Digital Media and Public Engagement in the Practice of Digital Heritage Education A Case Study of Saung Angklung Udjo, Bandung

Abstract

Cultural heritage education no longer happens only inside museums, cultural villages, or classrooms; a growing share of it takes place through digital media, before and after instead of a physical visit. This paper is a conceptual, literature-grounded study of how digital media formats shape public engagement within the broader practice of digital heritage education, using Saung Angklung Udjo (SAU) in Bandung as an illustrative case. SAU is built around the angklung, a bamboo instrument whose live performances are themselves participatory: audiences are invited to play alongside performers rather than simply watch. The paper asks how far that participatory character of heritage education carries over into SAU's digital media presence. Methodologically, it combines a narrative review of digital-heritage-education and heritage-pedagogy literature published between 2019 and 2026 with a qualitative, non-metric reading of SAU's own Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube content: each post or video is read against three format categories static image/carousel, short-form video, and long-form video and every category is evaluated against a single criterion, namely whether it functions mainly as information, as low-effort exposure, or as an active invitation for the audience to participate, rather than by follower counts or engagement metrics. The discussion argues that public engagement with digital heritage content is not the same thing as public participation in cultural education, and that SAU's current digital media mix leans more toward the former than the latter a gap with practical implications for how heritage institutions design outreach that actually teaches rather than only reaches.