Cultural Heritage on the Internet – Opportunities and Threats. Several Cases of Misinterpretation of Art in the Internet

Abstract

The internet is a space that has opened up new possibilities for presenting cultural heritage. With the development of the network, users have gained access to digital copies of books, works of art, and 3D visualizations of historic buildings and entire cities. Contact with culture through media has never been so easy. It’s hard not to appreciate these opportunities, especially remembering the recent times of the pandemic, when contact with human cultural achievements was mainly limited to online forms. Online resources are a vast reservoir of all kinds of materials, from which users select those that match their interests and preferences. Websites and online platforms offer a rich array of multimedia, texts, photos, films, simulations, and reconstructions, materials related to every period of human cultural and artistic activity. The sources from which these have been drawn vary. A large part of the materials are digital copies of artworks, scans of manuscripts, early prints, old photographs, and films, made available on the official websites of cultural institutions: museums, libraries, or archives. An even larger group consists of resources that have been made available on the Internet as a result of spontaneous, grassroots practices of its users, sharing materials from their private collections. These include, for example, photographs taken of museum exhibits, monuments, and landmarks, films shot in historical places. The main goal of this article is to draw attention to the problem of presenting content related to cultural heritage in cyberspace. There is no doubt about the benefits of digitizing cultural heritage resources. However, less attention is often paid to the dangers associated with their online dissemination. The same technologies that allow for the presentation of cultural objects in digital media often lead to representations far removed from the original appearance of the artwork or, sometimes much worse, to its decontextualization. Too much trust in the capabilities of modern technology can ultimately lead to the degradation of culture. The text will present several examples that highlight the fundamental problems associated with this topic.