Cultural diversity, technology and formats

There is a close link between content and “technology” as well as between “technology” and communication. Mankind through the centuries has produced an even increasing amount of content in different formats, with different techniques and technologies. Some portions of such content must survive and reach future generation as our legacy, major part of content, if kept alive, is addressed to natural obsolescence and will disappear. Formats, techniques and technologies differs very much both from culture to culture and from time to time. Oral tradition is still alive as major tool in order to preserve and communicate content in several different areas of the world . Performing arts and rituals are the backbone of many different culture as well as signs, symbols, ideograms and alphabets are common tools for writing and printing in major part of the world. Print was one of the last true revolutions in content management a true milestone. Nowadays we are facing a potential new revolution thanks to the “digital age”. Digital communication is the most recent ring in a long chain, starting from non verbal communication and gesture, over languages, signs and writing, through print, broadcasting and other media and formats. The paper will mainly focus on cultural heritage and cultural diversity and their relations with new technologies considering heritage as a path toward today culture. The extension of the concept of cultural heritage of various nature, including “intangible” heritage, the relationship between their conservation and the relative fruition issues new challenges for technology such as the combined utilisation of various resources online, the creation of supranational and multilingual dictionaries and thesauri, the creation and tuning of a new generation of communication objects and tools designed in order to better fit with different cultural models and content. The rapid obsolescence of technologies furthermore imposes the attention to data storage. However, the aspects, which most involve the online user, are both the interface and easy access to different subjects and contents. Last but not least we will consider opportunities and threats due to the implementation of the so called e-society and the increasing gap between on & off- line people