Digital cultural policy. The story of a slow and reluctant revolution

ABSTRACT

This paper describes digital cultural policy as a slow and ambivalent or reluctant revolution in a policy field. In investigates how cultural policy has gradually been affected by digitalization in the field of cultural production. I argue that digital cultural policy has developed in a sedimentary fashion, but that it also has been continuously marked by a certain ambivalence towards the digital revolution. Digital cultural policy is ultimately described as a field of hyperconvergence, where ideas, political tools, technology, and policy areas are entangled to an increasing degree. This challenges the research on and the analysis of digital cultural policy. The paper is primarily based on a close reading of Norwegian cultural policy documents. I have employed all the white papers on cultural policy from the Ministry of Culture between 1973 and 2019 – both the ones that explicitly deal with cultural policy and the ones that deal with a specific field of the arts (performing arts, visual arts, music etc.), as well as annual reports from Arts Council Norway between 1975 and 2018.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital cultural policy
• digitalization
• policy documents
• convergence

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. This paper is based (reworked and translated) on the article “Digital kulturpolitikk. Om en langsom utvikling på et politikkområd”, published in Norwegian in The Nordic Journal of Cultural Policy, no. 1/2020, 29–47. A similar version was also presented at the (online) conference International Conference on Cultural Policy Research (ICCPR) on March 25th, 2021.

2. A complete list of the documents used is included in the Appendix.

3. A stortingsmelding is a report on the status and developments within a given policy area, presented by the government to the Norwegian Parliament (The Storting). These documents are often rather comprehensive, and within some policy areas, as with cultural policy, they are usually read as the most relevant and principal documents to describe the current state of affairs within the policy area.

4. Originally in Norwegian. All titles and quotes in this paper have been translated by me.

5. Electronic data processing (abbreviated EDB in Norwegian).

6. In addition to digital cultural policies, there is, to be sure also a more general digital policy at play, both in Norway and in most other countries, dealing with e.g. e-government, the digitalization of the public sector etc. (see Ministry of Local Government and Modernization 2015–2016). This kind of policy is not a part of this analysis.

7. A note on language: In Norwegian, the distinction between digitalisation and digitization usually gets lost, as “digitalisering” is the dominant term, covering both aspects.

8. The ministerial responsibility for culture has changed several times in the last decades. In the early 1970s, culture for the responsibility of Ministry of Church Affairs and Education. In 1982, the first ministry dedicated to culture was established, the Ministry of Culture and Science. Subsequently, the ministry was renamed Ministry of Culture (1991–2002), and later Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs (2002–2010). After twelve years under the name of Ministry of Culture (2010–2022), the ministry is currently named Ministry of Culture and Equality (2022–).

9. Nynorsk, literally “new Norwegian”, is one of the official written languages of Norwegian, based on regional dialects and a pre-Danish oral language.

10. Quoted from the now defunct webpage of the project.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ole Marius Hylland

Ole Marius Hylland works as a research professor at Telemark Research Institute, with research on cultural policy and cultural history. Hylland has concentrated on the field of performing arts and museums, and he has also written about cultural policy for children and young people, and the history of cultural policy. He is a cultural historian with a Ph.D. from the University of Oslo, with a master's degree in folkloristics and a doctorate in cultural history. He currently works with various projects related to the digitalisation of the cultural sector and cultural policy, and he leads the project «Rapids and backwaters. Adapting fast and slow to a digital cultural turn», financed by Research Council Norway. Hylland has written a number of articles, reports and books on cultural policy and cultural history topics. In 2017, he published the introductory book Kulturpolitikk. Organisering, legitimering og praksis [Cultural Policy. Organization, Legitimation and Practice] together with Per Mangset, and in 2018 he published the anthology Aesthetics and Politics (Palgrave) together with Erling Bjurström.