Collective Presence: The Beatles, Tūpuna, and the Afterlife of Mass Media (ChatGPT)

I. From Transmission to Presence

Mass media is usually understood as a means of transmission. A song is recorded, a photograph printed, a film distributed, an interview broadcast. Something that happened at one time and place is transported to people who were not there to experience it. The medium therefore appears to solve a problem of absence: it allows an event, a work or a person to be encountered after the original moment has passed.

But transmission is an incomplete description of what actually happens.

A recording of a singer does not merely transmit information about the singer. It produces the perception of the singer's presence. A photograph does not merely tell us what a person looked like; we see the person's face. A film does not merely preserve an action; the action unfolds again before us. A voice on a record can enter a room decades after the body that produced it has disappeared.

The distinction is subtle but consequential. The transmitted object is not simply about someone. It becomes something through which that person is perceptually encountered.

This is particularly apparent with people whose public lives have been extensively mediated. The more representations accumulate, the less meaningful it becomes to think of them as isolated documents. A photograph is encountered alongside recordings; recordings alongside interviews; interviews alongside films; films alongside newspaper stories; all of these alongside the physical objects associated with the person. The individual begins to occupy a persistent position within the perceptual environment of other people.

They become perpetually and perceptually present. This does not mean that the representation is identical with the person. Quite the opposite: the difference between person and representation is fundamental. A photograph is not the person; a recording is not the singer; a fan's idea of a celebrity is not the celebrity. But the accumulation of representations can produce something that is socially more substantial than any individual representation.

A person becomes a presence in other people's lives.

This is where the phenomenon of projection becomes important. People do not merely receive representations; they interpret them. They construct personalities from photographs, voices, gestures, interviews and performances. They fill gaps in the available information with assumptions. They imagine what the person thinks, feels, believes or would do. Those imaginings are then exchanged with other people and incorporated into their understandings.

The projection is not the person.

Yet the projection can have consequences independent of whether it is accurate.

A person may be loved for qualities they do not possess, hated for things they never did, imitated for reasons they never intended, or treated as an authority on the basis of an imagined intimacy. Once enough people participate in the process, individual projections begin to accumulate into something resembling a collective memory of the person.

This collective memory is not simply a repository of facts. It is an evolving cultural construction: a composite of direct experience, mediated evidence, hearsay, interpretation, imagination and the memories of other people. It can preserve genuine characteristics while simultaneously transforming them.

The Beatles provide an extreme example because the quantity and variety of their representations are almost unprecedented. Their faces appeared on posters and album covers; their voices entered millions of homes; their films allowed audiences to watch them behave; magazines supplied apparently intimate details of their lives; merchandise brought their images into bedrooms and schools. The Beatles were therefore not simply heard or seen at particular moments. They became fixtures in the perceptual and material environment of an entire generation.

The consequence was a peculiar combination of distance and intimacy.

The audience did not actually know the Beatles. Yet the Beatles became extraordinarily familiar.

That contradiction is central to what followed. A person could feel that they knew John Lennon without ever meeting him; could recognise Paul's face instantly; could imagine George Harrison's personality; could feel affection for Ringo Starr. The relationship was not interpersonal in the ordinary sense, but neither was it merely informational. It occupied an intermediate space in which real people became psychologically present to people who had no direct relationship with them.

The phenomenon therefore cannot be adequately described as simple exposure to mass media. It is better understood as the transformation of transmission into presence.

Once presence becomes sufficiently persistent, it can become relational. People begin to act in response to the perceived person: they imitate them, argue with them, identify with them, reject them, create art because of them, alter their politics because of them, or incorporate their image into their own identities.

At that point, the mediated person is no longer simply something being transmitted.

They have become part of the social world of the people receiving the transmission.

That is the beginning of the psychic shockwave. II. Beatlemania and the Perceptual Monarchy

The Beatles were not the first musicians to provoke mass adulation. More than a century earlier, Franz Liszt had produced what came to be known as Lisztomania: audiences screamed, fainted, fought over souvenirs and treated a performing musician with a degree of personal fascination that would previously have seemed appropriate to royalty. The phenomenon demonstrated that a musician could become an object of collective emotional fixation on a scale far beyond the traditional relationship between performer and audience.

But Liszt still had to appear.

The Beatles crossed a threshold that Liszt could not. Through recording, radio, television, cinema, photography, print and merchandise, the Beatles could be present without being physically present. Their faces and voices could enter millions of homes simultaneously. Their performances could be repeated indefinitely. Their images could remain on a bedroom wall long after the television programme had ended and the concert audience had gone home.

This gave Beatlemania an unusual historical precedent: the perceptual presence of the monarch.

For centuries, kings and queens had been made symbolically omnipresent through portraits, coins, statues, ceremonies, proclamations, coats of arms and public ritual. Most subjects would never meet their sovereign. Nevertheless, they could recognise the sovereign's face, know the sovereign's name and encounter representations of the sovereign throughout everyday life. The monarch was both distant and familiar: a person whom almost nobody personally knew, but whom almost everybody was expected to recognise.

The Beatles achieved something remarkably similar without possessing the institutional machinery of monarchy.

Their faces appeared everywhere. Their voices entered the home. Their names became familiar even to people who did not particularly care for their music. Their clothing and hairstyles became recognisable signs. Their photographs appeared in magazines, newspapers, shops and bedrooms. Their records and films allowed people to encounter the same personalities repeatedly. Merchandise transformed their representations into physical possessions.

