Here comes ‘Post-Digital’ Culture
Thursday, January 28th, 2010Every 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’.
Digital. The banner under which museums, libraries and archives unite. The ultimate priority of Governments across the Western world. The word has become axiomatic - ‘Digital Britain’, ‘Digital Economy Bill’, ‘Digital Culture’. But like all axioms, it is ultimately meaningless. Or at least, it means so many things that it has lost its way in a semantic miasma.
Digital, when invoked by policymakers, tends to concern the process of creating digital content (pictures and words) and delivering this to users. It gives rise to an ecology of product - Digital Asset Managment Systems, Digital Image Libraries -and exotic new areas of practice such as Digital Preservation and more outlandishly, Digital Curation.
But, whisper it, aren’t we all just, really, kind of, a little bit over Digital? Not in the sense that it doesn’t matter, of course it matters in a profound and fundamental way. But in the sense that the first wave of infatuation is over, and we’re starting to think about the post-Digital sector and what it means to be a truly hybrid service industry. An industry in which the digitality and physicality of different parts of our stuff, and different channels for delivering our services, are simply background facts of life for museums, archives and libraries.
Because, let’s face it, Digital hasn’t turned out to be the magic bullet. Yes, it has been transformative in many ways, but it turns out that many of the great imponderable problems of managing physical stuff (lack of clarity about core purpose, poor planning, confusion about consumer demand, acquisition beyond our means) we have simply carried with us from the physical domain to the virtual one.
Digitisation, it has turned out, is acquisition with a plug. And yet, in the giddy thrill of our own little dot.culture bubble, we lost sight of the fact that all of this stuff we were acquiring would also need managing and yes, paying for. The skills we had, it transpires, are the skills we need. We just need to brush them off, dust them down and get over the idea that ‘Digital’ somehow equates to ‘Other’.
This line of thought has been prompted by two things.
Firstly, at a Museum Accreditation Scheme Strategy Group last week, we agreed that one of the most profound principles of Accreditation should be a kind of format-agnosticism. Not that we should refute the difference of Digital, but that we should treat these two imposters - physical and digital - just the same. That it should be a fundamental principle that the stuff of concern/interest to cultural institutions occupies a multiplicity of formats, and that with these formats come particular disciplines in terms of management, preservation and delivery. It is both exciting and challenging to think about how far the current generation of standards has to come in order to catch up with this basic principle.
Secondly, the brilliant Tony Butler’s equally brilliant article about ‘Museums in a No-Growth Economy’. Whatever the real economic realities of the next 2 years, the Realpolitik of a Recessionary economy demands a new vocabulary. And the new vocabulary of culture is sharing - mutualisation, shared services, shared infrastructure, less with less, simpler, smoother, easier. And alongside this, the idea of the hybrid organisation - something which has the features of a museum, an archive or a library (or all 3), but with a central value proposition that is at once both digital and physical.
All this coupled to the realisation that in 3 years time, people are highly unlikely to be talking about Digital. Project forward to a time when wireless is everywhere, copyright is a memory, phones are supercomputers and children are weaned by robots (well, not quite, but you get what I mean). It would be as anachronistic to think of something as ‘Digital’ , or to talk of ‘going online’, as it would be to look forward to a cocktail and a cigarette on an intercontinental flight.
So, here’s to post-Digital, hybrid culture! The real challeng, of course, is going to be thinking of the new hook, once the political willingness to spend money on digitisation has evaporated (newsflash, it’s gone already). What is the new political impetus for investing in culture going to look like? Could it, could it possibly, just be good old, old-fashioned enjoyement, quality, distinctiveness and meaningful experiences delivered through whatever channel is most appropriate? This correspondent, for one, certainly hopes so.
