Culture is Digital and the shifting terrain of UK cultural policy

ABSTRACT

In this paper, a change to the remit and title of a UK government department provides a starting point for reflection on the growing role of digital technologies in the re-imagination of UK cultural policy. An early strategic report produced by the re-named DCMS was entitled Culture is Digital. Identifying the UK’s cultural and technology sectors as ‘the ultimate power couple,’ this report directs the cultural sector towards the use of technology to enhance public engagement and to improve technical skills through the development of collaborations with technology companies. Reflecting on the place of DCMS in UK cultural policymaking and drawing on analysis of this report and associated strategic documents, including responses and updates produced in the light of the Covid pandemic, the paper analyses the claims made about the elision between culture and the digital and their consequences for the status of cultural policy within the British state.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• digital
• technology
• data
• government

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We are unsure – and would welcome insight into – whether this figure would include all the investment and expenditure by government on its own digital resources or activities, such as all the activity undertaken by the Ministry of Defence and the security services in terms of cyber-warfare, cyber disruption, cyber-defence, hacking, and by the police in terms of more mundane versions of cyber-crime. Each of these will be extremely expensive activities in both revenue and capital terms.

2. A crude indication of this shift might be revealed by the fact that the Digital Britain report contained just one reference to a named platform or tech firm – Google, still understood primarily as a search engine.

3. The British food and clothing retailer Marks and Spencer.

4. We are grateful to one of our anonymous reviewers for highlighting this revealing ambiguity.

5. This is not to say that tech firms are not subject to state concern and regulation entirely. As van Dijck et. al discuss, in the EU, such regulation has included GDPR legislation on the use and management of data and on-going debates about the role of platforms as ‘publishers’ of problematic content. See Kretschmer, Furgal, and Schlesinger (2021) for a review of emerging forms of platform regulation in the UK.

6. #CultureisDigital Progress report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXcrnD4vKBo (accessed 8^th April 2022).

7. This tool has subsequently been launched, in February 2020, as the Digital Culture Compass https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/blog/guiding-your-digital-journey (accessed 8^th April 2022).

8. By way of illustration of this point we might consider the use of Apple mobility reports at government press briefings or the use of apps, distributed through Apple and Android App stores, to enable proximity between Bluetooth enabled devices to act as proxies for virally infected bodies in the management of ‘track and trace’ systems.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Wright

David Wright teaches and writes about taste, cultural policy, and cultural work in the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at the University of Warwick.

Clive Gray

Clive Gray is an Associate Professor at Warwick University. He has published widely on cultural policy and the politics of museums.