RENEWING HERITAGE AND EDUCATION
If it’s not on YouTube, did it happen? If this hints at a problem, it must surely be that the question of heritage (not simply, ‘what happened?’, but, ‘what happened that matters?’) is at risk of contamination from popular interference in the age of user generated content and digital repositories. Certainly this is a view expressed through government policy (national curricula, My School, My University — all premised on the loss of meaning and meaningfulness) and in the mainstream media.
But against this, the ‘GLAM’ sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) — instead of telling people, especially young people, what’s good for them — is responding to global digital connectivity and undergoing rapid and dynamic change: both convergence and integration among previous silos (some libraries are museums, galleries and archives, etc.); and dispersal and interconnectivity through digital networks, where the distinction between official and informal repositories is blurred.
What forms and practices of heritage preservation and dissemination are appropriate to this digital and consumerist context? What do heritage and education look like under these conditions? What happens to the past in an age of user agency and media mash-ups? And, perhaps just as importantly, what happens to the future?