How culture became digital: editor’s introduction

In July 2017, the UK’s Department of Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) had the word ‘digital’ added to its title. This addition reflected a formal revision of the department’s remit and the addition of responsibility for the UK’s digital infrastructure to its existing concerns. The re-named department’s first strategic report, published in 2018, was Culture is Digital, a document that celebrated and sought to further cement relations between the traditional concerns of culture ministries (i.e. with the funding and regulation of access to arts, heritage, and media provision within a territory) and an emerging and increasingly established ‘digital economy’ facilitated by the widespread availability and use of information and communication technologies and devices. In presenting this special issue,¹ we identify this moment in the development of the UK’s policymaking as exemplifying an intensification of the relationship between the concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘digital’ which has been taking place around the world. This shift merits scholarly attention within cultural policy studies that considers not just what these technologies may or may not do for the sector and its institutions but to begin to take seriously the cultural values that underpin them.

It is a moment with echoes of the elision between culture and ‘the creative economy’ which gained prominence at the end of the 20^th century, and shares much with similar policy interventions across the EU, Korea, China, North America, and Australia, which appeared to establish the strategic significance of cultural policy for states. Two decades into the 21^st century, digital technologies shape culture in its symbolic mode in relation to the traditional concerns of cultural policy, including how culture is accessed, consumed, and valued. Researchers have argued for the value of such technologies in solving the specific challenges of the management of cultural organisations themselves (e.g. Bakshi and Throsby 2012) as well as reflecting how their rise has muddied distinctions between cultural and media policy (e.g. Valtysson 2020; Napoli 2008). As Roberge, Nantel, and Rousseau (2017) describe, these emphases reflect the role of digital technologies in disintermediating the ‘value chain’ in cultural production and consumption, with digital devices, platforms and infrastructures inserting themselves into and becoming dominant in directing these processes. Such insertions have sometimes been welcomed as enabling diffuse and potentially inclusive modes of artistic and creative production and facilitating new forms of cultural participation. This shift, increasingly established by the time of the 2018 report, was given impetus by the Covid 19 pandemic, in which many institutions – performance venues, museums, galleries – and artists were forced to somehow ‘go digital’ to survive (although, in the UK, evidence of the success of this shift in terms of actually increasing participation, before (Mihelj, Leguina, and Downey 2019) or after the pandemic is mixed (Feder et al. 2022)).

The everyday forms of creativity enabled and exemplified by near-universal, at least in the Global North and East Asia, access to smart-phones with the means to create and manipulate image and sound have offered, for some scholars associated with participatory cultures, the prospect of a broadening of the cultural conversation and a challenge to established cultural hierarchies and their mavens (in this issue Gu describes this in relation to the DIY cultures imagined by scholars such as Gauntlett (2011), Hylland refers to the notion of ‘convergence’ as it emerges from the work of Henry Jenkins (2006) and Siciliano considers the continuities and changes to narratives of participation exemplified by YouTube). In any case, these developments mean that, ‘the traditional ways of intervening in the cultural realm, of managing and massaging it, are required to react, adapt, and change; among other things, the subtle equilibrium between promoting access for the public and supporting creators, which has been the state’s prerogative for so long, is being forced to re-invent itself’. (Roberge, Nantel, and Rousseau 2017, 302). Digital technologies have appeared to change several elements of the ‘problem’ that cultural policy is expected to solve.

