Misplacing memory: the effect of television format on Holocaust remembrance.

Abstract

The Simon Wiesenthal Center's Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles provides a case study of how museum designers use television formats to communicate and educate. A dramatic spectacle is created that shapes how visitors are to feel and think. This spectacle turns the museum into an emotions factory and functions as a 'format of control'. It exerts a 'creeping surrealism' upon the visitor that misplaces memory and history by degrees. The implications of being unable to transcend television formats in a post-Gutenberg-galaxy world are discussed.