OpenCulture

Saturday morning saw me arrive bleary-eyed in Leeds to give a presentation to the Social History Curators Group about ‘Social History and Social Media’ - essentially a look at three key questions confronting the Social Historian in the digital age:

• Given that everyone’s experience and creative output is now spread across an extraordinary range of channels and platforms, how can we hope to curate digital Social History?
• Given that two of the central tenets of the new generation of digital services are collectivism and radical trust, what is the redefined role of a curator going to look like and how do we communicate it to the public?
• To what extent can the new technological tools, and the philosophies hich underpin them, be harnessed to the work of capturing and curating social history?

A fundamental argument in all of this is that this kind of challenge is not new to the Social Historian - given that the role of social history is to “assimilate, digest, interpret and reflect back to society the great socio-cultural, demographic, economic and consumer shifts which shape contemporary culture”, then they have been getting to grips with the accelerated pace of social change ever since the invention of the printing press and the inception of the Industrial Revolution.

Using the example of the Twitter and Flickr coverage of the Dean Street fire in Soho last week, I looked at the issue of the sheer volume of social and ephemeral material arising from contemporary digital culture, and argued that the only way we could hope to curate it is by enabling users to become their own curators. Hence a new phrase ‘citizen curators’, joins the ‘citizen digitisation’ refrain from the previous week’s JISC conference.

I argued, as I have many times before, that as the first wave of web2.0 recedes, it is leaving in its wake a new draft of the social contract with our users. Whether this new draft is a game-changing rewrite still remains to be seen, but for culture, I put forward the following set of clauses for this new contract:

1. You will talk, and we will listen
2. They’re your collections
3. Many voices is better than one
4. We will come to you
5. You have a fundamental right to Culture
6. We will provide the platform for Culture, but it’s not our job to construct it

It seems likely that, as we face a new political administration, a nation in economic difficulty and increasing competition for diminishing public resources, this new direction could form the basis of a kind of New Deal for Museums - a new vision in which we fundamentally rewrite the public understanding of what we can do, both as venues, as learning providers and increasingly as public service broadcasters and service providers.

This, ultimately, is the idea behind this blog, and behind the OpenCulture initiative of which it is a part. From recent conversations, it seems increasingly as though the time is right for a very different kind of dialogue about where the sector can go from here.

As ever, the SHCG audience were brilliant, and my thanks to Kitty Ross and the organisers for an interesting (and thought-provoking!) day.

The slides from the presentation are available from Slideshare.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 10:04 am and is filed under Business Models, Consultation, Europe, Events, General, Linked Data, Nick Poole, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.