Difficult heritage on social network sites: An integrative review

Abstract

Social network sites (SNS) have recently become an active ground for interactions on contested and dissonant heritage, on the heritage of excluded and subaltern groups, and on the heritage of collective traumatic past events. Situated at the intersection between heritage studies, memory studies, Holocaust studies, social media studies and digital heritage studies, a growing body of scholarly literature has been emerging in the past 10 years, addressing online communication practices on SNS. This study, an integrative review of a comprehensive corpus of 80 scholarly works about difficult heritage on SNS, identifies the profile of authors contributing to this emerging area of research, the increasing frequency of publication after 2017, the prevalence of qualitative research methods, the global geographic dispersion of heritage addressed, and the emergence of common themes and concepts derived mostly from the authors ‘home’ fields of memory studies, heritage studies and (digital) media studies.

Social Media as Lieux for the Convergence of Collective Trajectories of Holocaust Memory—A Study of Online Users in Germany and Italy

“…As a field of study, research on the digital memory of the Holocaust on social media relates to the category of difficult heritage and falls under the umbrella of history, memory studies, heritage studies, digital media studies, computer science, and tourism studies [30,33]. For this research study, it is important to examine the contributions made by memory studies and media studies to investigate such a complex and transdisciplinary phenomenon.…”

“…The purpose of the study is to determine whether these museums remain national(ist) ventures, or whether social media has been altering what a memorial or museum can be and facilitate a convergence of users' motivations and interests that transcends national boundaries [26]. As opposed to other studies concerning difficult heritage on social media [30], our research uses a survey methodology and analyses quantitative data collected from a questionnaire distributed to online users of the social media profiles of nine Holocaust museums and memorials. The hypothesis underlying this study is that the acceleration in cultural globalization [31] may also have affected digital mediatization of Holocaust memories across diverse countries as expressed by the convergence of users' interests, motivations, and agency in social media spaces.…”

An Ontology of Semiotic Activity and Epistemic Figuration of Heritage, Memory and Identity Practices on Social Network Sites

“…This markedly transdisciplinary literature on HMI-related practices on SNS ranges from advocacy paers suggesting why SNS are useful for institutional heritage communication or community activism, to evidence-based investigations on the properties, motivations, and effects of empirically-attested SNS interactions related to HMI, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods studies. Recent systematic literature reviews account for scholarship on loosely related themes such as participation in online communities (Malinen, 2015), social media and activism (Allsop., 2016) and social media in tourism (Zarezadeh et al, 2018), or on narrower topics such as social media in museums and heritage (Vassiliadis & Belenioti, 2017), Holocaust-related social media memory and education practices (Manca, 2021), and difficult heritage on SNS (Kelpšienė et al, 2022). Yet the underlying structure of HMI on SNS, viewed both as a field of practice and a field of knowledge, is not addressed by any of these studies.…”