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  3. How Modernity Forgets
  • Cited by 383
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      05 July 2015
      30 July 2009
      ISBN:
      9780511627187
      9780521762151
      9780521745802
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511627187
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.38kg, 158 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.22kg, 158 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Social Theory, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology, Sociology
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    Subjects:
    Social Theory, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology, Sociology
    Information

    Book description

    Why are we sometimes unable to remember events, places and objects? This concise overview explores the concept of 'forgetting', and how modern society affects our ability to remember things. It takes ideas from Francis Yates classic work, The Art of Memory, which viewed memory as being dependent on stability, and argues that today's world is full of change, making 'forgetting' characteristic of contemporary society. We live our lives at great speed; cities have become so enormous that they are unmemorable; consumerism has become disconnected from the labour process; urban architecture has a short life-span; and social relationships are less clearly defined - all of which has eroded the foundations on which we build and share our memories. Providing a profound insight into the effects of modern society, this book is a must-read for anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and philosophers, as well as anyone interested in social theory and the contemporary western world.

    Reviews

    'How Societies Remember was a tightly argued account of the importance of habitual, bodily memory to cultural transmission; How Modernity Forgets is a substantive cultural diagnosis of modernity, centred on the theme of cultural amnesia … It … [says] what it says with the sort of clarity that puts most cultural analysis to shame. Modernity … has displaced social life from place and replaced the known with the merely known about. In a series of superb historical vignettes Connerton shows that this has occurred in three ways: through the dismantling of the city frontier in the nineteenth century and the growth of megacities in the twentieth, through the development of superhuman speed … and through ‘the repeated intentional destruction of the built environment’ … via suburbanization, deindustrialization and urban renewal.'

    Source: The British Journal of Sociology

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