to address with the help of ethnographic field work undertaken in selected Rajasthan villages. The study is based on revisiting the SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) villages to capture the shifting trajectory with the onslaught of Terrestrial Television in Rural Rajasthan.