Key Words

digital heritage | Teotihuacan | Yahoo! | media economy | archaeological imaginary | new media | information society | web >2.0 |

Abstract

This chapter looks at the convergence of new media and archaeology, specifically cultural heritage. It begins from the premise that the usage of new media is already prevalent outside of the academy, and that this usage directly involves cultural heritage in creating an archaeological imagination. As a thread to the paper’s discussion of this intersection of new media and archaeology, I begin from the ‘cutting edge’ example of Yahoo!’s recent ‘media bundling’ project of creating a time-capsule of the human condition to be transmitted from the UNESCO World Heritage of Teotihuacan, Mexico where I currently work.

Building upon the specifics of how this new media mogul operationalized new media functionality beyond hyper-text, or e-text, at a cultural heritage site, I look at the salient components of what this emerging technology is (a ‘platform shift’) and how it parallels the emerging push in archaeology to open heritage management to greater public involvement (a ‘paradigm shift’). I chart the field of new media studies, drawing out the general implications for how this technology pervasively and powerfully influences societies utilizing it (a ‘transcoding’), and how this ‘computer culture’ alters how scholarship itself operates. This discussion centers upon several defining capabilities: customization of information, the re-tooling of this information for disparate and individualized goals, and the ease of quickly transmitting and sharing such information through the bandwidth of the internet. In practical consequence, these functionalities enable new media to be mutable and combinable. For cultural activity, ‘Users’ comes to define this mixed role of information generation and distribution.

With this emerging centrality of media users in new media, or a ‘mixing logic’, mapped out, I consider its role at a project I have undertaken at Teotihuacan. I discuss how the project’s wiki, a particular and defining type of new media technology, integrates the parallel concerns of this platform shift with archaeology’s paradigm shift. I conclude by suggesting that other critical issues in archaeology, such as the need to create and maintain digital databases and the granting of restrictive, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR’s) over the material of the discipline, may be cheaply and productively worked through by using such wikis.

Forward to Cultural (digital) Heritage

Containments

Return to Chapter 5: Taking 'Yahoo!s' seriously: new media and the platform shift in cultural heritage