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As Wolfgang Ernst explains, in the interview that opens Part I, our cultural objects are increasingly “digitally born” and the dominance of time-based, pervasive digital media means that material experience is neglected or underplayed. In contemporary culture, the emphasis on liveness and high-speed transmission poses a challenge to the traditional collection-based museum (Chapter 1). Andrew Hoskins and Amy Holdsworth use the term “post-scarcity culture” to describe the massive and simultaneous availability of images, footage, text, and data. This new media environment appears to be transforming cultural memory and crushing historical distance by making the past available on demand, producing a “smooth and smothering immediacy” (Chapter 2). This is something museums are forced to engage with because it is reconfiguring their role. How museums engage with this media environment, whether they embrace it, attempt to reconfigure or shape it, or stolidly continue to pursue their own goals regardless, are politicized issues.

In the past, museums have been criticized for their irrelevance to the present. In my own chapter, I give the example of a 1920s dispute in which museum director Alexander Dornor advocated facsimiles as a means of bringing museums into “the stream of contemporary life” (Dorner, cited in Chapter 25). The way in which museums construct the past has also come under critical scrutiny: the myth of history as progress is reinforced and naturalized by linear evolutionary arrangements that marshal objects into an “encyclopedic overview” (Habsburg-Lothringen, Chapter 15). The chronological display that invites the visitor to walk through time naturalizes the timeline, creating the sense that this is actually how history unravels (Lubar 2013). Meanwhile, the contemporary art world, now dominated by large private contemporary art galleries, has been characterized as locked in a kind of “presentism” in which fashion and the market rule (Bishop 2013, 12–23). Art historian Claire Bishop suggests that “the permanent collection can be a museum’s greatest weapon in breaking the stasis of presentism,” to create new forms of historical awareness, new ways of mobilizing the past in the present, in displays that go far beyond the chronological (Bishop 2013, 24, 61–62).

In the present volume, several contributors see museums as able to provide alternatives to the historical flattening produced by digital networked media. New approaches in display design, open storage, and collection management can provide counterstrategies to a dominant understanding of history (Ernst, Chapter 1). Some museums seem to fully embrace the new digital immediacy, opening themselves up to the onslaught of images in a new, networked culture. Others try to reveal the discontinuities and gaps in both traditional narratives of smooth progress and the contemporary sense of complete and simultaneous availability of history (Hoskins and Holdsworth, Chapter 2). This is not so far removed from the aims of 1980s museum designers and curators such as Gottfried Korff. Bettina Habsburg-Lothringen, head of the Museumsakademie Joanneum in Graz, writes in Chapter 15 of the ways Korff wanted to challenge the sense of an accessible, unmediated historical past that folk museum reconstructions and period rooms seemed to promote.

Arguably, these changes in the cultural relationship to the past began as early as the mid-nineteenth century when photographic, telegraphic, and phonographic media made it possible to see and hear the faces and voices of the dead. As writers such as John Durham Peters have shown, this was especially poignant in wartime and in an era of high child mortality (Peters 1999). In 1936 Walter Benjamin wrote about an increasing inability in the modern period to make experiences – the things that happen to us – into experience, in the sense of a deeply embedded and practical understanding. He connected this to media via the example of the newspaper, with its fragmented and disconnected articles, but also more widely to modernity, an era of rapid and accelerating social and technological change in which an onslaught of stimuli combines with the absence of any stable, unchanging position from which to view the world (Benjamin [1936] 2002, 146). Swiss curator Beat Hächler, in Chapter 16, considers this decay of experience as offering a new remit to museums to transform themselves into spaces that enable people to experience and reflect on their collective present.

One way in which stable and coherent historical accounts have traditionally been ensured is via a strict separation between individual memory (understood as unreliable, narrowly specific, and subjective) and official history (underpinned by documentary evidence and the authority of academic expertise and research). In Chapter 4, Steffi de Jong argues that the video testimonies now commonly used in historical museums overturn this old hierarchy of historical transmission and memory. Personal, individual memory is now an acceptable part of the historical narrative and a museum object. Indeed, the medium of video has been a key tool in prioritizing individual memory and personal experience. In the 1980s video enabled home movies to move out of the living room and innovative television makers used the video camcorder to make first-person experiences a part of broadcast television through genres such as “video diaries” (Rose 1994–95; Dovey [1995] 2004). De Jong sees the rise of video testimonies as symptomatic of the “era of the witness” (Wieviorka 2006). In this context, remembering is not simply a matter of reporting but of bearing witness, giving testimony. The media coverage of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the first televised trials, boosted the visibility of the witness to history. Television enabled testimony to be made public; video enabled it to be gathered and stored en masse.