But there was a crucial difference.

Royal presence was imposed from above. Beatles presence was voluntarily incorporated from below.

A portrait of a monarch might be displayed because the monarch was the sovereign. A teenager put a Beatles poster on the bedroom wall because the Beatles had become meaningful to the teenager. The royal portrait asserted authority; the Beatles poster expressed identification.

This distinction may explain part of Beatlemania's extraordinary psychological force. The young fan did not merely encounter the Beatles in the public sphere. They brought the Beatles into private space.

The bedroom became a miniature media environment. A record could be played repeatedly. A photograph could be looked at repeatedly. A poster could be encountered every morning. A magazine could be read and reread. A Beatles badge could be worn to school. A Beatles hairstyle could be adopted by the fan themselves. The representation ceased to be a temporary communication and became part of the physical environment through which the young person perceived the world.

The Beatles therefore became perpetually and perceptually present.

This is an important distinction from simple media exposure. Exposure is episodic: a broadcast occurs and ends. Presence is persistent. It is what happens when representations accumulate to the point where the person becomes a continuing feature of one's perceptual environment.

The Beatles were not represented merely as a single undifferentiated group. John, Paul, George and Ringo became individually recognisable personalities. Their faces, voices, mannerisms and supposed characteristics were learned separately. A young person could have a relationship with John or Paul rather than merely with "the Beatles."

The group therefore became something like a popular monarchy of four: four individuals whose images and personalities acquired a symbolic ubiquity previously associated with sovereign figures.

Yet the Beatles were also still musicians. The older tradition of the court minstrel had been transformed by modern media. Minstrels, troubadours and court musicians could carry stories, reputations and political ideas between communities, but their physical reach was constrained by the speed at which people could travel. Liszt demonstrated that a musician could become a mass idol, but his presence remained dependent upon physical performance.

The Beatles combined these traditions with technologies capable of reproducing presence independently of physical appearance.

The result was not simply a larger audience. It was a fundamentally different relationship between performer and audience.

A performer no longer needed to be there in order to be encountered.

Once the recording, photograph, film and merchandise had entered everyday life, the audience itself became part of the process. Fans bought the records, displayed the photographs, wore the badges, copied the hairstyles, discussed the personalities and introduced the Beatles to their friends. The representation was continually reproduced by the people who had received it.

This created a feedback mechanism:

Beatles → media → audience → identification → material representation → further perception → further identification.

Beatlemania was therefore not simply a wave of attention generated by four musicians. It was a self-reinforcing perceptual environment.

The Beatles became increasingly familiar because people encountered them; they became increasingly meaningful because people incorporated them into their identities, and they became increasingly present because those people then reproduced the Beatles' image for one another.

This is where the phenomenon begins to resemble the formation of a collective memory even while the Beatles were still alive.

The public did not simply remember things that the Beatles had done. It accumulated a shared understanding of who the Beatles were. Some of that understanding came from direct media evidence. Much of it came from interpretation, gossip, journalism, imitation and projection.

The projection was not the person.

But millions of projections interacting with millions of encounters created a remarkably powerful collective representation of the person.

Unlike the image of a monarch, that representation could become intimate. The fan could feel that the Beatles belonged to them.

That intimacy was partly illusory. But its consequences were real.

A teenager who felt personally connected to the Beatles might form a band. Another might adopt their clothes. Another might become interested in politics because John had said something provocative. Another might decide that writing songs was something an ordinary young person could do. Another might carry the Beatles into adulthood and eventually introduce them to their own children.

The psychic shockwave therefore did not simply travel outward.

It travelled forward through people's lives.

This is perhaps the crucial historical transformation that Beatlemania represents. The old monarch could be made omnipresent by institutions. The modern celebrity could become omnipresent through media, which in turn became an institution. But the Beatles added something new: the audience voluntarily became an extension of the media system that produced the celebrity's presence.

This would eventually become the basis of the self-updating media environment of the present. The Beatles did not yet have social media, but they already anticipated its essential dynamic. Every new record, photograph, interview, film or public appearance supplied new material for interpretation. Fans discussed it, journalists interpreted it, other fans reacted to those interpretations, and the Beatles themselves absorbed what they could of the resulting cultural response. The cycle generated another Beatles event, and the process began again.

The wave did not yet update continuously.

But the Beatles had already begun to demonstrate that a celebrity's perceptual presence could reproduce itself through the audience.

The technological system would later become instantaneous.

The psychological mechanism was already there. III. The Self-Updating Wave

The Beatles did not have social media, but the structure of their fame already contained something that social media would later make explicit: the audience could become part of the mechanism by which an artist's presence was continually reproduced.

The Beatles' relationship with their audience was therefore not simply a matter of communication from performer to listener. Every new Beatles event generated a second layer of activity around it. A new record produced reviews, arguments and interpretations. A television appearance produced photographs and stories. A film produced imitations and quotations. A new hairstyle produced thousands of new hairstyles. A political statement produced agreement, outrage and discussion. The Beatles supplied the original material; the audience and the media continually transformed that material into something larger.

The resulting process might be represented as:

artist → work → audience → interpretation → circulation → artist → work

The Beatles could observe parts of this process, discuss it and respond to it, but their information about the audience was largely second-hand. They encountered their own public through journalists, managers, friends, letters, record sales, concert audiences and the reports of people around them. They could see the consequences of Beatlemania, but they could not directly observe the millions of individual projections from which it was composed.