At the same time, the impacts of the rise of these technologies have been felt well beyond the cultural sector itself. While their acolytes and enthusiasts remain keen to articulate their emergence as permanently new, and constantly innovative, two decades into this century, they are central to how social and economic life is organised, at least in the Global North and East Asia. Arguably they have histories longer even than that reaching back to the development of computing technology in the mid-twentieth century and its application to the problems of modern states (Mirowski 2002). Digital technologies inform and help administer the strategic priorities of governments, have intensified, and quickened the flows of capital, facilitated new forms of commercial life through ‘cryptocurrencies’, new forms of social relations and new networked forms of political engagement and activism. They have also, more recently, been held responsible for the emergence of significant policy challenges, often along these same lines. The self-styled ‘disruptive’ models of tech companies are now strongly associated with undermining public trust in democracies and with contributing to and speeding up the emergence of precarious modes of work and deepening crises in mental health. As data-gathering devices and associated algorithmic mechanisms for sorting and analysing the data they gather play greater roles in the management and conduct of everyday life, they are implicated in the emergence of a more surveillant and less accountable mode of capitalism (Zuboff 2019; Pasquale 2015) as well as shoring up and intensifying existing patterns of inequality, including racial inequality (Eubanks 2019). The ‘move fast and break things’ business models of the big-tech firms have created direct conflict between them and civic values. This includes over the management and control of private data (as in the specific General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) intervention of the EU in controlling how data can be used, discussed by Valtysson in this issue) or, as Joque (2022) points out, in the creation of legal grey zones where the comparatively slow processes of state or democratic oversight mean companies are able to design technological routes to subvert regulation in the pursuit of competitive advantage. Examples that Joque describes include such technologically mediated interventions as the Volkswagen engine emission scandal in which software was designed and deployed to detect whether a car was being inspected for harmful emissions and temporarily adjust how its engine performed, or Uber’s strategy of using mapping technologies to predict the likelihood that passengers were potential transport inspectors and ‘hiding’ their vehicles from them. These practices and the platforms that facilitate them are supported by vast, apparently infinite, amounts of strategic investment capital which has been willing to wait years, even decades, for the opportunity to establish dependency and oligopolistic market power.

While such changes are often framed as a reflection of demand-driven changes in consumer habits and choices, they also reflect significant, long-term investment in the design of technologies and the life-worlds they create. People living with digital technologies are encouraged, or forced, to adapt their ways of life to fit these designs as they become more universal. As Greenfield (2017) describes, our ability to live – at least in the networked cities of the Global North and East Asia – depends on a complex ecosystem including massive global organisations, international regulatory regimes, the extraction and trade of the rare earth minerals that our devices are made from, and the start-ups that build apps. Thus,

our ability to perform the everyday competently is now contingent on the widest range of obscure factors – things we’d simply never needed to worry about before, from the properties of the electromagnetic spectrum and our moment-to-moment ability to connect to the network to the stability of the software we’re using and the current state of corporate alignments. (Greenfield 2017, 13)

In his excoriating critique of the relations between digital technologies and the environmental crisis, Jonathan Crary describes the imposition of what he terms ‘the internet complex’ as reflecting more than either consumer choice or system engineering but ‘as an essential part of the massive re-organisation of capital flows and the re-making of individuals into “entrepreneurs of their human capital”’. (Crary 2022, 9) He goes so far as to suggest that the resources and the modes of organisation and behaviour required to sustain the digital age are increasingly ‘inimical to a liveable and just world’. (Crary 2022, 2) While perceived, certainly among the acolytes and enthusiasts for technology, as indicative of inevitable routes to progress, the rise and imposition of this ‘internet complex’ has also been coterminous with steepening global inequality and ongoing environmental degradation.

In the light of these kinds of critical perspectives, the time is perhaps ripe for cultural policy scholarship to move beyond a ‘solutionist’ approach to digital technologies and to take broader stock of the implications for cultural production, consumption, policy and regulation of an increased dependency on digital technologies, platforms and devices. It is arguably well placed to do this for at least two reasons. First because the objects of its concern – art, literature, performance – like the fields of science and technology, have long been, and continue to provide, a means to reflect on the present and shape the future. In this issue, Mark Banks reviews Beck and Bishop’s (2020) account of the role of avant-garde artists, working collaboratively with and in the ‘labs’ of MIT or the RAND corporation, in developing the utopian technological imagination of the mid-twentieth century US as an example. Second, because the relations between the concepts ‘digital’ and ‘culture’ echo some well-established debates within the field. These might include between culture as a special discrete set of things and culture as everyday life, in a context in which everyday life is mediated by technologies; or between subsidised culture being ‘protected’ and preserved from the market and commercial popular cultures, when the market for commercial culture has been turbocharged by new platforms of production and distribution (Poell, Niebord, and Duffy 2022 – reviewed in this issue by Karen Gregory), or between ‘instrumental’ and ‘intrinsic’ approaches to culture and the arts, in a context in which both the claims made in evaluating the social or economic impact of the arts and the evidence gathered to support them can be seen through the lens of ‘big data’ (Oman 2021). Among these debates, I will suggest a further two which are made particularly acute, and which also feature in the articles in this issue.

