Cultural Heritage in a Digital Age,
Futures and transformations.
Rachel Charlotte Smith
Abstract
Center for Digital Urban Living
Advanced digital technologies and shifting paradigms of
communication are challenging contemporary cultural
heritage institutions to provide new forms of
representations and experiences that include modern
consumers as active co-creators in, rather than passive
consumers of, cultural heritage communication. From a
theoretical anthropological premise of culture and identity
as dynamic and transformational, I explore potential new
understandings and conceptualisations of cultural heritage
and its representations in relation to a research experiment
into interactive technologies.
Department of Information and
Media Studies
University of Aarhus
Helsingforsgade 14
DK-8200 Aarhus N, Denmark
imvrcs@hum.au.dk
Keywords
Cultural heritage, anthropological theory, cultural
communication, transformation, interaction design.
Cultural Heritage Communication
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI 2010, April 10–15, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
ACM 978-1-60558-930-5/10/04.
In the context of heritage communication, the traditional
role of cultural institutions as civic educational spaces of
distanced gaze (Bennett 2006) has been, and still is,
particularly prevalent. But while cultural institutions have
been important ‘bearers’ of national heritage and identity
and exponents of knowledge about foreign cultures,
anthropology and its modern theoretical approaches have
played a surprisingly marginal role in both the studies and
developments of these institutions. Being concerned with
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issues of culture and identity, anthropologists could play a
vital role in both describing the practices and experiences
of audiences in museums and in developing new
approaches for the experience and design of cultural
representations. This is especially relevant if cultural
institutions seek to engage younger generations whose
advanced patterns of consumption and communication
differ widely from the traditional self-understanding of
these cultural institutions.
A general problem in cultural heritage communication is
that much museum or heritage research tends to focus on
the historical role of institutions, ignoring the dialogical
aspects of people’s practices that happen inside them
(Handler & Gable 1997), or indeed beyond them. Cultural
institutions have traditionally been based on grand cultural
narratives, notions of object-based materiality and
historical authenticity (Macdonald 2003). But increased
globalised exchange, cultural differentiation and
communication is problematising both the concept and
content of cultural heritage. The challenge faced by these
institutions therefore, not only concerns new means of
communicating their ‘cultural products’ to receiving
audiences, but whole new paradigms of culture, knowledge
and communication that correlate to the everyday lives of
modern consumers and put their experiences and concerns
at the centre of communication.
Contemporary anthropological theoretical approaches
emphasize the formation and transformation of cultural
practices and identities in a globalised world as fluid,
fragmented and continuous processes (Clifford & Marcus
1998, Faubion & Marcus 2009, Appadurai 1996). Cultural
heritage and identity are markers or proprietary symbols of
difference and resemblance concerned with personhood,
property, ethnicity, etc., that individuals or communities
use to assert who they are (e.g. Harrison 2006). Today the
means of representing cultural identity includes a whole
range of visual and digital technologies, and, crucially,
everyday strategies for consuming these products. It
follows, that the formation, and transformation, of culture,
identity and heritage exists only through representation,
and consumption, and how people experience these
cultures and identities cannot be separated from the
situated dialogical acts in and through which they are
performed and negotiated (Ashcroft 2001).
Museums are privileged sites for the experience of cultural
heritage, as a particular form of cultural identity. Focusing
on the construction of cultural processes and identities as
well as the media practices through which these identities
are consumed can provide an analytical framework able to
mediate between the experiences of cultural heritage in
museums and the processes and concerns of cultural
formation and transformation in the everyday lives of
young audiences. Such an anthropological focus could
create the foundations for unexpected ways of re-defining
the content and experiences of cultural heritage
communication in ways that allow audiences to participate
in exploring what experiences of cultural heritage are, and
could be.
As an understanding of cultural processes and their
continual formation and transformation is a core concern of
the anthropological endeavor, this premise could be an
important contribution to reshaping understandings and
designs of cultural heritage communication in a
contemporary era of digital cultures. Through an
anthropological and cultural studies perspective on
audience engagement, practices and experiences, I wish to
link understandings and practices of ‘everyday’ cultures in
a digital era with new communicative practices in cultural
heritage communication. This will be done by in the
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intersection between social anthropology, cultural heritage
and interaction design.
Digital Natives
Digital Natives is a practiced-based research project that
explores and experiments with intersections of
anthropological audience research, participatory design
and new interactive technologies, experimenting with
possible new futures and understandings of cultural
heritage communication. The project concerns a generation
of young people who are raised in a digital era, surrounded
by new media and information technologies, and whose life
worlds are said to depart from that of previous
generations, both mentally, socially and culturally (Prensky
2001, Ito 2009). The project explores these young people’s
everyday cultures, identities and communication practices
in a local setting and experiments with new ways of
representing and interacting with these cultures in the
context of a concrete exhibition experiment. As such the
aim is to create an exhibition in collaboration with a group
of young people that explores and expresses the lives and
cultures of digital natives in Århus, year 2010. The project
involves creative participatory collaboration between young
people, anthropologists and interaction designers through
an extended period of nine months.
From a perspective of cultural anthropological research,
using the not yet manifest cultural category of Digital
Natives as nexus for theoretical enquiry has three main
aims: 1) to reveal cultural categories and identities as
fluid, and transformational: exploring the meaning of
nativeness in a context of contemporary Western youth
culture in a digital culture, reveals the search for stable
cultural categories and identities as an aphorism; their
existence is simultaneously, both and neither, local and
global, digital and physical, coherent and distributed but
always dynamic and processual, hence resisting static
representation (Rabinow 2008, Castell 2004). 2) to
challenge traditional uni-directional communication
towards an audience by engaging them as the subjects for
the exhibition; hence destablising the historically bounded
relationship between Self and Other, subject and audience,
by including these potential new audiences at various
levels of the project as engaged participants and coproducers of cultural communication (Fabian 1983), and 3)
to explore what a dual focus on everyday digital culture
and practices, and its expression through new interactive
technologies might contribute to our understanding,
redefinition and design of future cultural heritage
communication in a digital globalised world.
Futures of Cultural Heritage Communication
Working from such premises and understandings of
cultural identities, heritage and their representations,
between fields of anthropological research and interaction
design, I wish to explore issues such as:

Which consequences do conceptualizations of
culture as dynamic, transforming and processual
have for future representations of cultural
heritage communication?

How can the development and design of
interactive technologies and experiences support
such a cultural perspective?

In which ways can participatory designanthropological processes spur new insights into
potential futures of cultural heritage
communication in a digital era?
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Acknowledgements
This work has been funded by Center for Digital Urban
Living (the Danish Council for Strategic Research grant
number 2128-07-0011).
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