Heritage and Social Media

Understanding heritage in a participatory culture

Elisa Giaccardi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136284878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Heritage and Social Media explores how social media reframes our understanding and experience of heritage. Through the idea of 'participatory culture' the book begins to examine how social media can be brought to bear on the encounter with heritage and on the socially produced meanings and values that individuals and communities ascribe to it.

To highlight the specific changes produced by social media, the book is structured around three major themes:

• Social Practice. New ways of understanding and experiencing heritage are emerging as a result of novel social practices of collection, representation, and communication enabled and promoted by social media.
• Public Formation. In the presence of widely available social technologies, peer-to-peer activities such as information and media sharing are rapidly gaining momentum, as they increasingly promote and legitimate a participatory culture in which individuals aggregate on the basis of common interests and affinities.
• Sense of Place. As computing becomes more pervasive and digital networks extend our surroundings, social media and technologies support new ways to engage with the people, interpretations and values that pertain to a specific territorial setting.

Heritage and Social Media provides readers with a critical framework to understand how the participatory culture fostered by social media changes the way in which we experience and think of heritage. By introducing readers to how social media are theorized and used, particularly outside the institutional domain, the volume reveals through groundbreaking case studies the emerging heritage practices unique to social media. In doing so, the book unveils the new issues that are emerging from these practices and the new space for debate and critical argumentation that is required to illuminate what can be done in this burgeoning sector of heritage work.

PART I
Social practice

1
COLLECTIVE MEMORY AS AFFIRMATION

People-centered cultural heritage in a digital age

Neil Silberman and Margaret Purser

Introduction

Over the last 15 years, the character of the public administration of cultural heritage – long based on rigid standards of authenticity and monumentality – has undergone a far-reaching change (Araoz 2011). As most powerfully expressed by the 2003 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Convention for Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage, intangible cultural heritage and, by extension, all of cultural heritage, is ‘constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity’ (UNESCO 2003). This wholehearted acceptance of re-creation and adaptation as essential aspects of heritage significance places a new emphasis on process rather than product, thus opening up exciting new potential for digital technologies as facilitators of people-centered cultural heritage.

This chapter will examine the potential of social media as a framework for such community-based heritage activities. These applications provide varying combinations of visual, spatial and auditory representations that can be contributed to (or commented upon) by individuals, yet which also simultaneously comprise a constantly changing and expanding mosaic of collective memory. Case studies of digital applications and innovative uses of online social networks will be presented, demonstrating the richness of a dynamic, ever-evolving, participatory heritage praxis quite distinct from the older, static conceptions of heritage as unambiguous, expert-defined and needing protection from the forces of change.

This kind of interactive heritage – like traditional collective memory – is continuously transformed as a kind of meta-history itself. The role of heritage curators and conservators in the coming years must therefore become increasingly that of facilitators rather than authoritative scripters and arbiters of authenticity and significance. Although professional expertise in historiographical method, heritage policy and site management will certainly always be useful, in a digital world of multivocality of memory, these skills will not be the only ones. The task of heritage professionals will be rather to enable contemporary communities to digitally (re)produce historical environments, collective narratives and geographical visualizations that cluster individual perspectives into shared forms and processes of remembering. These interactions are reminiscent of the conversations that once occurred much more frequently at corner bars, in town squares and by evening campfires (cf. Putnam 2001) as a vital part of the exercise of cultural diversity that is now seen as a central component of world heritage (UNESCO 2005).

Un-inventing heritage: the transformatory power of participation

The acceptance of carefully designed and authoritatively presented narratives as the normative structure for public heritage communication is a tradition that extends back for centuries (Silberman 1995). From Herodotus, through medieval pilgrim guides, through the national monuments and heritage sites of the present, the main trajectory of communication has been from an author or an expert to a reader or hearer, relating a sequence of carefully chosen details, often with a subtext of contemporary political significance. As modern Western nations adopted official versions of their national story – to be taught in public schools and transmitted through national park systems – collective memory became a Janus-faced phenomenon. Official public commemoration projected forward into future generations of national-and international-scale human societies, while private collective memories looked backward through more localized and intimately performed narratives of a smaller, more circumscribed, but nonetheless shared past. And although the audience for state-sponsored heritage was never completely passive (neither accepting the authorized narrative at face value or refraining from expressing one’s own reaction) that interactivity remained largely unacknowledged by public institutions and was rarely used to enrich the public interpretation of the heritage itself. In important ways, that popular or individual reaction to official interpretation has carried the character of rumor, ridicule or gossip – frowned upon by the institutions of the state and its educational system, but enormously important in constructing unofficial communities of sympathy (Fine 2007).

