Museums and cultural memory in an age of networks

Abstract

Techno-social developments over the last two decades have given rise to a multitude of translocal networks, making possible an unprecedented ‘globalization’ of cultural memory practices across geopolitically diverse populations. Yet the work of philosophical conceptualization and critical analysis of networked museological practices still remains to be taken up satisfactorily, what with a pervasive tendency to conflate networks with decentralized/non-hierarchical organizations on the one hand, and the absence of a robust ontology, and a rigorous account of historical agents and their memory-making activities in prevailing theories of networks on the other. This article recruits DeLanda’s ‘assemblage theory’ and Deleuze’s Bergsonism to explain how cultural memory-making assemblages work across the internet’s many social networks. It also portrays the affordances of networks for museological practices, delineating a space of possibilities for cultural memory-making by way of contemporary examples.