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“omnivores” and “univores” (Peterson, 1996), the dichotomy of “producers” versus
“consumers” is replaced by “prosumers” (Toffler, 1980) and “produsers” (Bruns, 2007).
Household surveys, whether expenditure surveys or cultural participation surveys, have a
role to play in monitoring changing patterns of the consumption of culture, for example the
decline of CDs and the rise of online and live music consumption (Montoro-Pons and
Cuadrado-Garcia, 2011), and the move of popular photography to mobile phones and tablets
creating new communications applications. In the absence of good statistical indicators of
digital content, surveys have instead chosen to monitor ownership of the equipment used to
record or play performances (UNESCO, 2011).
The meaning of practices and contents refer more and more to an exchange and
communication value, and a new social dimension in cultural consumption-production
appears. New technologies are evolving quickly and the use of the Internet is growing across
all population strata, becoming increasingly integrated into everyday life activities, including
those deemed ‘cultural’. Access to the Internet is today considered as much a cultural right
as access to libraries was in the last century (Laaksonen, 2010). A recent report to the
General Assembly of the United Nations declares that access to the Internet is a human
right, as a unique tool enabling people to enjoy their right to freedom of expression (La Rue,
2011).
For an ever-growing proportion of the population, a consistent amount of cultural participation
happens in the Internet itself, not just via the Internet. Such new conditions call for a revised
framework for measuring participation, not limited to measuring how many people access the
Internet or use social networks but able to understand how the Internet is used and which
activities are carried out in the virtual space. Such information could greatly expand the
“institutional understanding of meaningful arts participation” (Novak et al., 2011). That is why,
for instance, since 2002 the U.S. Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) includes
questions about access to cultural content via iPods, mobile phones and portable DVD
players (Ibid]. Overall, it is important to remember that the aim is to measure the nature of
the exchange and its content rather than the technology per se. An interesting example is
provided by Malta which includes in its survey a question about uploading self-created
content (Malta, 2012).
It is also important to acknowledge that different technical and social barriers may affect
different communication channels: for example, the lack of a script for a rare language may
completely prevent written exchanges, or a script may exist but it may not have been coded
(Unicode) thereby preventing use of ICTs. Equally, the coding of a script may open up
opportunities for a linguistic community to communicate across the world to exchange
cultural values and strengthen their identity.
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