Public Address | Cafe | Hard News: News Memories 2: The Twitter thread

Joe Wylie

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 17:11:08 +1300

I remember mid-to-late-sixties our class/school being bussed into the Regent Theatre in the Square to watch The War Game – harrowing and sobering stuff!

That would have been 1968. While it only screened for about a week in Christchurch, the movie's billboard provided a dramatic backdrop for the speakers who…

Ian Dalziel

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 16:22:04 +1300

And that BBC documentary that dramatised the consequences didn’t make me any calmer.
I remember mid-to-late-sixties our class/school being bussed into the Regent Theatre in the Square to watch The War Game – harrowing and sobering stuff!

Watch here movie starts at 8:15min:
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/war-game/

John McFadgen

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 13:52:08 +1300

The Sputnik front page story in the Press was my earliest.

Memory is a strange thing though. My wife and I have recently had some long talks about our early years together, priming ourselves for some recorded conversations of family history for our sons.

We had a fairly freewheeling lifestyle…

Bart Janssen

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 10:18:14 +1300

I remember being pretty freaked by the threat of nuclear annihilation as a child.

And that BBC documentary that dramatised the consequences didn't make me any calmer.

Bart Janssen

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 10:15:10 +1300

Memories cluster around a relatively small number of signal events

Ok so more nerdy stuff. While memory research is still ongoing, and it's not my field so this is my lay reading of the research – my understanding of the latest hypotheses is that memories do fade, probably never lost…

Gareth

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 09:27:49 +1300

Joe Meek was certainly instrumental (sorry) in introducing all sorts of sound effects and recording techniques to the charts. He was what you might call a character...

His biggest hit eerily prefigured the White Stripes...

https://youtu.be/OuUpOerfT2I

Kumara Republic

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 22:53:13 +1300

From YouTube
If there's one song that perfectly captures the Space Race optimism of the early 1960s, "Telstar" would have to be it. Even though it's way before my time, it sounds remarkably like the foundations for the synthpop scene that emerged a bit under 20 years later.

Henry Barnard

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 15:12:49 +1300

I am with you, Gareth. The Cuban Missile Crisis, though I was 13 at the time and living in Manchester with my aunt and her family. We were truly worried by the events. The first `News' memories should be Suez when I was 7 and I was on board an…

Carol Stewart

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 14:08:30 +1300

I remember being pretty freaked by the threat of nuclear annihilation as a child. That, and fears of a tsunami from White Island wiping out Opotiki. Turns out we were worrying about the wrong thing.

Carol Stewart

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 14:05:04 +1300

Something else that should be mentioned: Whina Cooper's 1975 land march/hīkoi. Possibly one of those events where the importance is clearer when we look back on it, than it was at the time.

Gareth

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 10:05:48 +1300

Being a beardless grey beard, mine are the Cuban missile crisis and the very real fear that we were all going to die in a flash. I would have been 8. We lived near a rocket testing range, so this didn't seem unlikely. I asked my dad about nuclear bombs…

bmk

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 08:50:04 +1300

Either the hole in the ozone layer or the Rainbow Warrior. I can't remember which came first but I remember as a child the ozone layer hole seemed terrifying whereas I didn't quite understand the importance of the Rainbow Warrior bombing at the time.

Matthew Hooton

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 20:12:50 +1300

Death of Elvis because I came home from school and it was on TV instead of cartoons. I must have been five.

Hugh Wilson

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 17:43:08 +1300

There was the Springbok tour of course .. although it wasn’t a single event, more of a rolling CF.

Yes absolutely. Maybe it was my age at the time, but I feel like the monumentality of the protests really crystallised in the years following and certainly by the time Nelson…

Carol Stewart

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 16:57:02 +1300

There was the Springbok tour of course .. although it wasn't a single event, more of a rolling CF.
You're right about the disasters though. Not much at all in the 1980s. More broadly NZ had a charmed run with few large earthquake hits on urban areas all the way…

Fiona Mckenzie

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 13:05:32 +1300

Another weird thing is how quickly times change generally. I remember when my son was about 9, and had figured out the importance of The Beatles, he said to me "Wow – I bet it went viral on Twitter when John Lennon died"

Brent Jackson

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 11:40:46 +1300

My initial thought when I tried to wrack my brain was TV footage of the Vietnam war, principally the shots of people falling from aeroplanes as they took off, or commentary on them being found dead in the wheel bays upon landing in the US. Little me just could not…

Hugh Wilson

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 11:21:41 +1300

The responses also show quite a degree of commonality. Memories cluster around a relatively small number of signal events, which crop up repeatedly.

Yes – they're usually disasters. or some atrocity.

I was pondering why nothing from the early 80's had stuck with me – as opposed to the Rainbow…

Matthew Vink

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 10:43:10 +1300

https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2017/oct/31/the-reminiscence-bump-why-americas-greatest-year-was-probably-when-you-were-young

"One of the most robust findings in memory research is that people recall more memories from young adulthood compared to other periods of their life. For example, if you ask a group of people to list important events from their lives, you see a bump corresponding to a greater…

Russell Brown

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 10:31:56 +1300

I thought I'd collect these.

It's interesting the way that this exercise has ended up illuminating a demographic reality that isn't apparent day-to-day on Twitter. If you and I are five or even 10 or 20 years apart in age it makes very little difference to our online conversation. But…

Public Address

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 10:31:56 +1300

Discussion from blog post.