Technology, Culture and Public History: The Digital Ecosystem as a Habitat for History

Fields such as technology and economics have long valued the concept of 'digital ecosystems' which "redefine the boundaries between the public and private spheres" (World Economic Forum (WEF) 2019) as a way to understand how information circulates and is engaged with across different digital platforms and mediums (e.g. Colugnati et al. (eds.) 2010, WEF 2007, Feijóo et al. 2009, Darking et al. 2008, Nachira 2004). Covid-19 has reinforced understandings of just how essential integrated digital infrastructures, offering seemingly seamless on-demand access to multiple interconnecting realms of knowledge, have become to daily life in contemporary societies (e.g. Lazazzara et al. (eds.) 2020, Tofalvy & Barna 2020, Henry 2021, Susanto et al. 2021, Merry et al. 2020). To date, few scholars have analysed in any depth the ways in which these ongoing developments in communications are remodelling social engagements with the past across different realms of culture.

Engaging critically with existing interdisciplinary literatures on the digital ecosystem, my research will use carefully selected studies to investigate the ways in which historical information traverses intra-medium digital platforms. My MA thesis has already served as a pilot for this, interrogating the mechanisms employed by Netflix to facilitate and encourage different modes of cross-platform public engagement with 'The Crown'. Extending this analysis through other cases will prompt critical evaluation of the divisions between, for example, film, television, social media, heritage and public memory, which are common in existing literature (e.g. 'media events' Garde-Hansen 2011, 2016; 'interdisciplinarity' Burgoyne 2003, 2008; 'streaming platforms' McDonald 2016, Baker & Wiatrowski 2017, 'social media' A. Hoskins (ed.) 2017; 'television' Gray & Bell 2012; 'memory studies' Cubitt 2014, 2018; 'digital heritage' Bowen & Giannini 2019).

Key questions include:

- How can we best engage critically with the presentation of history across different types of digital media which are both user-led and producer-pushed?
- What is the mechanical relationship between producers of digital history content and users, and how does this affect how users treat, receive and understand material about the past across different digital habitats?
- How does digital media respond to these different needs/motivations/ infrastructures/actors and how does this differ between audiences?
- How do global socio-economic and political developments influence the ways in which public history circulates within the 'digital ecosystem'?

An intentionally diverse set of analytical case studies will each explore a different set of interactions set in motion by digital media. To give three examples - study 1 ('Hamilton') will track the reconfiguration of historical content in the passage from musical theatre to video streaming to social media sensationalism; study 2 (the 'Eva.Stories' project) will interrogate the transformation of traditional educational and commemorative strategies in Holocaust-themed social media content; study 3 ('#BLM') will show how historical understanding is mobilised in a transnational political movement exclusively facilitated through social media. Prioritising the public voice is a cornerstone of the research, which will use social media (e.g. Twitter, TikTok) engagement as well as traditional oral history methodologies (e.g public focus groups, interviews) to gain practical, as well as theoretical, insights into the practices, experiences and motivations of producers and consumers of historical knowledge in the digital arena.

Investigating the relationships between technological change and the production, circulation and consumption of historical knowledge addresses an important dimension of contemporary cultural history. Ultimately, it has the potential to encourage historians in how they themselves can function as participants in today's digital cultural interactions.