Access now, but for whom and at what cost?

ABSTRACT

Under the banner of ‘democratic access to culture,’ libraries, museums, theaters, archives, and galleries – the loci of information and cultural provision – once exclusive to elite classes or geographically bound to their local communities, are radically embracing digital technologies to have their content digitized and served over the network. Moreover, alongside institutional arts, informal cultural expression like street art and graffiti in urban spaces around the world are being curated together and made accessible online. This increasing access to cultural content with the introduction of network technologies, digital systems and applications has often been perceived as imperative to technological progress; however, I explicate how radical political economic changes are restructuring cultural domains, and I argue that the culture of ‘access’ is obfuscating the fundamental questions of who controls culture and for what purpose. The paper demonstrates that the seeming abundance of and daily access to culture are not the result of technological progress; rather, it is due to the corporate-led digitization of culture which has reconstituted public cultural institutions into instruments for capital and further morphed and absorbed them into the marketplace.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural institutions
• libraries
• archives
• museums
• access to culture
• digital capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Shinjoung Yeo is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society, University of California Berkeley.

Notes

1 The definition of information in this article is not data processing but a social process; thus, information and culture are used together to connect those two.

2 See examples of grants organizations on Digitization Projects Registry at https://registry.fdlp.gov/grant-opportunities

3 See International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Statement on Libraries and Intellectual Freedom.