Utopia and Digital Museum Policy in the Web 2.0. Cristiano Agostino Abstract This article begins to address, through a theoretical review and an analysis of select primary sources, the complex interplay between museum digital policies for the Web; and the utopian rhetoric which underpins what is known as “Web 2.0.” In particular, the article looks at the rhetorics of audience participation, inclusion and democratisation that museums routinely employ to justify the permanence of their cultural mandate in the digital realm: by looking at select “media strategy” documents, we can get a sense of the deep investment in the supposedly “inclusive” rhetorics of Web 2.0 that most museums seem to buy into, as they move their agency into the digital. Keywords Museum, Web 2.0, Utopia, Digital strategy. Utopia and Digital Museum Policy in the Web 2.0. In this article I aim to address some select facets of the current state of museums' web policies and the philosophies that guide them, as seen through the lens of one of the overarching paradigms of postmodern culture – the Western tradition of utopia. As I will suggest through the tools of literature review, theoretical discussion of current trends, and inspection of primary sources, the ongoing construction of paradigms for the development of museal web presences (be them web sites proper; outreach projects that involve the web in some capacity; or distribution of museal content by way of virtual third parties) owes a great debt to an utopia-fuelled ideal of social amelioration by creation of technology-supported 'alternative realities'. In this endeavour, institutions are buttressed by evolving controversial views on the relationship between museum and society, as well as a wealth of widespread, yet somewhat dubious theory systems, among which the most influential are: Web 2.0; social media; and folksonomies. What Utopia is in Contemporary Culture As the meaning of the term 'utopia' in our context is rather specific and the word is, more generally, widely deployed in academia in sometimes less than clear contexts, in order to define a seemingly infinite series of issues, attitudes and paradigms, it is necessary to offer a brief excursus on utopia as a historical strand of thought, from which then meanings relevant