Comments on: Here comes ‘Post-Digital’ Culture

By: Nick Poole

Nick Poole — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:52:04 +0000

Many thanks for these comments. I think Jeremy and others make a good point - there is clearly a lag between the impetus of practice and the understanding of leadership and management. I am always disappointed to find senior people willing to parrot with considerable confidence the digital axioms of previous generations. It’s one of the reasons why it has been so diffcult to slow and alter the course of the Digitisation juggernaut.

This being the case, I think we need to think more carefully about the messages we are putting into the heads of these people, and the channels we use to do so.

To those of you that recall ‘Netful of Jewels’ back in 1999/2000, it’s message of ‘digitisation leads to education’ was a fundamental part of engendering this mindset for the current generation of funders, politicians and managers. The prospective new generation are currently learning that social media and collaborative content are the new magic bullet - and in time they will be proven to be equally wrong.

This is why the ‘post-digital’ thing offers so much hope for me - it’s a vision of calm, stable and sensible decision-making which focusses on purpose and punter rather than medium or technology. The channels, too, are the ones I’d argue we’ve always had - it has to be in Accreditation, it has to be in funding requirements, it has to be in the minds of Local Councillors as a simple paradigm.

This, then, sets out our priorities for the next couple of year - to create this idea of the blended service as a simply-worded value proposition that can help us move from a fundamentally reactive stance to something more measured and long-term.

By: Mia

Mia — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:19:32 +0000

What Jeremy said.

By: Moved to comment « Culture, learning & innovation

Moved to comment « Culture, learning & innovation — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:58:27 +0000

[...] interesting posts too, that I didn’t get round to commenting on, for example, Nick Poole predicting the post-digital age to come very soon, Mia again on why museums have preferred to put collections in Flickr Commons [...]

By: Twitter Trackbacks for OpenCulture » Blog Archive » Here comes ‘Post-Digital’ Culture [collectionstrustblogs.org.uk] on Topsy.com

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:13:41 +0000

[...] OpenCulture » Blog Archive » Here comes ‘Post-Digital’ Culture openculture.collectionstrustblogs.org.uk/2010/01/28/here-comes-post-digital-culture – view page – cached Every once in a while, things shift imperceptibly but fundamentally on their axis. Devout views, long-held, become the laughable fancies of childish innocence. Entrenched positions become blurred as tectonic plates beneath them start to grind into motion. And so it is, it seems, with ‘Digital’. [...]

By: Ed

Ed — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:47:31 +0000

I thoroughly agree that hybrid is preferable to just-digital or just-analogue, however we are still a long way off. All too often organisational structures still heap “digital” into isolated teams, or worse, people. This reflects a lack of core funding for format-shifting (traditionally digitisation, but perhaps bi-directional in a hybrid environment?) which will limit ways of presenting across our collections. Unless we end up with two collections - one digital and one analog. You can place bets on which users will diminish first.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:34:02 +0000

I agree, of course, and yet…too many of our decision makers have far to go to catch up with digital and get it, and only then will they have a hope of seeing past it.
I’ll leave it at that.