Introduction: social memory and hypermodernity

The terms “collective memory” and “social memory” have been appearing in the literature of sociology since the beginning of the discipline’s institutionalisation in the late nineteenth century (we shall return to this point), and have stimulated a wide range of conceptual analyses since the midtwentieth century. Moreover, between the 1920s and 1940s they were systematically theorised by Maurice Halbwachs, an author whose work in this field was rediscovered only fifteen years ago. They are now, in the twenty-first century, firmly embedded in common knowledge. In French, for example, a GoogleTM search for the Durkheimian term fait social (social fact), conducted in mid-July 2008, revealed that there were 10.2 times more web pages from general sources than there were scholarly articles or documents indexed by Google ScholarTM, whereas for the Halbwachsian term memoire collective (collective memory), this factor was more than three times higher, at 35.4. Hence, within the general domain of social memory (as opposed to the more specialised domain of scholarly memory), the term “collective memory” yielded results three times higher than one of the most emblematic terms of sociology. It is precisely in the course of the last fifteen years that this increase has taken place, as Figure 1 indicates. The graph is based on lexicometrical sequences calculated by means of Google NgramTM from the American English corpus digitalised by Google BooksTM.