Video stores, media technologies, and memory

This paper seeks to establish what is at stake in the widespread closures of Australian video stores if we conceive of these stores as an important if undervalued dispersed media archive. This question is pursued, firstly, by outlining a series of contemporary debates concerning digital remembering, and then, secondly, tentatively testing their applicability for an examination of video stores as media archive. Digital memory debates argue that the present age is characterized by unfettered remembering without forgetting. The central contention of this paper is that the framing of these debates is complicated by a context like the video store that exists at the crossover point of old and new media, and which evidences a complex dynamic of simultaneous archival production and destruction, remembering and forgetting