“CREEMOS EN LA REDISTRIBUCIÓN DEL PODER, EN LA DEMOCRATIZACIÓN DE LOS ESPACIOS Y EN LA

With today’s developing technology, mass media content serves as a store of memory (McQuail 2005:7). Thus, in modern times, the media play a significant role in the production of memory in relation to national identity. Media produce and create a huge amount of ‘information’, preserve and transmit that ‘information’ to the public. However, they are not merely the store of memory that contains row or pure ‘information’; they are the source of representations that are constructed by certain discourses. Thus the media do not function like a ‘mirror’ that reflects the memories of others in actual ‘space’ and ‘time’ but by representing and constructing them. Hence, in this research, media are not conceived as a ‘neutral’ or an ‘objective’ source of ‘information’ because ‘meanings are constructed by using representational systems’ (Hall 1997:21) and as Nora (1989:11) points out, ‘representation proceeds by strategic highlighting, selecting samples and multiplying examples’. Thus, each medium might construct the ‘memory’ of an event by highlighting different aspects and support this ‘memory’ by showing a variety of evidence; it is more relevant to talk about the production and representation of ‘memories’, instead of about the ‘factual’ memories allowed to come forth by the media.

2

‘Atatürk’s name literally translates as the very father of Turks’ (Papadakis 1998:73). Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal) was a Turkish soldier and a statesman (1881-1938). He was the founder and the first President of the Turkish Republic. ‘Atatürk who was the Turkish nationalist leader’ (Pollis 1998:96) represents Turkishness and he is the symbol of courage, patriotism and heroism. Atatürk undertook a series of reforms to raise Turkey to the level of modern civilization which can be grouped under five titles: political, social, legal and economic forms and reforms in the fields of education and culture (Yale 2005:36-37).

It is important to consider media representations and discourses within the historical and contextual framework of the production processes that have given shape to contemporary media institutions − including primarily but not exclusively, issues of ownership and control over the production process. As Bommes and Wright (1982:256) argue, ‘inattention to the conditions of production of discourse treats discourses as if they were written on the wind’. The agenda of ‘the things to be done’ by the media institution, is shaped by the political discourse of the institution and it determines what part of the past and what kind of future will be brought into play for the production of public memories (Lang &Lang, 1989:126). Thus, the political and cultural constraints are embedded in media representations and discourses. Media reinforce, reproduce or contest the existing social relations through these representations and discourses.

The mass media − powerful contemporary tools for the production and circulation of ‘public memories’ − are constructed in historical, social and cultural constraints and cannot be evaluated as a separate entity. ‘Media is dependent on 'society', especially on the institutions of political and economic power’ (Mcquail 1994:2). There is an interrelationship amongst the economic, political and social factors as they constitute and are constituted by the media. As Garnham (2000:4) suggests, ‘Who can say what, in what form, to whom and for what purposes will be in part determined by and in part determine the structure of economic, political, and cultural power in a society’. Thus the media constrain or shape what should or should not be thought, said, written, remembered and forgotten according to certain social and political frameworks that are shaped in power relations.

The different types of possible control of a variety of media is important because control can influence the content of the media messages, which is closely related to the articulation and construction of ‘public memories’. Ownership and control constrain the production process of the media, which is best understood as the result of a continuing struggle over who gets to speak and whose version of ‘reality’ − ‘the product of discourse’ (Fiske 1996:54) − is legitimized. The historical desire to control the ‘dominant public memory’ continues in societies in the form of state, private and concentrated ownership of media institutions. It is therefore essential to consider the political, economic and cultural factors behind the media production.

The media function like a ‘memory machine’ and provide a great amount of ‘information’ shaped in certain social and cultural constraints. According to certain constructionist arguments, individuals’ media use is also articulated in social and cultural

contexts; so it is not possible to talk about ‘personal’ readings, because conception is not ‘privatized’. Individual differences in interpretation are caused not by ‘personal’ perception but by the social construction of remembering. Without the remembering and signification of certain cultural and social codes, one cannot interpret any situation.

Social and cultural codes are critical, not only because of their capability to constrain what we remember and forget, but because of their normalization function. Normalization is the most powerful and influential factor in the partial closure of any social structure. Media play a crucial role in the realization of normalization through persuasion; the media’s persuasive role is therefore constantly used by the dominant discourses for the continuation of its dominance. According to Ruddock (2001:122), persuasion is achieved not only through information, but also through controlling how people make sense of information. In this way, the mass media are persuasive in so far as they offer audiences seductive ‘knowledge positions’ that make sense of a chaotic world. In a similar vein, one can talk about the control of memory through its construction.

With the development of mass communication technologies, we have begun to live as a result of media penetration (Sreberny and Mohammadi 1994). We have been surrounded by media messages starting from the first day of our lives. The media is everywhere. As Livingstone (1996:319) argues, ‘media have permeated most if not all aspects of everyday life, and sources of symbolic culture are ever less separable from one another’. In this respect, it is also impossible to locate ‘memory’ as separate from the influences of the media. According to Scannell (1996:6), listening to the radio and watching television are part of the natural and ordinary things that we do in our daily lives, so it is difficult to notice their function and intentionality. Scannell (ibid.) suggests that this ordinariness and obviousness is the intended, achieved and accomplished influence of broadcast output. The situation naturalizes the role of the media in our daily lives and makes it even more influential.

