ABSTRACT

World Heritage is a profound expression of civilization. It connects the past with the present and the future. But the complexities and nuances for World Heritage in the new digital paradigm are not yet fully understood. While discourse on the affordances and limitations of social media for engaging with audiences has burgeoned in the past decade, the social and economic effects of search engines in the mediatization of heritage has largely gone unexamined. Here we consider questions raised by the digital specter generated by search queries on Google in response to two significant losses: the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral, and the destruction of Palmyra, Syria. While search queries appear as neutral engagements for information retrieval, they in fact generate specters in the form of increased search volumes that result in increased social and economic value for specific keywords. In this context, World Heritage becomes mediatized and coded into keywords – valuable linguistic metonyms of our most important cultural sites. By examining readily available data retrieved from Google Ads Keyword Planner, a tool for marketing, we explore how this new digital context reveals who the audiences of heritage are, how tragedy serves to increase value, and who benefits from such loss.

摘要

世界遗产是文明的深刻体现。它将过去与现在和未来联系起来。但是，新数字范式中世界遗产的复杂性和细微差别尚未完全了解。虽然在过去十年中，关于社交媒体在与受众互动方面的可供性和局限性的讨论蓬勃发展，但搜索引擎在遗产媒体化中的社会和经济影响在很大程度上尚未得到检验。在这里，我们考虑了由 Google 上的搜索查询生成的数字幽灵提出的问题，以应对两次重大损失：巴黎圣母院大火和叙利亚帕尔米拉的毁坏。虽然搜索查询表现为信息检索的中立参与，事实上，它们以增加搜索量的形式产生了幽灵，从而导致特定关键字的社会和经济价值增加。在这种情况下，世界遗产被媒体化并编码为关键词——我们最重要的文化遗址的宝贵语言转喻。通过检查从营销工具 Google Ads Keyword Planner 中检索到的现成数据，我们探索了这种新的数字环境如何揭示遗产的受众是谁、悲剧如何增加价值以及谁从这种损失中受益。