Abstract:

Memory structures, fragments, and rebuilds the past knowledge via conceptualizing today's conditions. Today’s awareness redefines the past image and provides it clarity and also accuracy. Such that, the analysis of the memory that confirms and makes sense of today, especially collective memory, lacks if it is considered without covering the concepts like past, identity, power, belonging and so on. This study aims to discuss, by considering its relations with power, the collective memory involving construction process based on myths and rituals transformed into mediation and remediation process through the media. Thus, the transformation of construction process also transforms the structures of collective memory. In today’s media-saturated environment., with Hoskins’s word, “new memory” is not only more fragile and unpredictable compared the past but also more manipulative apparatus for power. Purpose: The study aims to discuss how memory construction in the social context is transformed with the opportunities provided by communication technologies and its structural effect on collective memory. Approach: The study proceeds around a qualitive discussion. Findings: It is seen that the transformation of memory from traditional construction forms into a product mediated by the media, into a structure that is harder to predict and more fragile, does not change its function in the social context for power. Memory, in its new form, is a tool that constructs and controls the reality of the social system. Authenticity: Traditional debates on collective memory in historical and political contexts will be insufficient to understand current social transformations unless communication technologies are considered. Although there are many studies related to collective memory in social fields, studies on this structural transformation mentioned in Turkish literature have been neglected. For this reason, it is possible to say that this theoretical discussion based on “new memory” of Hoskins will contribute to the literature by addressing the structural transformation of collective memory with communication technologies.

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