Individual cultural memory (the autobiographical memory) fades if it is not supported and nourished in contact with other people or – as we will see – in contact with memory texts. Your memory is as it were rooted in other people’s remembrances. When meeting a friend from college, after a ten years interval, you start sharing memories: “do you still remember that day when we …” Your own memories are intertwined with the memories of other people, the memories of a group. This is clear, even in what is mostly considered to be a reflection of the most personal remembering, the diary – both the traditional paper diary and the modern weblog or blog. Annette Kuhn reported on her ‘memory work’, using photographs from her family album and linking them with other public and private memory texts, discovering that an individual’s memories
spread into an extended network of meanings that bring together the personal with the familial, the cultural, the economic, the social, and the historical. Memory work makes it possible to explore connections between ‘public’ historical events, structures of feeling, family dramas, relations of class, national identity and gender and ‘personal’ memory.