Hitler, Trump, Dangote: What Media Makes Us Remember
By Misbahu El-Hamza
There are no eyes. No nose. No eyebrows. No facial expression. No skin colour. Not even a complete face.
Yet, many of us can identify the person almost immediately.
This is Adolf Hitler.
I saw the image as shared George Galloway on his Facebook page this morning with an Adidas brand as moustache. I asked an AI tool to remove the brand and leave the moustache.
I find this image fascinating, not because of Hitler himself, but because of what it says about media and memory.
Most of us never saw Hitler. He died decades before many of us were born.
Yet photographs, documentaries, films, textbooks, newspapers and television have reproduced his image so frequently that a hairstyle and a small moustache can be enough for our minds to reconstruct the rest of his face.
The media did not simply tell generations about Hitler. It helped create the visual memory through which generations recognize him.
That made me wonder about our own time.
What images are today’s media and our news feeds planting in our minds that we will still recognize decades from now?
Take Donald Trump. If you removed his entire face and left only the distinctive hair, dark suit and long red tie, how many people would still recognize him?
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What about Benjamin Netanyahu? How much of his face would have to disappear before we stopped recognizing him?
Or Aliko Dangote? Would we even need his face? Could a combination of cement, trucks, factories and a refinery already lead many Nigerians to think of one man?
What image have years of reporting created when we hear the words “Boko Haram,” “bandits,” or “IPOB,”?
Forests? Motorcycles? AK-style rifles? Armed men photographed from a distance?
We may think we are simply consuming the news. But while we scroll, watch and read, we are also building a visual archive in our heads.
Newspapers and television once had enormous influence over that archive. Today, social media platforms and their algorithms also determine which images we encounter repeatedly.
Years from now, some of today’s people, places and events may require only a hairstyle, an object, a silhouette or a particular scene for us to recognize them.
This is just as many of us could remember the historical symbol of Kano’s economic importance with just a sight of a [groundnut] pyramid, Babban riga as a core Northern Nigerian identity, Yoruba with Agbada and fila, etc.
If only you can reflect, you may, right in front of you what your news feed is teaching you to remember today.
And perhaps the more important question could be what image is it creating in your mind about them?
Misbahu El-Hamza is social media influencer and popular on Facebook
