DECONSTRUCTING CULTURAL NARRATIVES IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Abstract

The analysis of the impact of digital archives on the preservation of cultural heritage poses a number of controversial and sometimes dilemmatic questions for scholars. One of these is based on the idea of the need to preserve cultural heritage through its digitization, which opens up prospects for both the protection of tradition and its complete loss through the erasure of meaning and values. Based on Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, in which he invests the meaning of the play of “difference” and “deferred meaning”, one can see how the digital age transforms traditional narratives about the past, blurring their fixed nature and creating new interpretations that depend on subjective factors: who manages the archives, who reads them and in what context, gives them semantic load. In this process, cultural heritage can either be preserved or undergo a series of deconstructive transformations, exposing internal contradictions and hidden dependencies that previously remained unnoticed. Any attempts to capture the single «true» content of the narrative are impossible, since the «traces» of meaning that are present in it are never fully revealed.In the traditional approach, cultural narratives or historical chronicles, myths or literary works were perceived as stable carriers of meaning, reflecting the «truth» about the past. However, digital archives, such as online museums, libraries or databases, destroy this illusion of presence, which J. Derrida spoke about in his critique of Western metaphysics. Translating texts, images, or artifacts into digital format makes them available for endless copying, editing, and reinterpretation. For example, a digitized medieval manuscript ceases to be a unique object tied to a specific time and place and becomes hypertext that can be annotated, translated into other languages, or embedded in new narratives. This blurs the boundaries between original and copy, emphasizing that meaning is not fixed once and for all, but emerges in the process of differences between versions and interpretations.