In the wake of the Cold War obsolete military infrastructure was transformed into visitor attractions by traditional heritage stakeholders or was left as ruins for the war history buffs to reveal. However, the heritagization of the Cold War remains during the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium coincided with the advent of the digital society. This led to an inclusion of new actors and arenas on the terrain of heritage production. In this paper we focus on how the logics of the digital age have affected the Cold War heritage in Sweden, where it is both popular and contested, through an investigation of the social media platform Youtube and the video content pertaining to the Swedish Cold War. We suggest, like previous research has indicated (Gillespie 2015; van Dijck 2013; Pietrobruno 2013; Reider et al 2018; Bishop 2018), that social media should be understood in relation to opaque economic (e.g. monopolies) and technological (algorithms) frames that intervene in the supposedly democratic universe of social media.

In addition, given notions that todays’ situation is unique, we problematize views that emphasize the difference between heritagization online today and heritagization in pre-digital contexts: Yesterdays’ heritagization in many ways looked different from todays’ online-age, but was it not also influenced by phenomena that we usually think did not exist in the past, for example so-called filter bubbles? And, despite ongoing de-politization in contemporary neoliberal discourses, is not the post-Cold War era still marked by ideology?