Media Conscious Understanding of Historical Popular Culture

Abstract

This article focuses on popular historical culture, particularly on how the use of digital mediahas changed our engagements with historical culture. Popular historical culture is discussed asa cultural phenomenon that is present across all media. Because of the digitalization of media,cultural practices related to history have fragmented, and historical culture is engaged with ina variety of ways. These engagements can take widely different forms depending on the mediaused. In this article I argue that a more media cognizant understanding of historical culture needsto be developed. This is necessary because digitalized media has changed our dealings withhistorical knowledge, and remediation is constantly challenging our perception of how “reality”can be properly represented. In the paper, I discuss how theoretical works related to historical culture have a slightlytroubled relation to digital media, and do not properly take into account how media content isconsumed today. I argue that the source of these troubles is at least partially the hegemony ofmemory-related theory in the scholarly understanding of historical culture. The current scholarlydiscussion of historical culture mainly lacks understanding of how popular media functions andis engaged in the digital age. For this reason, central aspects of digitally mediated historicalculture do not receive enough scholarly interest. In the article, I employ a framework based on media studies for understanding popularhistorical culture. By doing so, I distance my analysis from discussions related to memoryand begin to develop a view, in which instantiations of popular historical culture are seen asconverging media that people engage with in hopes of gaining more knowledge about the past.Here, different instantiations of popular historical culture are seen as entry-points to morehistory-related content, rather than as competing holistic representations. This leads to analternative knowledge-centered interpretation of why popular historical culture is engaged with