New Imagined Community by Cultural Participation

Abstract

Although the preservation of cultural heritage has always been a primary task of cultural policy in many countries, the idea of combining digital technology and cultural heritage was almost entirely unknown as recently as 1990. It is undeniable that digital technologies have played an important part in our lives. In the case of Taiwan, the government has been working on digitizing cultural heritage by launching National Digital Archives Program since 2002. Most scholarship has focused either on technical practices or the economic value of such practices. Scanty attention has been paid to the relationship between digital cultural heritage, cultural citizenship, and one’s imagined community. In other words, the application of digital technology onto cultural heritage has been largely unmapped in terms of identity formation. This study explores the social and cultural implication of the combination of technology and heritage. When heritage meet contemporary technology, how does it shape and what does it implicate for one’s cultural identity and imagined community?