Re-thinking the cultural codes of new media: The question concerning ontology

Abstract

The digital world need not solely be conceived in Western, elite terms, but instead can and should be re-envisioned as a space that empowers the values, priorities, and ontologies held by global users from the 'margins', within the developing world. This paper asks us to re-consider the ontologies of the digital world in light of the cultural beliefs, languages, and value systems of emerging web users. I argue that as we design new media technologies and develop projects we must think about local ontologies and practices rather than singular Western-created representations of knowledge. I present several examples that think past rigid, hierarchical classifications, opening up the codes of new media to better listen to diverse community and cultural voices.

Digitisation, digital interaction and social media: embedded barriers to democratic heritage

“…Furthermore, capitalising on the Internet's advantages often relies upon an infrastructure that can supply goods and services in 'real life' that are unequally distributed. Srinivasan (2013) draws particular attention to this global inequality in the physical make-up of the Internet, as well as cultural bias in the way data and documentation are organised. Additionally, there are technological factors at play, particularly in terms of how data are organised through search engine algorithms, that fundamentally affect how much and which data are available through the Internet.…”

“…This is achieved by building accessible databases that are constructed around cultural meaning rather than operating systems (Srinivasan et al 2009;Srinivasan 2013) and facilitating social history groups in constructing their narratives around their local environment (Giannachi et al 2014). Consequently, the same actors are able to find new ways for values to be expressed and communicated, and for the public to appropriate and communicate their heritage values.…”

Information and ontologies: Challenges in scaling knowledge for development

“…Communities and states represent the people, places, things, and events around them through ontologies, distinct systems of categories, and their interrelations. Locally created ontologies emerge and evolve based on accumulating experience and practice and in response to changing environments (Srinivasan, , ; Srinivasan & Huang, ). In contrast, most of the schemata for organizing information on a larger scale—for administrative use, “large‐N” databases, or international knowledge‐sharing—emerge from sometimes outdated administrative needs, technical discussions, negotiated compromises on metadata, and the exigencies of capturing, storing, and retrieving recorded knowledge.…”

“…Some cultures, in contrast, rely on the written word to reinforce cohesion (Messick, ). The point we wish to make is that different communities may rely on different ontologies and that distinct ways of organizing knowledge impact their ways of acting upon and communicating about their worlds (Srinivasan, ).…”

Critical Histories of Museum Catalogues

“…Further, the study of museum collections as objects of inquiry and sites of historical information has been reinvigorated in part due to the conceptual issues that have arisen through digitization and attempts to create shared access to cultural heritage resources (Beltrame , ; Ngata et al. ; Amiria Salmond ; Anne Salmond ; Srinivasan ; Srinivasan et al. ) .…”