Embracing Digital Trends & Participatory Culture

The main and most revolutionary effect that the digital had on culture has been the immediate and (apparently) swift breaking down of the barrier between creators and the public. Thanks to digital technologies, today anyone is able to produce content, and therefore production no longer takes place within a hierarchical, vertical, and elitist logic: social media have opened up the possibility of being creators / co-authors of cultural content with an enormous potential of exposure to the world, whose actual outcome obviously depends on the interplay of many different factors. Since the cultural sphere refers to the theme of expression, it becomes relatively easier (as compared to science, where the role of technical expertise is necessarily more imposing) for citizens to participate in a meaningful way. In this sense, culture can become a real laboratory of human development and sociality through creativity. Precisely because of its inclusive nature, it is necessary to enable people to participate in a proactive, co-creative way, to give rise to shared and meaningful sense-making processes. With an awareness of this new reality, CHIs must take responsibility to concretely and actively favour such an integration, providing fertile ground for digital participatory interaction with users in terms of skills, tools, and accessibility of knowledge resources.

Social strategies to get out of the pandemic have strongly involved the use of digital platforms for the dissemination and production of culture in the CH sector. But what about digital users? From the first analyses carried out by the inDICEs project on some cultural and creative industries (CCIs), we find a gap between the effort to produce digital cultural content put forward by the CHIs and a struggling active interaction with (and affiliation of) users.

One of the most neglected variables in the existing socio-economic policy context is precisely the rate of cultural participation of citizens. There is generally little awareness of how a low rate of cultural participation reflects forms of cognitive poverty and deprivation, which often strongly correlate with other socio-economic deficiencies. The consequence, especially in a knowledge society such as the one we inhabit, is the impossibility of achieving real forms of social inclusion, and failing to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities offered by digital platforms and resources for the sake of human development, quality of life, and empowerment.

The real challenge for CHIs is to work in a context of a strong intersectoral and intra-sectoral networking, constantly fed by open debate, with a firm eye to the local and European socio-economic challenges. The effort is already evident in the policy vision for the coming years by the European Commission which, with the new 2030 Agenda, makes cultural production and participation explicitly connected to social cohesion goals. In particular, programs such as Horizon Europe, focused upon research and social impact, and the related Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KIC) call on cultural and creative industries are clear cases in point. Culture can provide fresh approaches and insights to tackle social challenges, and the digital, in this regard, may be an extraordinary amplifier, which allows participation while overcoming constraints of physical presence and simultaneous access. But it is necessary to improve the depth and quality of the type of participation processes that are promoted by the digital programs of cultural institutions, because mere audience engagement is not enough to ensure lasting, transformational social impact and to contribute to the full progress of civil society in terms of active citizenship, seizing a fundamental generational opportunity to pursue a new, different development scenario.

In order to map the current situation about digital cultural participation of CHIs users, the inDICEs project, gathered a large amount of data from online sources, with special attention to social networks. This was complemented with a list of case-studies and correspondingly appropriate indicators for each cultural and creative sector. This enables the project to carry out e.g. trend analysis for various CCS through web posts, analysis of the relation between CHIs and their social network users, impact analysis of specific social campaigns, impact analysis of CCS with respect to specific socio-cultural trends, network analysis and mapping of cultural digital platform ecosystems as well as psychosocial analysis of web content in various CCS sectors. The analysis data are then used to define policy recommendations on agenda setting and the role of the digital in enabling forms of cultural access, participation and production, highlighting the potential of the digital dimension of CHI as a channel of access to culture. It forms the basis of the following recommendations.