Social memories Who decides what we remember?

It is not possible to remember everything, nor to forget completely. Every act of remembering also implies an act of forgetting. While this happens on the individual level, where remembering is always a selection, conscious or not, it also happens on the social level. Thus we speak of collective memories, as if human groups were capable of remembering or forgetting in a unified way. But even those who lived through the same episode, side by side, do not remember it identically. Their memories diverge, fragment, contradict each other. Yet we continue to speak of a "social memory" as if it were natural and homogeneous, without asking ourselves how it really works.

The problem is that we tend to think of social memory as a sum of individual memories. But this is not so. Social memory is shaped. Often, it is induced. Collective memory does not emerge spontaneously: it is the result of multiple operations of selection, repetition and silencing. These operations are not neutral. They are exercised by powerful bodies: the State, political parties, school systems, academies, the media, religions. These actors not only propose a version of the past: they institute it. They make it official. They tell us what we should remember and also, and this is fundamental, what we should forget.

In the present, these dynamics are intensifying. With massive digitalization and the multiplication of narratives in social networks and global media, the control of memories no longer passes only through school texts or national dates, but through algorithms, communication campaigns, bots, tags. Memories go viral or fade away according to strategic decisions. Forgetting is programmed. Memory is managed. In this context, the figure of the historian and of those who research the past becomes even more vulnerable: their work can be disproved, manipulated or made invisible in seconds. History runs the risk of being displaced by the immediacy of the dominant narrative.

That is why it is urgent to study social memories as constructions that can be manipulated by power. Before speaking of "collective memory", we must make sure that it is what identifies a given people and ask ourselves: who remembers? what is being left out? Is manipulation possible in that context and at that moment? Only in this way will we be able to resist prefabricated memories and make way for true and deeply human memories.

 

Dr. Yara Altez