Heritage in the Digital Era: Cinematic Tourism and the Activist Cause (Routledge Advances in Sociology)

What happens to traditional conceptions of 'heritage', in the era of fluid media spaces? 'Heritage' usually involves intergenerational transmission of ideas, customs, ancestral lands, and artefacts, and so serves to reproduce national communities over time. However, media industries have the power to transform national lands and histories into generic landscapes and ideas through digital reproductions or modifications, prompting renegotiations of belonging in new ways. Contemporary media allow digital environments to function as transnational classrooms, creating virtual spaces of debate for people with access to televised, cinematic and Internet ideas and networks.
This book examines a range of popular cinematic interventions that are reshaping national and global heritage, across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Australasia. It examines collaborative or adversarial articulations of such enterprise  (by artists, directors, producers but also local, national and transnational communities) that blend activism with commodification, presenting new cultural industries as fluid but significant agents in the production of new public spheres.   

CONTENTS
List of illustrations/Acknowledgments/Rethinking heritage: cultural industries and global kin/Heritage entropy? Cinematic pilgrimage in New Zealand (2010)/The Da Vinci 'node': networks of neo-pilgrimage in the European cosmopolis (2006-2008)/Projecting European heritage: Acropolis in Ruins (2009)/Memory and protest: Yimou Zhang's and Ai Weiwei's artwork (2004-2011)/From deep ecology to thick description: Avatar's (2009) 'cosmology of protest'/Bibliography