Contemporary artists inhabit a very different environment.

The audience's response can now return almost immediately to the artist through comments, posts, videos, interviews, fan communities, memes, reaction content, streaming data and direct messages. The artist can encounter not merely the media's account of the audience, but the audience's own representations of its response.

The distinction is not simply one of speed. It changes the structure of the phenomenon.

The Beatles experienced a feedback loop.

Contemporary artists can experience an observable feedback loop.

That distinction matters because the artist does not necessarily need to study the feedback analytically. In fact, the most interesting form of artistic response may occur without anything resembling statistical analysis.

An artist who has lived for years inside a large public culture inevitably acquires an internal sense of its expectations, desires, obsessions and misunderstandings. The audience begins to occupy the artist's imaginative environment. The artist may not consciously think, my fans will react in this particular way, yet years of encounters with fans, critics, journalists and cultural commentary have become part of the material from which artistic intuition operates.

Artist intuition may therefore be understood partly as the internalised response to accumulated projection.

This produces a curious reversal of the ordinary parasocial model.

The fan thinks:

The artist does not know me.

That is generally true.

The artist, however, may carry thousands of imagined audience members in their head. Those imagined people are not accurate representations of individual fans. They are accumulated impressions: remembered conversations, recurring criticisms, familiar enthusiasms, stories, expectations, anxieties and patterns of response.

The artist therefore becomes surrounded by an internal audience.

This is particularly important for artists who have existed within public culture for decades. By the time someone has become a household name, the views of their audience may have been living rent-free in their head for most of their creative life. They do not need to consult the audience before every artistic decision because the audience has already become part of the environment where those decisions are made.

Taylor Swift provides a particularly useful contemporary example, not because she necessarily treats audience reaction as an analytical dataset, but because her public career demonstrates how carefully controlled artistic communication can generate enormous secondary interpretation. A lyric, photograph, visual image, announcement or performance can enter a vast network of fan interpretation without requiring the artist to explain every possible meaning. The audience supplies an extraordinary amount of the subsequent circulation. The artist can then introduce another work into an already transformed environment.

The wave therefore updates itself.

A useful distinction can be made between the Beatles' system and the contemporary system:

The Beatles generated successive waves.

Social media allows the wave to remain continuously active between successive artistic events.

This does not mean that the Beatles' wave was destroyed when they stopped performing together. Quite the opposite: The Beatles have become embedded within the self-updating wave.

A Beatles recording released in 1965 can generate a TikTok in 2026. That TikTok can generate commentary. The commentary can produce an article. The article can lead someone to the original recording. A musician can reinterpret the song. A fan can dispute the interpretation. A new generation can encounter the Beatles through the argument rather than through the original release. The resulting discussion becomes another layer of Beatles memory.

The Beatles are therefore not merely preserved inside the digital archive.

They continue to circulate through a living network of interpretation.

Every new encounter can produce another representation, and every representation can become the starting point for another encounter.

This changes the temporal character of celebrity.

The old mass-media model was relatively episodic:

event → reaction → decline → new event.

The social-media model is recursive:

event → reaction → interpretation → reinterpretation → circulation → new reaction → new interpretation.

The wave is continually re-energised.

This also explains why an artist can become increasingly culturally present without necessarily becoming increasingly personally accessible. The quantity of mediated material does not eliminate projection. It can actually provide more material from which projection can be constructed.

The audience does not encounter only the artist.

It encounters the artist plus everyone else's interpretation of the artist.

A fan can therefore encounter a Taylor Swift song, then encounter another fan's explanation of it, then a criticism of that explanation, then a meme derived from the criticism, then a reaction to the meme. None of these necessarily originates with Swift, yet all of them contribute to the cultural entity called "Taylor Swift."

The same process now operates upon the Beatles.

The Beatles have become inhabitants of a cultural environment that they helped create but which they can no longer control. New generations continually add material to the collective representation of them. Their descendants contribute memories. Surviving collaborators provide testimony. Musicians reinterpret their work. Historians revise earlier accounts. Fans construct theories. Algorithms introduce old material to people who have never previously encountered it.

The collective memory therefore does not simply become larger.

It becomes denser.

More people contribute to it, more representations circulate through it, and more layers of interpretation become attached to the original people and works.

This is where the distinction between person and projection becomes essential.

The projection is not the person.

The fact that a projection is inaccurate does not prevent it from becoming culturally consequential. A mistaken interpretation can be repeated until it becomes part of the collective memory. A fan theory can influence subsequent interpretations even after its original basis has been forgotten. A rumour can become part of the mythology surrounding an artist regardless of whether it was ever true.

The artist's collective representation can therefore become increasingly elaborate while simultaneously becoming increasingly independent of the actual individual.

The phenomenon is not a failure of communication.

It is what happens when communication becomes recursive.

The artist creates something. The audience interprets it. The interpretation becomes part of the environment in which the next interpretation occurs. The artist encounters some of those interpretations and absorbs them into intuition. The artist creates again.

The wave does not merely travel from artist to audience.

It travels through them.

This is the point at which collective memory begins to acquire another property: presence.

