Embracing Digital Trends & Participatory Culture
Enabling cultural access, participation and production
According to the early results that emerged from the first set of data analysis on CCS case studies, we are going to put together first suggestions for policy recommendation guidelines. The goal of these analyses is to identify insightful elements that can help to describe the role of the digital in enabling forms of cultural access, participation and production, through the relation between the most important Cultural Heritage Institutions' Facebook and Instagram pages and their users (with a specific focus on the pandemic impact on the digital activity). This information can be useful to highlight the digital behavioral trends of CHI (the tools, the streams and their gaps and potentials), their real capacity of involving and communicating with their users.
As we can see from the following early single-case and comparative analysis:
- The pandemic led to putting a lot of extra effort on digital interaction between Libraries and Archives and their users, compared to the Museums institutions which maintain quite the same level of intensity of digital activity.
- Relationship between follower growth and interaction rate: if the number of followers grows and the interaction rate remains stable, it means that the new followers interact in forms that do not differ substantially from those of the old ones, and therefore engagement campaigns targeting new audiences have worked; in the opposite case, if the number of followers grows and the interaction rate drops, it is plausible to say that the new followers are inactive and only the hard core of already registered and active users continues to really interact. In our cases, even if the is a constant follower growth, the interaction rate decreases: this may imply a lack of interest from users or a large share of inactive/non-engaged public, which can be related not only to the type of content produced but also to the production practices themselves, that need to become more horizontal and to exploit in a more inclusive and substantial way the potential of the digital platforms.
- CCS during the pandemic started using different tools for keeping in contact with their users such as videos and IGtv.
- Archives:
- Higher interaction with Facebook public: the audience is probably older compared to other sectors’ digital users;
- Peaks of interactions corresponding to the two lockdown periods;
- Effort in producing content in areas where archives were probably aware of existing significant gaps (second lockdown, IG, IGTV).
- Libraries:
- Facebook’s users were already engaged and active, which may mean that libraries, which represent a point of reference for their local communities, maintain a strong relationship with their community also digitally.
We have so far observed, in museums and libraries, a drop in engagement associated with the COVID-19 pandemics. The drop in engagement was in particular remarkable for Instagram, whereas on Facebook the effect was less striking. Both cases are focussed on GLAM institutions that are i) traditionally meant to be physically visited ii) offer cultural content that is meant to be timeless. We could possibly expect that other case studies considering cultural industries less linked to the physical experience and offering more ephemeral experiences would be different. Indeed, Instagram is a kind of social network where one shares "special moments" that are perhaps harder to create in the context of the GLAM institutions than in other industries like, for example, fashion, where content consumption is not traditionally limited by physical access and, most importantly, where the ephemeral nature of the content conjures up in rendering a particular moment "special".
