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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
processes. ICT enables the virtual mobility of arts which have a great informative role
at the very least.
Museums, libraries and other cultural institutions are eminently suitable and
important locations for public access points, education for the information society
and for access to it for all citizens. The new means of communication and the related
expansion of media content is listed among a number of developments (others are, for
example, migration flows, EU enlargement, globalization, geopolitical changes, etc.)
that “have given intercultural dialogue, cultural diversity and social cohesion a more
prominent place on the political agendas” (Wiesand et al, 2008: 3).
In the digital age “new tools and technologies enable consumers to archive,
annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content” (Jenkins, 2002). They enable
amateur producers to engage in cultural production that had been previously reserved
for professionals only due to the demanding and expensive professional technology.
Thus affordable digital technologies have opened entirely new possibilities for
amateur film making and video production. Similarly, modern technological support
empowers smaller cultural groups to organise their cultural life and communication,
for example forming Internet groups based on shared ethno-cultural identity.
Therefore ICT can contribute to the democratization of culture, meaning better access
to the means for cultural production and dissemination. The Internet is a reservoir of
diverse content and together with other new technologies of communication has
greatly contributed to what is now frequently described as “multiple cultural
identities”. The digital world is diverse in its very nature. Interaction within
cyberspace offers new possibilities for connecting people. The new communication
technologies help to overcome problems caused by the dispersion of new migrants. In
the past, the territorial autonomy of minorities was in the foreground, while today it is
being replaced by functional autonomy. If different associations – for example the
associations of Macedonians or Bosnians in Slovenia – have new technologies at
their disposal, they can implement the vision of collective autonomy despite
dispersion. With functional autonomy, the individuals’ roles can be different; they
can function as a vehicle of cultural identity wherever they may live. In this way, we
are outgrowing the correlation between cultural identity and a certain territory, and
thereby autochthonism. In such circumstances, a person can freely choose his/her
cultural identity.
Nevertheless there are also voices stressing the more negative aspects of today’s
digital age which is marked by the fear that a “capitalist deployment of technology
serves mass deception” (Cox, Krysa and Lewin, 2004: 8). The increase in forms of
production, by blurring the traditional divides between producers, distributors and
recipients raises the question of how society will react to them and hence how we can
sustain diversity of different cultural contents and expressions, and combine human
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