A person who has been sufficiently mediated can remain perceptually active long after the original encounter has ended. A person who has died can continue to enter the consciousness of people who never knew them. A person can influence decisions made decades after their death. Their descendants can encounter the public's projection of someone they knew privately. Surviving collaborators can continue to hear the voices of people who are no longer physically present.

The self-updating wave therefore provides the technological mechanism by which a mediated person can move from memory into continuing presence.

That is where the Beatles' story begins to intersect with a much older question: what does it mean for a person to remain with the living after their physical death? IV. Collective Memory and First-Hand Knowledge

Collective memory becomes more complicated when the person being remembered is not merely a historical figure, but someone whom members of the remembering community actually knew.

This distinction is particularly important in the case of the Beatles. For most people alive today, John Lennon and George Harrison are encountered primarily through recordings, photographs, films, interviews, journalism and the accumulated interpretations of other people. For Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, however, John and George were not originally cultural figures. They were people with whom they lived, worked, argued, travelled, made music and formed friendships.

The same distinction applies to their children.

For the public, Paul McCartney is a Beatle. For his children, he is their father. John Lennon is a historical icon to millions of people, but to Julian and Sean Lennon he is also, and irreducibly, Dad. George Harrison is a figure in popular music history to the public, while Dhani Harrison inherited an intimate relationship with the person behind that public identity.

These are not simply different degrees of knowledge about the same individual. They are different modes of relationship.

The collective representation of a person can be extraordinarily detailed without becoming equivalent to knowing that person. A fan may know thousands of facts about John Lennon, recognise his voice immediately, have watched hours of interviews and possess a sophisticated understanding of his public persona. Someone who spent an evening with John in 1968 may know almost none of those facts. Yet the latter possesses something the former cannot obtain through media: an actual encounter with the person.

First-hand knowledge therefore acts as a kind of reality anchor within collective memory.

Someone who knew a person can encounter a later representation and think:

That isn't how they were.

This does not mean that the witness possesses an objectively complete version of the person. Personal memory is selective, fallible and interpretive. An encounter is still only an encounter. Nevertheless, it contains information that cannot be derived from the mediated representation alone.

The difference becomes particularly powerful when first-hand knowledge is transmitted across generations. A child may never have met the person who has become part of their family's cultural memory, yet may grow up hearing a parent say:

I knew him.

The child therefore inherits something more complicated than either direct experience or media representation. They inherit someone else's memory of an encounter.

A Beatles fan might know John Lennon through Imagine, A Hard Day's Night, photographs and interviews. Someone whose mother met John might know him partly through a story about that meeting. The second person's understanding of John is still mediated, but the mediation has passed through an actual human relationship rather than beginning with mass media.

The result is a layered form of memory:

person → encounter → personal memory → family memory → collective memory

alongside:

person → media → projection → collective memory.

These two streams eventually meet.

A family story can enter journalism. A journalist's account can influence a fan. A fan's interpretation can become part of a documentary. A documentary can be watched by a descendant who possesses a contradictory family memory. The collective representation is continually modified by encounters between different kinds of knowledge. This creates a peculiar position for the surviving Beatles.

Paul and Ringo are simultaneously subjects of collective memory and sources of first-hand memory. They inhabit the historical world that others are trying to reconstruct. When Paul tells a story about John, he is not merely contributing another piece of Beatles mythology. He is introducing a memory from inside the social world that produced the mythology in the first place.

That distinction becomes especially important as the original participants disappear.

For Paul, John was once a living collaborator. For younger generations, John increasingly exists as a historical personality. Paul's memories therefore become a bridge between two forms of existence: the John he knew and the John whom the culture remembers.

Yet even Paul cannot simply replace the historical John with his own memory. His John is also a reconstruction. It is shaped by decades of memory, grief, subsequent events and the knowledge of what John eventually became in public consciousness.

The relationship between the two is therefore recursive.

Paul remembers John.

Paul's memories become part of the public memory of John.

That public memory becomes part of the cultural environment in which future generations encounter John. Those generations develop their own projections.

Some of those projections eventually return to Paul.

The collective memory can therefore feed back into the memories of those who originally created the history.

This is one of the peculiar consequences of the self-updating wave. The past is not simply transmitted from witnesses to descendants. Descendants can eventually participate in changing how the witnesses themselves understand their past.

The same process occurs within families.

A child of a famous person may grow up with a private understanding of their parent that conflicts with the public image. Yet the child also lives inside the public image. The parent is simultaneously a private person and a cultural institution. The child may encounter strangers who believe they know their parent, while knowing that those strangers have never experienced the person as a parent, friend or colleague.

The statement "projection is not the person" becomes particularly powerful here.

The child knows this intuitively.

The fan may know it intellectually.

The difference is experiential.

The child has encountered the person behind the projection.

This gives first-hand knowledge a peculiar role within collective memory. It does not destroy projection; it introduces another layer of reality into the system.

The same is true of surviving collaborators. Paul does not simply possess a collective memory of John. He possesses memories of John's voice, humour, impatience, musical instincts and habits of interaction. Those memories can become active in the present.

This is why the distinction between remembering someone and continuing to relate to them becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

A person may be physically absent while remaining psychologically and culturally present. A collaborator may still anticipate what the deceased person would say. A child may still make decisions partly in relation to what their parent taught them. A musician may still alter a composition after how a dead collaborator would respond.

The dead person has ceased to be physically available, but the relationship has not necessarily ceased to operate.

