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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
The precipitous development of new technologies and the emergence of digital
cultures has intensified the emergence of new forms of cultural organization. 2 As
Lessig (2004:9) stated, “...the Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for
many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far
beyond local boundaries” and in fact far beyond national or conventional
organizational boundaries and borders that defined the functioning of cultural
institutions and arts organizations.
The constant increase in the number of cultural portals and networks in the virtual
sphere and the areas of their activities indicate that the conventional notion of a
cultural organization’s functioning, operation, governance and management is being
redefined and challenged.
As the number of cultural portals and networks rapidly evolves, the question arises
as to whether the associated management structures follow their growth – do they
progress, do they expose themselves to the risk of adopting new approaches to
dealing with kaleidoscopic environments?
Out of all public policies and systems, cultural policies can be distinguished as key
resource structures that support and assist cultural organizations in their path from
their foundation to the time when they are reaching audiences – in brief, cultural
policy provides for cultural content and activity to be generated while arts and
cultural organizations find their position in the wider public context. 3
This paper will attempt to define the status of the cultural portals and networks or
cultural organizations that concentrate their activities and predominantly operate in
the virtual sphere in the framework of European cultural policies. It sets out to
identify and investigate the standing models of management 4 and governance in
cultural portals and networks and measures them vis-à-vis a cultural policy scale of
2 Although there are many new and quite exciting forms of cultural organizations that base
their activities in the virtual sphere (online galleries, libraries, archives, blog posts, design
rooms, etc.), for the purposes of this paper by new forms of cultural organizations, we refer
to cultural portals and cultural networks exclusively.
3 Cultural policy in this context is regarded in its core meaning implying that cultural policy
provides structural guidelines and legislative frameworks that define and assist arts and
cultural organizations in methods and ways of functioning. These include legal acts on
founding an arts organization, governance, finance, etc.
4 By establishing models of management, we can consider the application of standard arts
management practice, i.e. the application of the five traditional management functions -
planning, organizing, staffing, supervising and controlling (Martin, 1998: 128 in Chong
2002: 8). The research presented in this paper does not investigate all these aspects of
managing arts organizations but focuses mainly on the governance and management
structures, their roles in the decision-making processes and how it affects overall
organizational prosperity.
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