This sort of unofficial, community-based reaction to official heritage narratives has, throughout history, thrived on all kinds of alternative conspiracy theories and explanations that have contested the official version. Groups and sometimes especially creative and persuasive individuals have used these counter-narratives to give voice to feelings of historical exclusion or disempowerment. Whether it was the popular explanations of the Ten Lost Tribes, the Moundbuilders, the Von Däniken thesis, Velikovskyism, JFK conspiracy theories, or even the wild rumors of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, disenfranchised sectors of the public have been able to contribute to the interpretation of public events and icons only by contesting the power of the authorities as being intentionally deceptive and or factually incorrect. At times, these contests can and do spill over into an equally unambiguous and exclusionary nostalgia. It is expressed in the kind of scorched-earth xenophobic nationalism that currently fuels anti-immigrant sentiment and propels religious fundamentalism into the center of political discourse all across the world (Roy 2010). It is manifested in pitched battles at national and local levels over the relative purity and authenticity of history textbook narratives (Castenell and Pinar 1993). In both these forms – the official and the reactionary – lies an assertion that there is only one truth to be had, accessible only through narratives that are inherently authoritarian and didactic.

None of the competing claims for a totalizing, absolute truth reflect the socially inclusive and fluid modality of genuinely collective memory. Indeed the alternatives in the realm of collective memory have always flown beneath the radar in a series of face-to-face or family encounters, almost always transmitted orally, that describe a different warp and weave of time. Instead of interpreting and tracing the history of the big heritage subjects like technological progress, the succession of aesthetic styles through history, and the rise and fall of nations, it has produced a thick anecdotal description of how the world works based on membership in a social collectivity (Zerubavel 1996). That membership can be read simultaneously on many levels: in the place names of a particular territory, in the recipes prepared on special occasions, in a yearly round of holidays linked to religious or cultural traditions, and, of course, in the telling of family stories at gatherings of kin. In whatever its form, it remains (with the exception of the examples systematically collected by modern folklorists, from the Grimm brothers onward) largely unrecorded and borne through time by the active exercise of identity. In other words, it is what Paul Connerton (1989) identifies as ‘performative memory’ that absolutely requires the personal, physical participation of its adherents, not merely an assent to or passive acceptance of an official historical narrative.

Even as collective memory on the local and family level has been progressively shattered in industrialized nations by globalizing mobility, urbanization, suburbanization and the disintegration of extended families in individual-centered service economies (Connerton 2009), some pockets of viable community and family ‘performative’ identity still exists. As we will suggest in the following pages, the active awareness and performance of shared habits, places, celebrations and recollections is a vital channel of human communication (and not only intergenerational inheritance) in healthy and dynamic societies (cf. Misztal 2003). No wonder then, that as a vibrant, collective consciousness of the past has progressively receded in large segments of the industrialized world, a hunger for personal connection with ancient places, traditions and customs has arisen alongside ‘official’ heritage narratives.

The interactive element in public heritage interpretation was never completely absent in the historical sites and initiatives that steadily increased in the Industrial Age. The birth of house museums (West 1999); the proliferation of community-inspired historical pageants (Glassberg 1990); the establishment of open air museums (Rentzhog 2007); and the evolution of historical re-enactments (McCalman and Pickering 2009) merged the hunger for older and apparently more stable ways of life with routinized visits to what might today be called an ‘immersive environment’ (Lowenthal 2002). Yet even in these mass-produced venues for performative memory, there remains a sharp distinction between those that remained faithful to officially dictated narrative and academically authenticated facticity (at places like Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg in the US, Bokrijk in Belgium, and Skansen in Sweden among others), and the eclectic and creatively anachronistic Renaissance Fairs, Wild West towns, and other quasi-historical reenactments that encourage participation in communal re-creations of a consciously imagined and idealized past (Gunnels 2005). The limitation of all these interactive environments, however, is their carefully bounded extent in both space and time. Whether in visits to open air museums or historically themed events, participation is explicitly defined by the way they are set apart from everyday life. They require special acts of pilgrimage and expenditure; participants travel to and from them as consumers of momentary experience with a beginning and an end.