The existence of media brings a different dimension to the analysis of human memory as we are different from our ancestors, who learned all they knew through face- to-face communication and social interaction. We cannot isolate the role of the media in culture, because the media are firmly anchored into the web of culture’ (Bird 2003:3). The development of mass communication technologies provides extensively mediated conditions of remembering through advances in the capture, preservation and transmission of ‘information’ and images (Hoskins 2001:334) in narrative stories. In this

way, memory is experienced, produced and conveyed through the media (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003:5).

The media as the primary means of communication and transmission (Mcquail, 1994) play a major role in the mobilization of meaning for the articulation of memories in relation to national identity (Ashuri 2007). Without the contribution of print and broadcast media, it is not possible to talk about the creation of a culture and identity in common (Morley and Robins 1995). As Zerubavel (1994a:73) notes, in today’s societies, journalists have more decisive roles than historians in shaping the popular images of the past, which are substantial in the construction of national identity as they enter into the daily lives of people through the media. In today’s societies, the media’s role is primal in the construction of self-other relationships; as Casalegno (2004:319-320) points out, ‘communication can built barriers or favour an exchange. New technologies can participate in both the creation and the destruction of the social tie’. In this respect, media might play a crucial role in the construction of a social unity between the social individuals within a group or community − and it might also cause its destruction through its representations and narratives.

Events gain and lose importance through the media; as Georgiou (2001:325) suggests, as soon as a story is not in the news anymore, the people stop caring. Thus, the media show us what is important and what is not and it functions to shape what we remember and forget relating to our national identities. The mass media invoke memory that reinforces political agendas serving particular ideas about the virtues of the nation, the family, or the current government (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003:5) through its narratives. According to Morley and Robins (1995:193), ‘media play a powerful role in the reproduction and reinforcement of the feelings of familiarity, security and unity by arousing fear, anxiety and violent emotions’. In this way, they help to provide the necessary context for the closure of community or nation by contextualizing our feelings and thoughts. Baer (2001:492) describes how television functions to reduce the world to an appearance, blocking all possible critical reflection and response; however, it is not only television which limits the ability to question. Print media also provide extensive ‘information’ about events and construct our knowledge of them through written texts. News articles serve to reduce possible alternative thinking about events: according to Bion (1987 cited in Morley and Robins 1995: 194), thinking is discomforting and disturbing because in thinking, there is the risk of finding out something you don’t want to know and, consequently, ‘most people want to closure off what they don’t want to see

or hear’. In this way, media replace our ‘eyes’ and ‘ears’ and provide what we should see, hear, know and believe without thinking and questioning. Our national identities are also constructed in this narrative framework. National identity is conceived as a kind of ‘given’; it is part of our common sense as it flavours everyday life. As Alasuutari (1999a:87) notes, ‘[d]aily life is based on routinized, taken-for-granted lines of thought and action, and the media are part of this unquestioned environment’. Therefore, we hardly question or think of our national identities (Spillman 1977).

New communication technologies have also collapsed the temporal distance between the ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’. Today, we can see, hear and feel something from the past, present and future with the images and texts provided by the media: the media bring the past and future to the present and make them seem to happen right now (Tomasulo cited in Hoskins 2004). In Peters’ (1999:138) words, “the far could now speak to the near, and the dead could now speak to the living”. In his book ‘Speaking into the air’, Peters (ibid.) discusses the revolution of ‘time binding’ and ‘space binding’. ‘Time binding’ is the capturing of lost time through new communication technologies. Simultaneity across distances, first in writing, then in speech, sound and image, provide ‘space binding’. As Stier (2003) argues, through the media people can acquire memories of a past that have no geographical or biological connection. This is also the case for the memories of the present. The media show us how the past was, how the present is and what we should expect from the future. Almost everything we know about the past and present events is increasingly mediated through the media. Hence it can be claimed that most of our understanding of the past or present that is crucial in the construction and articulation of our national identities, is ‘manufactured’ rather than remembered (Hoskins 2001). In this context, Peters (1999:139) notes that every new medium is a kind of machine for the production of ghosts. By using the term ‘ghost’, he implies the absence of the body that transcends limitations in time and space.

In a similar vein, Scannell (1996:80) talks about the absence of the ‘event’: ‘in its own time and place any event creates and sustains its own being. In its extended, relayed, mediated form it simultaneously enters into other worlds and their ways of being’. Hence, according to Scannell, broadcasting does not create the event through transmission but when the broadcasting takes place, a new event − the event as broadcast − is created. The former is embedded in the latter and a new event is created that has its own conditions of existence. The event is ‘doubled’ when it is mediated and relayed through broadcasting; and the locales of the two events are radically different: each locale has its own

circumstances and involvements. In this sense, the media’s representation does not change the ‘events’ but manufactures new events through its articulations.