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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
National(istic) perception of cultural diversity
The extension of documents, 4 general and sectorial, shows that culture is an important
part of strategic thinking in the development of the information society in Slovenia. 5
All these political papers mention cultural diversity, mostly together with linguistic
diversity, when they discuss the possibilities and challenges of information society.
However, the term “diversity” is highly ambiguous in these documents and requires
further explanation of its political context. The thesis of this paper is that in the
strategic documents analysed the term “cultural diversity” is not used in the first place
to characterize the increasingly diverse socio-cultural structure of Slovenia nor does
it follow the pluralistic origin of cultural content as outlined in The UNESCO
Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural
Expressions. There is no precedent to show that cultural diversity can be seen as a
framework in which different ethnicities coexist within the nation state. When they
elaborate the role of digital culture there is no stress on the new citizenship landscape
searching for conditions of equity and fairness for cultural participation. Culture
4 We are not going to discuss here that the weak point in the transition to an information
society is not strategic thinking but the transponibility of documents in practice. However,
it is worth mentioning that the strategy si2010 recognized the following critical factors for
the achievement of its goals: constant and firm political back-up for the implementation of
strategy as a precondition for a project of this size and complexity; and interaction among
all interested stakeholders which includes not only different sciences but also cooperation
between the business and academic worlds and capacity building of users who need proper
skills to use e-services and e-content; adequate funding that corresponds to strategic
objectives; training for IT and computer professionals who take care of the functioning of
information society; investment in research with an ambition to transfer results into
practice; the preservation of digital content with solutions to store and retrieve information
and special attention for national cultural heritage; and user oriented services where users
and their satisfaction is a central element of the system.
5 There are many successful individual stories (e.g. the development of the Co-operative
Online Bibliographic System and Services (COBISS) for public libraries, the Cooperative
Archival Computer Information System of Slovenia (AERISS) together with the InfoArh
application for archives, the establishment of the Internet portal of the Digital Library of
Slovenia and the regional portal KAMRA, the Slovene Music-Information Centre (SIGIC),
the net of 19 multimedia centres across the whole country, etc.) but essential issues (such as
the availability of digital cultural content, “fresh money” for digitization, cooperation
between the main institutions, concerted action in digitization, capacity building of
professional staff, proper awareness of the importance of digitization of cultural heritage,
etc.) remain problematic although there are some positive signs such as the already
mentioned introduction of a special budget item for digitization in 2008 (annual reports on
implementation of the National Programme for Culture for the year 2004 and 2005;
progress reports of the National Representatives Group coordination mechanisms for
digitalization policies and programmes MINERVA eC Project and MICHAEL project
(Gazvoda, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006); Rajh, 2007; Korun, 2005).
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