That observation takes us beyond collective memory.

It raises the question of collective presence.

If a deceased person can continue to be perceived through recordings, photographs and stories; can continue to influence artistic decisions; can remain present in the memories of surviving collaborators; can shape descendants who never knew them; continually acquires new relationships through generations of people who encounter their work, then the distinction between remembering the dead and living with their continuing presence becomes less straightforward.

For most modern Western analysis, the natural assumption is that the person has disappeared and only representations remain.

That assumption is precisely what the concept of tūpuna calls into question. V. From Collective Memory to Collective Presence

The distinction between memory and presence becomes particularly important when considering what happens to a person after death. The conventional modern assumption is straightforward: a person dies, their physical existence ends, and what remains is memory. Recordings, photographs, writings and stories preserve representations of the person, but the person is no longer present.

That assumption is not universal.

For Māori, tūpuna are real. The ancestors are not simply historical figures whose memory has been preserved by their descendants. They remain part of the relational world of the living. Their presence may be experienced through whakapapa, whenua, whānau, ritual, dreams, intuition, stories and the practices through which relationships between generations continue. The ancestor is therefore not reducible to a representation of an ancestor.

This distinction is essential to understanding Tūpuna.

The song does not describe the dead as something that has been lost and subsequently reconstructed through memory. It begins with death:

Eyes closing; mauri ebbing.

Yet the movement of the song is not toward disappearance. It moves toward relationship:

They're calling us close.

The tūpuna are not merely remembered by the living. They are calling the living into relationship with them.

That is why the final images are active rather than archival:

They're waking our toes, giving us rhythm.

The ancestors are not simply the source of stories about the past. They participate in the ways the living move through the present.

This presents a fundamentally different model of cultural continuity from one in which the past survives only through representation.

The distinction might be expressed as:

Memory asks: How do we preserve the past?

Ancestral relationship asks: How does the past continue to participate in the present?

These questions overlap, but they are not identical.

This difference matters when considering the Beatles because their continuing cultural existence presents an unusual case in which memory demonstrably produces ongoing presence. John Lennon can still alter what a musician writes. George Harrison can still influence how another musician approaches spirituality or guitar playing. George Martin can still function as an internal point of musical reference for someone who worked with him. The Beatles can alter the decisions of people who were not born when the band existed. The causal chain has not ended.

The person is physically absent, but actions originating from the person continue to act.

Paul McCartney's descriptions of still hearing from John, George and George Martin make this particularly provocative. There is an important difference between saying:

"George would have liked this."

and saying:

"George said to do that bit."

The first can easily be understood as recollection or imagination. The second describes an experience of continuing dialogue.

It would be premature to insist upon a particular explanation for such experiences. They could be understood psychologically, as the result of deeply internalised relationships; culturally, as the continuing operation of the deceased person's accumulated influence; or spiritually, as an actual continuation of communication with the dead.

The important point is that these explanations cannot simply be distinguished by observing the resulting creative act.

If Paul changes a piece of music because he experiences John telling him to change it, the observable fact is that John has become causally active in Paul's present creativity.

Whether that agency originates entirely within Paul's own consciousness or involves something beyond it is an ontological question. A materialist interpretation may say that Paul's brain has retained such a detailed model of John that the relationship continues. That explanation is perfectly compatible with the observable phenomenon.

It does not, however, demonstrate the internalised John is nothing but a representation.

That is a philosophical assumption rather than an empirical finding.

The same caution applies in the other direction. The fact that Paul experiences John's continuing presence does not establish scientifically that John remains independently conscious and communicates with him. The experience itself cannot settle the metaphysical question.

The appropriate position is therefore not to choose prematurely between psychology and spirituality, but to recognise that the phenomenon is real even when its ontology remains contested.

This is where Māori understandings of tūpuna become particularly valuable.

A Māori conception of ancestral presence does not require the living to construct an exhaustive psychological representation of the dead before a relationship can continue. The ancestor remains part of whakapapa and therefore part of the relational structure through which the living understand themselves.

The relationship precedes the representation.

That reverses an assumption common to modern theories of mediated memory. If the ancestor is real, then representations do not create ancestral presence. They are merely some of the ways that presence can become perceptible.

This distinction also changes how we might understand the Beatles' extraordinary afterlife. John Lennon exists today simultaneously as:

• a historical person;

• a body of recordings;

• a photographic and cinematic presence;

• a political symbol;

• a father remembered by his children;

• a friend remembered by Paul and Ringo;

• a musical influence;

• a projection within millions of individual minds;

• a component of collective memory;

• and, for some people, a continuing spiritual presence.
  

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive versions of John.

They are different relationships to John.

The collective representation can therefore be understood not as a substitute for the person, but as one layer within an expanding field of relationships surrounding the person. This is where mass media introduces something historically unusual.

A traditional ancestor is known through whakapapa and through the relationships maintained by descendants. A modern celebrity can acquire millions of relationships with people who have no genealogical connection whatsoever. Recordings and images allow those people to encounter the deceased perceptually long after physical death.

The Beatles therefore demonstrate a new form of mediated ancestrality — not ancestry in the genealogical sense, but the possibility that a deceased person's influence can become embedded in people separated from them by geography, time and even generations.

The distinction is important because the Beatles are not merely remembered.

They continue to produce effects.

A teenager discovers Revolver and forms a band.

