Exomemoria y cultura de frontera: hacia una ética transcultural de la mediación

Resumen

The social construction of the digital memory, let us call it ¿exomemory¿, has traditionally been a task related to aseptical procedures and tools but, in fact, it is an activity crossed by complexity and mediation. The positivist model claims for objectivity as the frame and goal in and for which electronic and external memory workers and thinkers have to fight and strive. The theoretical concept of multiculturalism is a dangerous slogan and no sufficiently critical as to tackle the rights of diversity and singularity even within a given (but not real) ¿monocultural society¿. Exomemory mediators as librarians, archivists, documentalists or virtual curators are not capable to address their tasks from a holistic approach compatible with every culture without determining their products and services of symbolic value from an hegemonic position, should it be at local, national or global level. So, these professionals and scholars have to practice reflexivity and include other metatheoretical concepts in their ordinary actions so that users may know who is behind the analysis, ¿whose are the tracks¿. To get this purpose, the field of research called ¿knowledge organization¿ must be opened to a new paradigm in which Critical Theory and Hermeneutics go together. Several theoretical and metaphorical terms commonly used are reviewed and forced to their paradoxical limits. The essay stands for a ¿culture of the border¿ as the best imaginary place to depict and accept those contradictions denied by dogmatic and hermetic intelligence .