Before providing a critical overview of key theories of memory (personal, collective, mediated and new), let us take a well-known example that elicits the discourses on media and memory this chapter is concerned with. This will help us to understand the ways in which memory operates as extrapolated by Paul Connerton in How Societies Remember (1989): through cognitive and performative modes. In the cognitive mode, the past is past and we retrieve events and experiences from the past into the present: through the act of remembering. In the performative, the past is brought into the present as a commemorative act or ritual for ‘the past can be kept in mind by a habitual memory sedimented in the body’ (Connerton 1989: 102). In this sense, contextual notions of memory also become defining factors to include ‘a whole range of extra-verbal and non-cognitive activity such as emotional experience’ (Papoulias 2005: 120). It is these contextual factors that media record, represent and are consumed by audiences.

If we were to investigate Princess Diana's death and funeral in 1997, we could undertake audience research to explore memories of watching the funeral on television. There have been analyses of Diana's death in terms of national mourning and a culture of grief (see Kear and Steinberg 1999 and Walter 1999). However, media here are largely seen as channelling memories and funnelling history rather than as involved in the construction of our lifeworlds.