First, at the theoretical level, the distinction, which Valtysson’s article in this issue outlines, between a Habermasian perspective on the role of cultural policy in the making and maintenance of the public sphere and a perspective drawing on Foucault, via Bennett (1995, 1998), that culture is itself part of a strategy of government, implicated in the making and management of citizens. The former concern might connect most explicitly with issues of media policy as they relate to traditional institutions like newspapers or public broadcasters for whom the rise of digital technologies has created profound challenges to business models and rationales. The early optimism of the emergence of ‘citizen journalists’ that by-passed the established media conglomerates or wealthy proprietors has been dissipated and replaced by anxiety over the role of social media in troubling distinctions between publishers and platforms and, through business models based on web-traffic and data harvesting, in monetising divisive debate. Similarly in the realm of broadcasting, the emergence of platforms like Netflix, with their convenience, range and quality of content, afforded by vast amounts of long-term strategic investment, poses challenges to the rationale for public service broadcasters as the arbiters of the cultural and political conversation within nations. These are problems for states to solve, and the articles here gathered identify some different approaches identified in Norway (Hylland), Denmark and the EU (Valtysson) and the UK (Wright and Gray). Such developments also create, as Rindzeviciute’s contribution to the issue describes, borrowing from Rittel and Webber (1973) ‘wicked problems’ for cultural policy, both for these kinds of media institutions but also for other forms of cultural producers – within the arts, theatre, literature, or the heritage sectors. Notwithstanding whether they might be able to sustain the modes of reflection and critique that underpin a healthy and inclusive public sphere, these producers, institutions, and organisations need to adjust to and survive in a new media ecology driven by clicks, likes, retweets and shares and informed by the accumulation and exploitation of audience data. Important tensions emerge from this ecology. The dispersal of the means of cultural production that was claimed to emerge through digital technologies, as Gu critiques in her article on Chinese making cultures, has been interpreted as an extension of the individualising promise of European modernity itself. Whether or not these promises have been fulfilled, recent discussion of the democratising tendencies of digital technologies are less optimistic, as modes of political ‘populism’ that are facilitated by these same technologies are charged with threats to civic bonds and institutions. The spectre of a technologically empowered ‘mob’, with the contemporary synonyms associated with that imaginary (i.e. of people who are easily duped by fake news or seduced by conspiracy theories that circulate precisely because they are not on the ‘mainstream’ media) also re-emerges as a policy challenge.

This tension reignites historical debates – central to the intellectual formation of the problem of culture for the state as articulated by Matthew Arnold in the 19^th century ([1869] 1993) – in which the role of culture is precisely to bring a population to a level of awareness through which they can exercise their emergent freedoms in constructive and productive ways – and, in that context, in ways which sustained a social order. This points more directly towards the latter conceptual concern of cultural policy studies with the educative forming of citizens. While contemporary cultural policy-makers might be reluctant to admit to the paternalistic implications of claiming a role in the ‘forming’ of contemporary citizens, the ubiquity of data generating and collecting devices produces a particular version of the person, who is known and therefore manageable through their data. This might indeed produce further anxieties about ‘surveillance’ with Foucauldian overtones in which the policeman in our heads becomes the smartphone in our pockets, but just as interesting is the extent to which these devices depend on and create a vision of a person whose cultural life – what they consume, what they like, eat, listen to, read and how they exercise or otherwise spend their time – can be measured and presented back to them as insight into their ‘real selves’ to inform how they might modify their behaviour (Lupton 2016) and, at the same time, made visible to commercial and state organisations.

