1 RE-WRITING LITERARY PAST IN THE DIGITAL AGE∗

The concept of knowledge society has by now become an inseparable part of modern human been said that the Internet has transformed knowledge into a global library and made it into a circulating hypertext. According to Umberto Eco it has created such an explosion of semiotic fireworks, where any point in space can be connected with any other similar point.1 The new Library of Babylon does not acknowledge borders between states, nations and cultures. This process is global with respect to the consumption of culture, but local regarding the creation of digital content. Thus, Marshall McLuhan’s phrase ‘the medium is the message ’ should also be considered when memory documents created with the old analogue media are re-mediated and reconstructed in the environment of new digital media.2 Below, we will examine the new practices of culture, and in the age of new media, its development can use seemingly limitless resources. It has representing the past from the viewpoint of memory institutions that hold and preserve large collections documents. Our approach is based on the thesis that the opportunities offered by the digital era are already having their effect not only on the representation of single memory objects (photos, etc.), but also on the traditional memory narratives. The previous large memory narratives include, with the function of depositing, making accessible and teaching of the past, also literary history- most commonly in a form of a book. While so far, it has been in the form of subjective narratives of one or several authors, then now the digital space allows the restructuring of these narratives into interactive information environments. We have tested the opportunities offered by such re-writings in the creation of three different web projects on Estonian literary history, starting from 1997, which have tried to bear in mind the new media generation. The concept of new media generation focuses on young people who have been growing up with digital technologies and whose needs and habits of new media consumption have been studied with sociological methods