Mediated temporal consciousness: memory and concepts of time through engagement with online news archives

Abstract

Archival news content no longer exists solely in physical collections at a limited number of public institutions and media organization storerooms. Instead, digitized and digital-native content of the past can be found online through multiple venues, including the venerable online video sharing site, YouTube. This research looks at how online videos of major news events within the past 10 years provide a chance to re-engage with memories of the news events and other memories connected to the time of the given news event. Through a qualitative research method known as video elicitation, the study uses semi-structured interviews with participants to look at recalled semantic and episodic memory content connected to a recent news event featured in a YouTube-based archival news video -- one regarding the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri, protests after local police shot and killed African-American teenager Michael Brown, and the other regarding the 2010 British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and underwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The study considers the characteristics and comparative states of the interview responses in building a new media concept -- mediated temporal consciousness (MTC) – to understand the awareness and articulation of episodic and semantic memory content associated with past news events or the time at which the person first learned of the news event. MTC is a proposed extension of presence (also known as telepresence) theory in the sense of presence as transportation; in this case, transportation from the present to past points in time coinciding with initial mediated dissemination of news events.