The digital turn : user's practices and cultural transformations

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).

Papers presented at the conference in Tartu, 14

Papers presented at the conference in Tartu, 14

Papers presented at the conference in Tartu, 14

2009

The concept of knowledge society has by now become an inseparable part of modern human been said that the Internet has transformed knowledge into a global library and made it into a circulating hypertext. According to Umberto Eco it has created such an explosion of semiotic fireworks, where any point in space can be connected with any other similar point. 1 The new Library of Babylon does not acknowledge borders between states, nations and cultures. This process is global with respect to the consumption of culture, but local regarding the creation of digital content. Thus, Marshall McLuhan's phrase 'the medium is the message' should also be considered when memory documents created with the old analogue media are re-mediated and reconstructed in the environment of new digital media. 2 Below, we will examine the new practices of culture, and in the age of new media, its development can use seemingly limitless resources. It has representing the past from the viewpoint of memory institutions that hold and preserve large collections documents.

2010

Assistant professor Graciela Padilla proposes a paper to share the results of a research on teaching innovation, funded by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its section of Innovation and Improvement Projects for Teaching Quality, organized by the Vice-Rector for Development and Teaching Quality.

Transforming Culture in the Digital Age, pp. 187-193, 2010