There is an interesting analogy to be made with these forms of paternalism, underpinned by data and data-generating devices which shape behaviours, and that which emerges from Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Discussing the role of culture in the context of the expanding democracy of 19^th century Britain, in which an assumed dominant utilitarian liberal consensus was emerging in questions of economy and government, Arnold was sceptical that untrammelled individual freedom was a route to the common good, suggesting instead a role for culture in shaping individual behaviours. Rather than a situation in which Englishmen (sic) were free to do and say what they liked, for Arnold,

culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person may like the rule by which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that. (Arnold [1869] 1993, 64)

In a context of increasingly technologically mediated social and cultural life, the forms of persuasion and guidance involved in the ‘becoming’ of the contemporary person are perhaps as much in the design of apps and platforms as they are in ‘culture’ as Arnold imagined it. Greenfield implies as much when he reflects that ‘when pursuits as varied as taking a photograph, listening to music and seeking a romantic partner all start with launching an app on the same device, and all of them draw on the same, relatively limited repertoire of habits and mindsets, a certain similarity inevitably comes to colour each of them’. (Greenfield 2017, 18) Bandinelli’s article in this issue, for example, draws attention to the technical similarities between the algorithmic ‘matching’ of contemporary consumers to products within platforms and the matching of romantic or sexual partners achieved through dating apps.

Such developments typify a second tension within cultural policy scholarship, primarily played out in the pages of this journal, that is potentially heightened in the digital context, between explicit and implicit cultural policy.² The former might concern the direct state or regulatory interventions into the institutions and processes concerned with cultural production, and several contributions to this issue allude to these forms of intervention. Hylland describes some examples in the Norwegian context, including those that address anxiety on behalf of the state about the relations between digital media and ‘traditional’ modes of cultural distribution in the fields of literature or music, and seek to somehow preserve these forms and the media through which they are produced and circulated from an imminent ‘threat’ from digitisation. The policy context of Wesner’s article about the development of a participatory database supporting craft production in the UK includes directives to encourage a shift in the mindset of makers as more than the guardians of technique but into proto- ‘entrepreneurs’ who can capitalise on and exploit their skills in a creative economy. Wright and Gray’s article describes how, in the UK, direct collaboration between significant national organisations like the Royal Shakespeare Company, the British Museum, the British Library – and major technology platforms – Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon – is imagined, at least by a cohort of national policymakers in 2018 – as the future of the sector itself, partly through the provision of logistical and administrative efficiencies but also through the opening up of new art forms and new modes of production and engagement, typified by the National Theatre’s digitisation of performances as a boon to questions of ‘accessibility’.

By contrast, implicit cultural policy, as Ahearne describes it, brings attention to those institutions and agencies beyond the proscribed cultural sector that might be engaged in the project of influencing the behaviour of national populations. Presciently, in 2009, he contends that while the kinds of explicit relations between tech and the cultural sector, as manifest in such things as the digitising of museum collections, are significant it is ‘the hidden software codes, recording of web usage and the exploitation of the knowledge thereby acquired within large economies of scale’ (Ahearne 2009, 145) that will have most impact on cultural practices in the medium term.

