ABSTRACT
Participatory culture and the representations that arise from it evidence the socio-visual value of the Sydney Opera House. These cultural phenomena are also revealing of the inadequacies of the existing UNESCO suite of heritage instruments to account for the way that people make iconic places significant. The first part of this chapter explores how the World Heritage Convention attempts to account for the value of places in terms of memory and identity. The second part of the chapter explores how UNESCO's other heritage instruments, namely the Digital Heritage Charter and the Intangible Heritage Convention, are more able to account for socio-visual value as manifest online in participatory culture. The chapter then explores how representations and participatory culture manifest socio-visual value, but only for the contingent communities that occur in relation to world-famous iconic sites.
