Abstract:
This article goes beyond considerations of digital media supporting identity and community to discuss the ways in which digital technology itself resembles and even parallels traditional indigenous means of producing and sharing knowledge and of experiencing time and space. Drawing from examples ranging from Aztec maps that represented time-space units simultaneously, through discussing indigenous codex and glyphs in which visual language is able to convey meaning using simultaneity rather than chronological narration, to the use of performance for durable cultural storage and transmission, this article points to the many areas of convergence between the multimodal communication that digital media increasingly enable and ancestral practices of indigenous peoples around the world.