In her account of the establishment of ‘surveillance capitalism’ through the rise of the big technology platforms, Zuboff goes to some length in explaining the genealogy of the assumptions about people and their capacities that underpin the architecture of an economy dominated by big tech. She uses the example of the anxieties expressed by the US Senate Sub-Committee on Constitutional Rights in the early 1970s about the implications of the nascent, behavioural modification programmes practiced in the US military in the immediate post-1945 period, designed or inspired by the psychologist B.F. Skinner. The beliefs underpinning this mode of thought – that the empirical observation of what people actually did, rather than what they said they thought or believed, should form the basis of strategies of government through which preferred forms of conduct could be incentivised and trained – was imagined by the committee to undermine fundamental principles of democracies premised on the assumption of autonomy and freedom of rational citizens. The notion of a freedom based around a restricted number of preferred courses of action was imagined to be an anathema. Fast forward a few decades, though, and it is less controversial. As Davies (2012) reflects, behavioural data has become useful to the contemporary state for more than just efficiencies in-service delivery. The 2008 financial crisis, he argues, inspired an adjustment to the Hayekian notion underpinning neoliberal government, that the individual pursuit of self-interest would produce optimal outcomes for society as a whole. This had been challenged both by the reckless behaviours of derivative traders crashing the economy, but also by evidence of the pathologies of excessive forms of consumption on physical and mental health with their concomitant costs for the state. Moreover, findings from such data-rich fields of knowledge as neuroscience, evolutionary biology and behavioural economics appeared to falsify the idea of the rational individual actor entirely. As Gane (2021) describes, this latter field is typified by the infamous ‘Nudge Unit’, latterly the Behavioural Insights Team, initially set up in UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s Cabinet Office in 2010 following the influential success of Thaler and Sunstein's book Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). This perspective sought to dissuade governments from an unshakeable belief in homo economicus and the markets in which they operate to solve policy problems. Instead, behavioural economists acknowledged that, far from always being able to identify and act in their own interests, people make mistakes and need subtle guidance to incentivise the forms of behaviour which are good for them and, by extension, good for society. When aided by the accumulation and deployment of vast amounts of data about practices, habits, tastes and values and the training of modes of action within the parameters of apps or platforms, these forms of knowledge underpin an emerging ‘libertarian paternalism’ (Gane 2021) with the ambition to ensure individual behaviours are framed by a ‘choice architecture’ discouraging choices that are likely to be damaging to social life or costly to the state.

A similar policy intervention has emerged in China, based around the ongoing design of a ‘social-credit system’ (SCS). Here, the possibilities of data generating and collecting devices are aligned with the principles of audit culture and scientific management, common across the governments of complex societies. When combined with the preponderance of ratings and rankings now familiar within apps concerned with service interactions and the experience and management of everyday life, including dating and ride-hailing apps (Ding and Zhong 2021) the SCS works by generating scores for businesses and, crucially, individuals in relation to their relative ‘trustworthiness’. The articulated aspiration here is to extend beyond the well-established notion of a ‘credit score’ as a relative measure of the risk of financial investment. As Zhang describes, this initiative reflects long established traditions in Chinese governance related to moral education and is based on what they term ‘disciplinary-pastoral’ power, combining the possibility of punishment for low scores (principally through denial of access to public services) with encouragement towards ‘civilised behaviour’. In other words, the ambition of the initiative is, ‘to bind together the homo economicus – citizens as legal subjects and market actors – and the homo moralis – citizens as rule-abiding and virtuous members of society.” (Zhang 2020, 578)

The return of this patrician ‘behaviourism’ and its application, via the availability of big data, to the practices of modern government might be where implicit cultural policy is now most clearly manifest. Historians such as Koopman (2019) and Bouk (2015) indicate that processes of capturing and measuring personal information are contemporary manifestations of older projects to produce the ‘statistical’ or ‘informational’ person who, in complex societies, is known and visible to the state through the forms of information attached to them in administrative systems – our birth, marriage and death certificates, our health records, our national insurance numbers, our passports, our bank accounts, post-codes, etc. These legal, administrative, and bureaucratic underpinnings of individual identity reflect, for Koopman, a ‘reformatting’ of the person in such a way as to make us readable by the modern state – and has long been in the making. As he suggests, ‘we today are not only brave new citizens confronting a new-born world of digitized data – we are also legacies of a power of information that has been constructing our subjectivity for almost a century now’ (Koopman 2019, 155). Along the way this process was given considerable boost by the development of the sorting and logistical power of the early computing systems in the immediate post-1945 period and, as Rindzeviciute notes in her contribution, ‘cybernetic’ notions of state administration, based on and emerging from strategic state investment in technologies that could process population-level amounts of data in both the US and USSR in the 1950s. Contemporary stories about big data and the more apparently networked and diffuse forms of device which shape the ‘imaginary’ of digital culture have their roots in these kinds of machines with their underpinning logics to, as David Golumbia (2009) notes, calculate, categorise and striate. Regardless of the relative value of these forms of knowledge for actually shaping human behaviour, tech companies have built such ‘choice architectures’ into the business models of their platforms and policymakers, in some countries, appear to be persuaded of their usefulness, in a similar way, perhaps, to which policymakers of the 19^th century thought culture useful to shaping the behaviour of the population.

