Heritage and Social Media: Understanding Heritage in a Participatory Culture [Book Review] (original) (raw)

Visitor, contributor and conversationalist: Multiple digital identities of the heritage citizen

The Historic Environment, 2016

In this paper we analyse modes of connecting to and interacting with heritage through a range of selected digital applications and social media that all relate to the history of places. With their emphasis on connectivity and online participation, these apps and sites seek to create both repositories and digital communities through which images, information, memories and experiences can be shared. Through comparison to the rise of 'citizen science', we propose a new way of categorising these recent mobile and web-based sites that scrutinises, in a more fine-grained way, the mode of citizen engagement that was inscribed into their designs and purpose. The simple typology of curated sites, content-hosting sites, and social network sites, provides a way to examine the possibilities and the limits for a kind of digitally-enabled 'heritage citizen'. We ask questions around how digital and social media open up new forms of consumption and production of heritage related int...

Hedonistic Heritage: Digital Culture and Living Environment

History is not anymore the prerogative of historians, nor is displaying heritage the exclusive privilege of museum curators. In the digital era, local interconnected amateurs commit themselves to the cultural circuit of heritage through the mediation of globalised images. In that circuit, heritage and social memory take a particular form: as resources for tourism and trade, but also resources for collective action, social engagement and cultural production. “Ordinary people” engage in playful leisure such as genealogy, local history, photography, walking, exploring, surfing on the Internet, self-publishing, etc. As do-it-yourself hobbies associating offline and online practices, these hedonist activities, which blend production and consumption, creation and transmission, tend to redraw heritage communities. What do they tell us about the change of commodity, space and time? What do they tell us about the contemporary process of heritagisation and the role of people as well as the place of institutions in it? We focus on the shifts induced by the emergence of empowered actors, the “prosumers,” who participate in various networks, institutional as well as non-institutional, combining amateurs and professionals. Their collaborative experiences lead to design spaces of inspirational actions that we highlight in the context of two post-industrial areas, Swansea (UK) and Saint-Etienne (France).

Mobile Public Memory: The (Digital/Physical) (Artifacts/Souvenirs) of the (Archiver/Tourist)

SAGE Open, 2014

This article will look at the impact that mobile technologies have had on the ability of people to document their everyday lives. What is important to note about this documentation is that it has become a public display of events and experiences via mediated content. This documentation becomes more interesting to observe when it is put in context of how people can now record their travels. This “public memory” of private travel is assisted via mobile technologies with applications designed to record locations through Global Positioning System data and mediated content. After the documentation, the consumption of this content is conducted through social media services and other public outlets as opposed to the traditional means of showing where people have traveled via postcards, slides, and souvenirs. Through a mixed-method study, this process of documentation is analyzed via the thematic dichotomies that emerged throughout the course of surveys and interviews. This article will explore this contrast between the digital and physical through an analysis of the “traditional tourist” versus the “archiver of experiences.” Finally, the impact of this documentation will be framed in the context of mobile communication. As people adjust to mobile technologies as part of the normal flow of society, those same people find new and innovative methods of applying these technologies beyond mere one-to-one communication or even one-to-many communication (Ling & Campbell, 2011). Some people are applying the channels of communication to become more of a self-documenting mode. This self-documenting mode is comprised of writing posts and comments and recording mediated content for the purpose of recording the experiences and mundane actions of everyday in a way that can be recalled or searched via a public social feed. This feed of information represents a kind of “public memory” for the individual who posted the content. For the purpose of this analysis, the term public memory is simply shorthand for posting content onto a mediated platform where one of the purposes of posting is to journal or note information that has a personal significance. For example, one could take pictures of their meals not because they are showing the dinner to their friends but rather keeping a recorded journal of their favorite meals to remember them later. In this way, there is not necessarily an imagined audience that the individual is focusing their content toward, but rather it is designed to be an online scrapbook. The purpose of this work is to look at how mobile media is changing the nature of the collection of memory via digital artifacts created by the hybrid of services that represent the social and hyper-local interactions. These interactions are best exemplified through the use of the SoLoMo (social, local, mobile) category of applications for mobile devices, especially services such as FourSquare and Instagram (Nelson, 2013). These services will be discussed within the context of their impact on public memory, specifically how they bridge the gap between the digital and the physical, the gap between an artifact and a souvenir, and its ability to combine the role of the tourist and the archiver. The remaining parts of this article will define these terms and describe the impact that the mobile media space has had on these concepts.

Chapter 7. The Right to Produce Memory: Social Memory Technology as Cultural Work

Berghahn Books, 2023

'remembering me' memorialisation 2 , displaying the Self or an inclusive heritage process. 3 It responds to Marianne Hirsch's call for a 'shift in attention and methodology' in memory studies 'outside official structures of commemoration.' 4 Bodies, places, sites and memories become together and while this may assume a materiality, a representation (statue, memorial, artefact) over which one has rights, custodianship and ownership it also follows that it is immaterial, open and shared. As Merrill et al (2020) have argued 'the more or less digital' elements of the 'commemorative public atmospheres' combine or create assemblages. 5 Memories composed of a combination of 'more or less digital' elements, mean that the cultural work and creative labour of social memory technology has become more visible and

What Are Memories Made of? The Untapped Power of Digital Heritage

Why are we here and what are we doing? What is digital heritage supposed to be? We often get so involved in our particular projects and research goals that there is little time to zoom out to see the larger picture in which we-not only the pixels-are a part. So my intention here is to explore the contours of that larger picture, reflecting on recent ideas about the nature of human memory, its relation to cultural heritage, and connections of digital technology to both. For I don't think that it's an overstatement to say that a deeply shared faith in the closely-knit triad of collective memory, heritage conservation, and digital processing animates most of the members of the worldwide digital heritage community to do what they do.

Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social (2017). (Preview: Contents and Introduction)

Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social Edited by Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo and Eivind Røssaak. Amsterdam University Press, 2016, 332 pages, 39 b/w illustrations. ISBN:9789462982147 How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions, phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very much up in the air. The essays in this collection discuss the new technologies of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social. Contributors: David Berry, Ina Blom, Wolfgang Ernst, Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Liv Hausken, Yuk Hui, Trond Lundemo, Adrian Mackenzie, Sónia Matos, Richard Mills, Jussi Parikka, Eivind Røssaak, Stuart Sharples, Tiziana Terranova, Pasi Väliaho. Full book available for download in Open Access: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=619950;keyword=memory%20in%20motion