Public Heritage and the Promise of the Digital

Abstract

The “promise” of the digital has been a democratization of the notion of heritage, and a disruption of ideas about ownership, authorship, and authenticity that might have seemed more straightforward in the recent past. This chapter overviews the possibilities brought about by these developments before introducing a series of ethical questions that they bring sharply into focus for museum and heritage practitioners. It appraises three practices which exemplify this conflicted terrain and demonstrate the issues at stake: heritage institutions’ uses of social media, crowd-based methods, and immersive mobile encounters. The chapter concludes that reflexivity is fast becoming a core professional competency for those working in digital heritage contexts.