The, perhaps, happy lesson of the history of cultural policy, though, is also that such ‘civilising ambitions’ are rarely fulfilled and that successes in that direction can be partial, or even resisted – in much the same way as the utopian/dystopian promises of technological change can come unstuck as they meet the realities and contingencies of governments, institutions, and people. The articles gathered here provide good evidence for this too. At the level of national policymaking, while Wright and Gray’s article articulates a British context in which culture is used as a ‘stalking horse’ through which the state is framed as open for re-formatting by collaboration with big tech, Hylland’s account of the development of digital cultural policy in Norway suggests a more cautious approach in which the risks and opportunities of the rise of global technologies for a Norwegian way of life are weighed and evaluated over time. Valtysson similarly outlines, in the EU and Danish context, both the implications and risks of a more ‘platformised’ mode of cultural production for cultural policy and the concrete ways in which states, or supra-state organisations like the EU can either seek to regulate the power of platforms (in the case of the GDPR) or, in the case of the Danish Ministry of Culture’s 2022 Media Agreement, can seek to direct platforms to augment, rather than undermine a public sphere. Other articles highlight the ambiguities and ambivalences that emerge from the application of technologies to the problem of culture. Gu’s account of maker cultures indicates how the counter-cultural dreams of the early open software movements survive in the hacking and re-formatting of the products of global platforms – but also how these very practices have, in the Chinese context, been placed in dialogue and negotiation with national and regional strategic goals. Cossu’s amateur investors engage in the significant risk of cryptocurrency as a route out of the failed promise of early 21^st century capitalism to provide a stable future, while the artists he researches use these same technologies to maintain the promise of an autonomous creative life. Siciliano’s account of the gatekeeping practices in the US indie music distribution industry and in YouTube’s content production processes troubles simplistic claims about the novel power of platforms, suggesting important continuities in the requirements of cultural forms, and their producers, to ‘fit’ into infrastructures and conform to formats to be visible. Rindzeviciute details the relationship between the algorithmic sociality of social media and its role in stoking and cementing the divisions, or the perception of divisions, within societies, to the extent that cultural institutions and policymakers are moved to act in its shadow. The young participants in Bandinelli’s study, though, also show a keen awareness of how they are known and represented algorithmically and how to ‘change the parameters’ of the apps through which they are seen, offering a powerful analogy of the types of agency that can emerge through taking ownership of how a technology is used and made meaningful in everyday life. Wesner’s account of weavers working out the pros and cons of subjecting their craft to the logic of technologies provides two final important perspectives. First, drawing from the productive engagement with the work of Siegert (2013) is the reminder that culture significantly pre-dates and contains the digital, with the consequence that technologies reflect and contain the values of the cultures from which they are produced. And second, the assertion that policy about the relationships between culture and the digital need to be negotiated in practice.

The processes through which culture has ‘become’ digital in the contemporary context have been a culmination of the various negotiations of the past. The papers gathered here provide some insight into the results of those negotiations, in a range of national settings (across Europe, the US and China) and through a variety of methods (document analysis, ethnography and qualitative interviews) by those individuals and organisations subject to, empowered or constrained by these technologies. These approaches can provide a useful template for future researchers in the field of cultural policy concerned with thinking beyond the pragmatic benefits or risks that technology might be identified as bringing to the problem of culture and reflect on how that problem is changed by its subjection to the logics of digital technologies, platforms, and devices. Together they can contribute to an important conversation about the relations between ‘culture’ and ‘the digital’ that goes beyond whether such technologies are somehow inherently good, bad, essential, or damaging for social and cultural life but acknowledges the stakes at play in this relationship for the varied organisations, institutions and actors that make up the cultural sector and for the societies of which they are a part.

Notes

1. The special issue emerged initially from a panel convened at the ICCPR organized by Kyoto University in March 2021, and workshop held in partnership with the Centre for Digital Inquiry at the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies at the University of Warwick in March 2022. We are grateful to the organisers and participants in these events for their time and insight.

2. A special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol 15(2), 2009, edited by Jeremy Ahearne and Oliver Bennett introduced this distinction.