Heritage and Social Media ─ Understanding heritage in a participatory culture

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.

Elisa Giaccardi is Associate Professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), where she is affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Culture and Technology. She works at the intersection of interaction design and social media, with an active interest in living heritage practices. Her contributions to this subject comprise research and design work on collective memories, affective geographies, and emerging curatorial practices.

Foreword 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 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