A composer hears George Harrison and begins studying Indian music.

A songwriter encounters Lennon and changes their political assumptions.

A parent introduces Abbey Road to a child.

That child later introduces it to their own child.

A musician creates something in 2080 that would not have existed without the Beatles.

At that point, the Beatles are no longer simply objects of historical memory. They have become part of the conditions from which subsequent lives and works emerge.

They are, in that sense, culturally ancestral.

This does not require the claim that the Beatles are literally ancestors, nor does it collapse Māori ancestral ontology into Western theories of influence. The comparison is more precise: both challenge the assumption that death necessarily converts a person into an inert object of memory.

The tūpuna remain relationally present.

The Beatles remain culturally and perceptually present.

The question raised by the modern media environment is whether these two forms of persistence may have more in common than the conventional distinction between "spiritual presence" and "mediated memory" allows.

Mass media may have unintentionally created an unprecedented infrastructure for continuing presence after death.

It preserves voices that can still speak.

It preserves faces that can still be seen.

It preserves performances that can still move bodies.

It preserves personalities that can still enter the imagination.

It preserves relationships through the memories of those who survived them.

It then places all of this material into a self-updating network in which each new generation can encounter, reinterpret and add to it.

The result is not a static archive.

It is a living field.

That field is what I mean by collective presence: the condition in which a person who is physically absent continues to be perceptually encountered, relationally invoked, culturally transmitted and causally active among the living.

The Beatles may be one of the clearest examples of this phenomenon because the machinery of their presence was already extraordinarily powerful during their lifetimes.

Their physical lives ended at different times.

Their presence did not.

The wave continued. VI. The Beatles Inside the Wave

The Beatles present an unusual case because they did not simply become the subject of collective memory after they ceased to exist as a group. They became embedded within the mechanism that continually produces collective memory itself.

The distinction is important.

A historical figure can be remembered because their achievements are preserved in books, photographs and archives. The Beatles are encountered through an active cultural system that continually generates new encounters with them. Their recordings are streamed by people who were not alive when they were made. Their films are excerpted and circulated in new contexts. Their photographs become memes. Their songs are covered, sampled, analysed and taught. Their stories are retold by descendants, surviving collaborators, journalists, musicians and fans.

The Beatles therefore occupy an unusual position within the self-updating wave. They are simultaneously the source of an earlier wave and material within the present one.

The original Beatles phenomenon was already unusually recursive. A new Beatles record did not merely reach an audience; it produced conversations, reviews, photographs, fashion, imitation, controversy and further media coverage. Those reactions became part of the environment surrounding the next Beatles release.

After the Beatles ceased functioning as a group, that process did not terminate. It changed direction.

The Beatles could no longer produce new group recordings to restart the cycle, but the culture could continually discover new ways of encountering the existing material.

A previously obscure photograph can become newly significant. A familiar recording can be remixed. A piece of studio documentation can prompt a new argument about who played an instrument. A surviving Beatle can tell a story that changes how an old song is understood. A child of one of the Beatles can provide a memory that complicates the public image of their parent. A new generation can hear a song in a context that its original audience could never have imagined.

The archive therefore becomes generative.

This is a crucial difference between an archive and a living cultural presence. An archive stores what has happened. A cultural presence generates new relationships with what has happened.

The Beatles' catalogue is consequently not simply becoming older. It is being recontextualised.

A song released in 1965 can acquire a meaning in 2026 that could not have existed in 1965, because the listeners of 2026 possess another sixty years of history. They know what happened to the Beatles afterwards. They know about John and George's deaths. They know Paul's subsequent career. They know the political and cultural consequences of the 1960s. They possess recordings, interviews and biographies unavailable to the original audience.

The original work therefore enters each generation with a different surrounding field of knowledge. This is one reason why collective memory cannot be understood simply as the preservation of an original interpretation. The remembered object changes as the remembering community changes.

The Beatles themselves become part of that process.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are particularly unusual because they remain living participants inside a cultural phenomenon that increasingly belongs to history. Their current existence means that the collective memory of the Beatles can still encounter the people who produced it.

A documentary can say:

This is what John Lennon was like.

Paul can respond:

That isn't how I remember him.

The public memory and the personal memory can therefore enter into dialogue.

The same thing occurs when Paul discusses George Martin, George Harrison or John Lennon as active presences in his creative life. His recollections do not merely add information to the archive. They demonstrate that the historical Beatles still exist within the cognitive and emotional world of someone who actually inhabited their original social environment.

This creates a temporal paradox.

For most people, the Beatles belong to the past.

For Paul, parts of that past are also still present.

The Beatles therefore exist simultaneously in several temporalities:

1960s Beatles — the people who actually lived the events;

remembered Beatles — reconstructed by those who experienced them;

mediated Beatles — encountered through recordings/photographs/films;

projected Beatles — imagined by audiences;

historical Beatles — interpreted by later generations;

continuing Beatles — the cultural presence that remains active now.

None of these can simply be declared the "real" Beatles and the others dismissed as false. They describe different relationships to the same historical persons.

This becomes especially important when the people who knew the Beatles personally begin to disappear. As long as Paul, Ringo, their families, collaborators and other witnesses remain alive, the collective memory contains living counterweights to its own projections. Someone can say, in effect:

I was there.

Eventually there will be nobody left who can say that from personal experience.

The collective memory will then become increasingly dependent upon recordings, documents and inherited testimony.

