D:\Documents and Settings\Ana\My Documents\Biserka-knjiga ...

governmental or corporate action plans, which instrumentalize these portals of
“natural” appearance. It would be nonsense to think that culture is a neutral service,
such as roads or public health. You cannot separate culture and the state, as you do
between religion and the state in a secular country. The investments of the state are
therefore always linked to identity affirmation, social consensus, education,
international prestige and tourism or any specific local interest, which are fully
legitimate as long as they don’t slip into political propaganda.
Characterization
Ecology of the media and hyperhumanism
To clarify the objectives and strategies of these portals, it may be useful to consider a
series of parameters:
• origin of the financial resources
• type of governance (public, private, commercial, NGO, hybrid, etc.)
• type of contents
• architecture of the portal
• design and aesthetic of the portal
• type of users
• level of open access, interactivity and possible participation of the users (closed
architecture of collaborative openness - Web 2.0).
According to these ecological parameters we may discover that cultural portals are
a typical illustration of media ecology theory and its preoccupation with
understanding media, as McLuhan would say (2004).
We do not intend in a general ecology of media, nor in the specific analysis of
cultural portals, to introduce implicit hidden values and conclude with political
judgments. All these categories, purposes and strategies may be recognized as
legitimate social functions. Evaluating the political system of a society or the cultural
state policy of a country would bring us to another type of analysis and discourse.
But it may be useful to allow the sociocultural, commercial or political logics to
appear, those which inspire these cultural portals, and to verify their design and
coherence, or to demonstrate their ambiguity and confusions and, according to these,
to predict their success or failure. Any public institution or commercial group who
decide to create a cultural portal should systematically question these ecological
parameters and carefully analyse these issues according to their declared and explicit
purposes. It would allow them to be efficient and not to work hard just for a final
frustrating result. The ambiguity of cultural enterprises, reflected in the architecture,
design, aesthetics and contents of any cultural service, is certainly leading to a final
failure, especially in the field of cultural portals, which are very complex and sensible
147