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Our approach to cultural transmission is based on the theoretical works of many different disciplines: Cultural theory, sociology, archaeology, media theory, ethnology, history, didactics, and material culture studies help us understand our digital heritage and shape our practice.
But let us take a step back. Because, when thinking about the Internet, the most important insight is quite simple:
What? Yes.
The Internet is a network for contemporary cultural expressions. We act within the web and reproduce and produce cultures in the process — making it a virtual cultural space.
The network also provides access to the artifacts and cultural assets of the past. Many museums, archives, or libraries have digitized large parts of their collections and made them available online. This very confluence of past and present represents our new digital heritage: We must protect and transmit it for future generations.
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Artifacts are manifestations of history and thus culture. Artifacts help us to interpret the past and understand the present. They create identity and meaning and shape and enable (cultural) action.
Almost anything you can find online is representative of a culture. Whether it's your parents' old Facebook posts or the metadata from a Google search — acting online means acting culturally.
Our job is to find exciting and relevant narratives and translate them into digital cultural artifacts. We want to create objects that represent digital cultures appropriately, and thus actively transmit them.
We are constantly working to dissolve any kind of bias in our platform. Part of that involves engaging our community: If you have suggestions for possible artifacts, you can send them to us here.
Digital cultures are highly impermanent: They are not only subject to rapid technical change, but in most cases also to the economic interests of large Internet companies. As such, economic considerations outweigh cultural ones.
The deliberate demises of platforms like Vine or GeoCities show that we cannot rely on platform operators for conservation. This is why the Internet Archaeology Institute exists: We believe that digital cultures must be preserved and protected in order to be transmitted.
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