Description:

The Internet has allowed the production and archiving of a plurality of contents and narratives online by individuals, including historically under-represented populations. The storage and linking capacities of the Internet play an important role in the preservation and organization of cultural heritage. Professional historians, archivists, museum curators and other traditional stewards of public memory face a new set of challenges to rethink their role in a changed “archiving ecosystem”. Internet has greatly impacted how memories are created, stored, accessed and shared. More recently, large proprietary digital platforms began to play an increasingly relevant role in defining what is to be seen, remembered and forgotten, given that billions of people and organizations produce and post content through their applications. They became an important stakeholder to the collective memory preservation, stablishing a new layer of complexity to the issue. Their private policies of content storage, moderation, distribution and amplification are not necessarily aligned with the public interest in the preservation of collective memory, given their commercial nature. Memories are mobilized by archives represented by images, symbols, values and codes which encapsulate common ideas that become part of an inter subjective symbolic system and can be corroborated, corrected, disputed. Moreover, the increasing role of digital platforms in preserving public memory has been associated to traditional challenges of Internet Governance, such as preserving the integrity of information, countering disinformation, protecting the right to information, promoting under-represented cultural heritage, preserving multilingualism and other issues. The workshop aims at bringing together multiple stakeholders to discuss the challenges and initiatives for the preservation of public memory online and also its relevance to the Internet Governance debate.