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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
Cultural diversity and intercultural communication
Our world is becoming more and more interdependent and there is a rapid
development of new and multiple approaches to cultural diversity, aiming to promote
cultural specificities as the basis for intercultural communication. The processes of
globalization have intensified not only the transnational exchange of cultural goods,
media products and information, but also transnational migration. UNESCO statistics
indicate that 175 million of our planet’s inhabitants live in a country other than the
one they were born in (UNESCO, 2005). One in every ten people in the developed
regions of the world is a migrant. One has to add to this a growing mobility, above all
among young people, owing to the European Union’s Erasmus and Erasmus Mundus
programmes (more than a million students have already taken part in these
programmes), as well as an increasing artists’ mobility thanks to efforts undertaken
by cultural networks and portals (for instance, on the move). Through their openness,
their non-hierarchical, horizontal and flexible character, these networks support
cultural diversity and facilitate intercultural communication. Questions concerning
cultural diversity, as well as those concerning instruments of cultural policy, were
previously essentially linked to the problematic of minorities (the “multicultural
mosaic”) at the national level. New dynamic forms of mobility and transnational
migration have created new links and ways of exchange and cooperation, and have
developed new expressions of cultural diversity, especially in the urban and
metropolitan context. These transnational and transcultural forms of diversity
represent a new challenge for cultural policies (Robins, 2006).
Cultural diversity “is nurtured by constant exchanges and interaction between
cultures” (UNESCO, 2005). Today, it is impossible to deal with the European and
worldwide dynamic of cultural diversity without referring to intercultural
communication and dialogue. Intercultural communication is a dynamic process of
interrelations, of transmission and exchange of cultural values, as well as of
interaction between different cultures under the impact of information and
communication technologies. The management of cultural diversity poses itself as a
necessity before the global community, and can only be approached through flexible
and tolerant intercultural communication. This is why, like cultural diversity,
intercultural communication is a new challenge for cultural policies.
Change and digital culture
The third challenge for cultural policies relates to digital culture. The development
and rapid changes induced by the information and communication technologies
complexify the approach to cultural policies. Digital culture “has been produced out
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