n.a shared, perceptible narrative of the pastCox 1993, 125Bodnar contests the general assumption that public memory emerges from political discussion concentrated upon economic or moral problems—such as Americans were prone to witness during the Ronald Reagan Presidency—and sees, instead, public memory emerging from “fundamental issues about the entire existence of a society: its organization, structure of power, and the very meaning of its past and present.”Cox 1998, 60If archivists contribute their share to the building of public memory by collecting interesting stuff with little consideration of the nature of contemporary culture and its wars, what they acquire may be of questionable value for future generations of researchers. . . . Archivists, instead, need to work with all the contentious factions in the culture wars, and they need to engage in broader discussions of how public memory is constructed.Galloway 2006, 83To the extent that bolstering white supremacy and formulating a specific subcultural public memory were projects shared by the former Confederate states, elements of this study may be familiar, though the archival story has not been told. The trajectory of Rowland’s career, which touched on nearly all the great movements of archives and history during his lifetime, also provides a useful historical transect through those events.Caron and Brown 2011, 11For memory institutions, among the most significant impacts of this socio-technology convergence are the increasing demands for information resources and their corresponding commodification and commercialization within a new information resource marketspace; new sets of consumer expectations around the timely accessibility of information resources; a massive proliferation of information service providers and distributors; and the removal of traditional information resource filters and their substitution with networks of information resource intermediaries, consumers and “prod-users” (or “prod-umers”). This new information resource environment is both redistributing and complicating the development of public memory far beyond the confines and semantics of analog information resource intelligence and learning experience. It is shifting the context of information resource and memory development from relatively formal, controlled, and ordered relationships to the informal, uncontrolled, disordered, experiences and unlimited communications relativity of cyberspace. And it has effectively ended the public memory monopoly once exercised by archives, libraries, museums, and others.Katz and Gandel 2011, 221Likewise, in Greek city states, there emerged the centralized archive, with their archons or magistrates, as places of law, of consolidation of power by controlling records and public memory. Central to the stature of bibliophylakes and archons—and their various successors such as librarians, archivists, clerks, and others—was trust.Caron and Brown 2013, 147Our current view is that the constitution and construction of public memory, like any other element of public business enterprise, must be policy based and supported by logical business processes and administrative procedures. In fact, this represents a fundamental principle within the mantra of our ongoing institutional modernization: the articulation and preservation of public memory is an objective of public policy implemented within the context of public administration. Consequently, it must have the capacity to be predictable, measurable, and accountable in relation to results.Brett 2017, 480De Kosnik defines “rogue archives” as digital archival efforts characterized by constant availability to the user and zero barriers to entry, and by content that can be downloaded or streamed in its entirety (with no regard for payment or copyright restrictions) and which would rarely, if ever, be preserved in a traditional archives. Such rogue efforts came into significant play at the start of the digital era, as increasingly widespread and democratic Internet access caused public memory to be loosened from state or institutional control.Houdek and Phillips 2017Another aspect of public memory that draws the attention of communication and rhetoric scholars is the necessity that memories be manifested in some way. These manifestations may take the form of public speeches, monuments, museums, and commemorative events, but they are all decidedly public and visible. Stephen H. Browne identifies this aspect of public memory “a principle of textuality,” and through this principle “public memory lives as it is given expressive form; its analysis,” he asserts, “must therefore presume a theory of textuality and entail an appropriate mode of interpretation.”Cook 2020, 457The archivist thus became an active selector of the archive, if through the filter of academic history, and thereby consciously created public memory. Far from neutral and objective, and guarding what was inherited or received, the archivist determined what would be received by archives, with inevitable subjectivity entering that decision-making process.Joffrion and Cloonan 2020, 159-160Thus, archivists may control future interpretations of the past by privileging certain historical and personal narratives while marginalizing others. The cultural record is often biased toward the activities and interests of the wealthy and powerful, leaving significant portions of society either undocumented or underdocumented, and potentially lost to history. To address this inequity, archivists have become increasingly inclusive in the selection and appraisal of materials. In fact, a good deal of recent archival literature focuses on the power of archives to shape public memory, and an emerging professional imperative encourages all archivists to collect and document the records of marginalized and underrepresented communities. As democratic principles evolve and the world grows increasingly interconnected, the archivist’s desire to leave a representative and inclusive record to future generations is becoming a commonly accepted value.Fournet 2021, 124Strong argues that music journalists play a significant role in this process. She asserts that “the continued reinforcement of the status of certain bands as ‘the best’ based on the tastes of particularly influential groups (who, it would appear, often have similar characteristics to the artist they are more likely to favor) keeps these groups alive in collective and public memories in a way that does not apply to other bands.” To extend Foucault’s imagery here, these journalists strengthen the luminosity of some bands while, as a consequence, creating light pollution that diminishes the historical visibility of others. It is the politics and perspectives of actors like these journalists, along with any and all other interest groups related to a band, song, album, or musical movement, that constitute the archives of recorded popular music.
