"Written and Shot for Us, The Young Ones": Collective Memory and Meaning Attribution - The Case of Watching Late Socialist and Early 1990s TV Programs by Contemporary Young Audiences
Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to study the effect of the late state socialist and post-socialist TV programmes on a young audience, who had no direct experience with the late socialist nor the early transition period. The authors examined how their attitudes to the depicted content were formed, to what degree their understanding was influenced by the encoded meanings and to what degree it was influenced by an existing collective or family memory.
The existing collective and family memory appeared to be the most important in the process of attributing meaning to the period programme watched. However, the authors also observed a rather strong influence of dominant discourse that was spread by the mainstream mass media and by educational institutions.
This is because respondents from different social and regional backgrounds tended to produce similar narratives regarding recent history, even given their different backgrounds.