This does not make it less real. It changes its structure.

The culture will possess enormous quantities of evidence about the Beatles while possessing progressively fewer people who experienced them directly. The perceptual presence may therefore become stronger even as the number of people capable of distinguishing personal experience from cultural projection diminishes.

That creates an extraordinary possibility. The further the Beatles recede historically, the more perceptually present they may become.

The reason is that technological preservation does not obey the normal laws of human memory. A photograph does not grow older in the same way that a human memory does. A recording can be played tomorrow exactly as it can today. A film can show a person moving and speaking with a vividness that ordinary memory cannot reproduce.

The dead therefore become capable of appearing strangely contemporary.

John Lennon can suddenly be seen walking into a room.

George Harrison can suddenly be heard laughing.

Paul can appear at twenty-five years old.

Ringo can speak directly to a camera.

The temporal distance between viewer and historical subject collapses perceptually even while it remains enormous historically.

This is one of the defining properties of mediated presence.

The dead do not become progressively less perceptible.

They can become permanently perceptible.

The Beatles thus occupy an extraordinary position within the psychic shockwave. They are no longer merely at the centre of the original event. They have become permanent nodes within the cultural network through which subsequent generations construct meaning.

The wave has incorporated its own origin.

That is the peculiar condition of the Beatles today: they are simultaneously the people who created the shockwave and objects carried by it.

Every generation can add another layer.

Every new interpretation can become part of the collective memory.

Every new encounter can reactivate the original recordings.

Every new reaction can create another representation.

The Beatles therefore do not simply survive the wave.

They live inside it.

VII. The Afterlife of Presence

The distinction between memory and presence ultimately leads to a question that mass-media theory cannot answer by itself: what, exactly, is present when a dead person continues to be encountered by the living?

A photograph is not the person.

A recording is not the person.

A film is not the person.

A fan's projection is not the person.

This distinction remains essential within a Māori understanding of tūpuna. The wairua of a person is not the wairua of the mediated artifact through which that person may be encountered. A photograph of an ancestor does not contain their wairua because it depicts them. A recording of their voice does not become their wairua because it reproduces their voice. The artifact has its own existence and may have its own spiritual and relational significance, but it should not be confused with the person.

This prevents an important conceptual error. The argument is not that technology has somehow captured a person's soul.

Mass media can preserve traces without capturing wairua.

The more interesting possibility is that those traces become part of a continuing relationship with the person. A recording may allow a voice to be heard again. A photograph may allow a face to be encountered again. A story may allow a characteristic or memory to be transmitted. These things are not the person, but they can become means through which a relationship with the person is maintained or renewed.

The distinction is analogous to the difference between a map and the land it represents. The map is not the land. Its existence nevertheless changes how people encounter the land.

In the same way, the mediated artifact is not the ancestor. It can nevertheless participate in the social, cultural and spiritual relationships through which the ancestor remains present.

This provides a useful way of reconsidering the Beatles.

John Lennon's recordings are not John Lennon. His photographs are not John Lennon. Imagine is not John Lennon. The collective image of John assembled from millions of photographs, recordings, stories and projections is not John Lennon either.

Yet John Lennon continues to do things.

People hear his music and alter their own music.

People encounter his political ideas and alter their own politics.

Paul McCartney remembers him and incorporates that relationship into new work.

John's children live with the consequences of being his children.

Musicians who never met him construct their careers partly in response to his example.

People who were not born when he died continue to form emotional relationships with his work and his public identity.

His physical death did not terminate these relationships.

The question, then, is whether we should describe this simply as "legacy," "influence" or "memory," or whether these terms conceal something more fundamental: a continuing presence of the dead within the relational world of the living.

The Māori concept of tūpuna makes it possible to ask that question without first assuming that the dead have ceased to exist except as representations in the minds of the living. This does not mean that the Beatles should be described as tūpuna. They are not ancestors in the genealogical and cultural sense in which Māori understand tūpuna. The value of the comparison lies elsewhere. Māori ancestral ontology demonstrates that physical death and relational absence are not necessarily the same thing.

That distinction is easy to overlook in a modern Western framework.

If the body dies, the default assumption is that the person has become part of the past. What remains is memory, representation and influence. The person becomes an object of historical knowledge.

Tūpuna offers a different starting point: the ancestor remains a participant in the relational world of the living.

The difference is not merely semantic.

If the ancestor is understood as continuing to exist, then memory is not what creates their presence. Memory is one of the ways the living remain connected to a presence that already exists.

This distinction becomes particularly provocative when considering Paul's descriptions of continuing encounters with John, George Harrison and George Martin.

There is an obvious psychological interpretation. Decades of intimate collaboration can produce extraordinarily detailed internal representations of other people. A musician may know instinctively how a deceased collaborator would respond to a chord, lyric or arrangement. Such an internalised relationship can become so vivid that it is experienced almost conversationally.

There is also a cultural interpretation. The Beatles' shared musical vocabulary became part of Paul's own creative consciousness. John, George and Martin helped constitute the musical person Paul became. Their voices can therefore continue to operate within his creativity because their relationships remain embedded in him.

Neither explanation, however, establishes that these are the only possible explanations.

If Paul experiences John as saying, do that bit, the external observer cannot determine from the resulting music whether the experience was entirely psychological, culturally inherited, spiritually mediated, or some combination of these.

