ABSTRACT
Late-modern mediatized societies offer many arenas for interpreting and staging the past. The past is not simply given but is made meaningful to the present by means of communication and mediation. One of the most powerful institutions for mediating the past is the museum. Since their inception, museums have comprised a set of heterogeneous and dynamic institutions involved in the framing of the relationship between objects, media, and people.1 In this context, digital media and the internet can be perceived as forces for renewal.2 In common with popular culture of history in general, hopes are high that a disintegration of the hierarchies of knowledge presumed to have restricted public engagement with the past will occur.3 However, Ross Parry points out that there are two accounts, which are not mutually exclusive, of how museums have related to digital media. More and more museums embrace them, but among other things, it is the presumed capacity of new media to overthrow institutional stability and controlled authorship that has slowed down their expansion within the world of museums.4
