Social Media as new Arenas for Intangible Cultural Heritage

In 2003, recognizing the risks emerging from globalization and social transformation, the UNESCO decided to endorse the new label of Intangible Cultural Heritage (referred to as ICH onwards) in order to protect the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills that communities recognize as part of their cultural heritage. By issuing the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the UNESCO acknowledged the importance of oral expressions and traditional practices as well as the urgent need for their preservation. In order to ensure such preservation, the Convention called for an international system of safeguard, analogous to the one that, since 1972, had protected tangible heritage through the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Yet, while granting intangible practices the same status accorded to material legacies, the UNESCO experts recognized that the two types of heritage require radically different preservation systems. Intangible heritage is, by definition, a living heritage, a heritage that is nurtured by the communities that initiated it and continue to recreate it over and over. Preserving the intangible heritage primarily entails assuring that such communities of practice both live and survive, a goal that calls for bottom-up and decentralized approaches. Consequently, one of the main issues that this Convention raised is the need for new preservation tools that are suitable for transcribing oral cultures by respecting their living and bottom-up nature. This paper presents a case study related to this topic, the Luminara Feast in Pisa (Italy). This study postulates that social media provide promising new solutions for the preservation of ICH by respecting the specific nature of such heritage. Indeed, these tools offer not only the possibility to gather different translations of a cultural element into a unique space of fruition (by respecting the bottom-up nature of ICH), but also the possibility to leave transcriptions open for further transformation (by respecting the living nature of ICH). Thanks to their multimedia, networked and shared nature, social media are expected to overcome two major problems in traditional preservation: the constraint of a top-down organisation such as that imposed by the heritage institutions, and the simplification and fossilization inherent to transcription.