The important point is that John has become present enough to act.

The ontological question remains open.

This is where the distinction between collective memory and collective presence becomes decisive. Collective memory describes what a community retains about someone. Collective presence describes the possibility that the person continues to participate in the community's present—through memory, influence, relationship, perception, intuition, cultural practice, or, depending upon one's ontology, continued existence.

Mass media dramatically expands the conditions under which such presence can occur.

Before recording, a person's voice disappeared when they stopped speaking. A photograph could preserve an appearance, but only as a still image. A performance could be remembered, but not repeatedly re-experienced with anything approaching its original sensory immediacy.

Recording changed this.

A dead person's voice can continue to speak.

Film allows a dead person to continue moving.

Photography allows a dead person's face to remain perceptually available.

The internet allows these traces to circulate indefinitely and to be encountered by people who were born decades after the person died.

The self-updating wave adds another dimension. The artifact does not simply remain available. It is continually reintroduced into new contexts, interpreted by new people and connected to new cultural events.

The result is perpetual perceptual presence.

This does not mean that the technology has defeated death. It means that technology has radically altered the relationship between absence and perception.

A person can be biologically absent while remaining perceptually available.

They can be historically distant while feeling psychologically immediate.

They can be physically dead while continuing to influence living decisions.

They can become part of the internal world of people they never met.

They can even become part of the world of people who never existed in their lifetime.

At some point, the distinction between remembering someone and encountering their continuing presence becomes philosophically difficult to maintain.

This may be the deepest consequence of the psychic shockwave.

The shockwave does not merely spread an image of the person. It creates relationships to the person.

Those relationships accumulate across generations.

Some are based on direct experience.

Some are inherited from parents and grandparents.

Some are constructed from recordings and photographs.

Some are projections.

Some are artistic responses.

Some are political.

Some are spiritual.

Some may be entirely imagined.

Yet together they form a cultural field that continues to surround the person long after their physical death.

The field is not the person.

The artifacts within it are not the person.

The projections within it are not the person.

But neither does the distinction necessarily mean that the person has become irrelevant to the field.

The field exists because the person existed.

It continues to change because people continue to encounter the person.

It continues to affect the living because the person remains part of their relationships.

That is the sense in which mass media may have created a new kind of afterlife.

Not an afterlife manufactured by technology, and not an assertion that a recording contains a soul, but an environment in which the dead can remain perceptually, relationally and causally present on a scale previously impossible.

The Beatles are an extraordinary example because their presence began before their deaths. Beatlemania made four young men perceptually ubiquitous while they were alive. Their recordings, images and personalities entered the private spaces of millions. Their audience incorporated them into identity and memory. The resulting collective presence survived the breakup of the group, the deaths of John and George, and the passage of generations.

The Beatles therefore demonstrate the complete arc:

person → representation → perception → projection → collective memory → collective presence.

The contemporary media environment has simply accelerated and extended the process. For Māori, however, the final step does not require the preceding steps to create the ancestor's existence.

The tūpuna are real.

The mediated artifact is something else.

Its wairua is not theirs.

Its significance comes partly from its own existence and partly from its relationship to the people, places and ancestors with whom it is associated.

This distinction matters because it leaves open a possibility that conventional theories of mass media tend to exclude before the discussion has even begun: that presence need not be reducible to representation.

Perhaps Paul's John is an internalised memory.

Perhaps it is the continuing causal presence of a relationship.

Perhaps it is something spiritual.

Perhaps these descriptions are not mutually exclusive.

The purpose of the theory is not to settle that question.

It is to recognise that the question exists.

When the deceased continue to speak through recordings, influence decisions through memory, shape descendants through inherited relationships, appear in dreams, inspire new works and remain perceptually available to people born long after their death, describing all of this simply as "remembering them" may be inadequate.

The past can remain active.

The dead can remain relationally present.

The collective memory can become a collective presence.

Perhaps that is why the final stanza of Tūpuna does not say that the ancestors are merely remembered.

It says:

They're still pulling us close.

The deepest lesson of the Beatles may be that they helped create the technological and cultural apparatus through which the dead can continue to be perceptually present to the living.  They did not invent recording, television, cinema, photography or mass merchandising. What they pioneered was their integration into a single, self-reinforcing system of presence: one capable of placing a person's voice, face, personality and creative work into the everyday perceptual environment of millions of people, and of allowing those representations to continue circulating long after the physical person has disappeared.

The Beatles created that apparatus for themselves while they were alive. Subsequent generations inherited it, expanded it and eventually made it continuous through digital media. The self-updating wave is therefore not something that happened after the Beatles. The Beatles helped create the wave in which they now remain embedded.

Their extraordinary historical position is consequently not simply that they survived in the archive. They helped construct the conditions under which an artist could become perpetually and perceptually present.

Perhaps that is why their cultural afterlife feels qualitatively different from ordinary historical remembrance. The machinery through which we encounter them was, in substantial part, their own creation.

The tūpuna do not require such machinery to remain present. Their relationship with the living precedes the mediated artifact. The Beatles present the modern technological counterpart: a system through which a person's perceptual and relational presence can continue to expand after physical death.

The artifact is not the person. Its wairua is not the person's wairua. Yet the artifact can participate in relationships that continue to connect the living with the dead.

They're still pulling us close. The Beatles helped invent a system for making people culturally present beyond the limits of their physical lives.