‘Performative memory’ as a component of collective experience and identity is something quite different. It is an ongoing process that is also at least potentially transformative. Each performance of inherited, shared traditions is not necessarily a discrete occasion, but often a fleeting moment in which, by tweaking the performance itself, the meaning or relevance of the memory itself can be changed. As suggested in the UNESCO definition of intangible cultural heritage mentioned above, it is additive, and conversational, and has no clear beginning or end. Such performances (and the conversations about them) can extend over months or decades; old threads dropped in the past can be picked up again when the need arises, or interest returns. These moments can be both serendipitous and purposeful. But in either case, the narratives constructed are not totalizing, absolute or singular. They do not resolve in a single answer. Rather, they are contemplative, experimental, evocative and essentially mundane. They occur in the almost unnoticed moments of changing the recipe inherited from mothers-in-law or first cousins; in retelling alternate versions of remembered events with a childhood friend; or walking home along a well-worn path for the first time with a new neighbor or a grandchild. There is no sense of separation from everyday life; in fact, it is just the opposite. These performances are the way that people weave rational connections between past and present, taking apart elements of the remembered past and reassembling them to make sense of an ongoing, dynamic present, and to negotiate the currents of power and authority that shape daily life (Scott 1990; Glassie 1995; Zerubavel 2004).

Yet in a world in which communities of memory are far-flung, hybrid and diasporic, and where face-to-face interaction between siblings, old schoolmates, former colleagues and childhood friends is increasingly replaced by the digital communication of email, websites and social networks, new kinds of ‘virtual’ communities are being built. It is our contention that digital technologies offer a new medium not only for conversation and contact, but also for the construction of viable, continuous ‘memory communities’ that creatively reassemble fragments from a shared past into a dynamic, reflective expression of contemporary identity. The potential of these digital communities to restore a sense of collective memory is enormous, as we will suggest in the following sections. But the technologies that animate them must be used with caution, lest they merely enhance the dominance of the authorized, official narratives that have degraded and in many cases replaced the creative power of both individual and collective memory.

Realer than real: the seductive misuse of digital technologies

The amazingly lifelike images of new generation computer reconstructions of ancient sites, immersive environments and personalized content are powerful new elements in the presentation of official heritage. Through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the development of digital applications has blossomed with funding from such major sources as the European Commission (Digicult, Minerva and EPOCH being among the most well-funded EU projects); the US National Park Service through its National Center for Preservation Technology and Training; heritage non-profits such as CyArk, Archives & Museum Informatics and the Virtual Heritage Network, and with increasing investment from a large number of private firms in the computer and museum design industry (cf. VAST, VSMM and Eurographics conferences). Digital applications have become standard features of archaeological and architectural research, public heritage presentation and even site management, with a new body of theory emerging for the most effective use of digital heritage for both research and educational uses (Parry 2005; Cameron and Kenderdine 2010). Even though concerns have been voiced about the durability of digital media (Addison 2007), it is taken as a given that digital heritage is essential for the preservation of the world’s heritage. Yet what is its effect on performative collective memory?

Visualization is perhaps the most conspicuous of the new digital heritage applications, though it is hardly an innovation or novelty in the field of heritage (Molyneaux 1997). Ever since the birth of what might be called antiquarian interest in the Renaissance with their meticulous architectural reconstructions of Greek and Roman architecture through the melodramatic tableaux of the pageants and panoramas of the nineteenth century, to the Hollywood costume epics of the twentieth century, graphic imaginings of the past have always been a standard medium of popular historiography. As stirring or romantic artists’ impressions, these pencil-drawn, oil-painted or cinemascoped Technicolor images have created indelible popular images of the past. Those images have been constantly c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Others: a prologue
• INTRODUCTION: Reframing heritage in a participatory culture
• PART I Social practice
• 1 COLLECTIVE MEMORY AS AFFIRMATION: People-centered cultural heritage in a digital age
• 2 SOCIALLY DISTRIBUTED CURATION OF THE BHOPAL DISASTER: A case of grassroots heritage in the crisis context
• 3 MUSEUM OF THE SELF AND DIGITAL DEATH: An emerging curatorial dilemma for digital heritage
• 4 SOCIAL TRACES: Participation and the creation of shared heritage
• PART II Public formation
• 5 REMEMBERING TOGETHER: Social media and the formation of the historical present
• 6 HERITAGE KNOWLEDGE, SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE INTANGIBLE
• 7 CONNECTING TO EVERYDAY PRACTICES: Experiences from the Digital Natives exhibition
• 8 THE RISE OF THE ‘MEDIA MUSEUM’: Creating interactive cultural experiences through social media
• PART III Sense of place
• 9 MOSAICS AND MULTIPLES: Online digital photography and the framing of heritage
• 10 MOBILE OUIJA BOARDS
• 11 EXTENDING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN LAND AND PEOPLE DIGITALLY: Designing with rural Herero communities in Namibia
• 12 SITUATING THE SOCIABILITY OF INTERACTIVE MUSEUM GUIDES
• AFTERWORD: Dialogue in the space between ethnography and heritage
• References
• Index