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Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
Challenging institutional thinking
For organizations like museums and galleries this evolutionary phase is challenging
and difficult, many institutions carry with them hundreds of years of history, and
established and institutional ways of thinking and working. The culture of that
thinking is very well defined in many cases and does not sit easily with the open,
non-hierarchical, interactive nature of the Web today.
A few years ago, we invited Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing at the
Guardian 2 newspaper in the UK to give a talk at the annual UK Museums on the Web
conference 3 that 24 Hour Museum was sponsoring. Simon Waldman talked about the
parallels between the challenges that face the publishing sector and the museum
sector, and the similarities as both are establishment institutions with long histories of
real world activity. He showed a photograph of the outside of the Guardian
headquarters in London taken in June 2000, a time when a lot of people were pulling
away from the net after the burst of the dot com bubble. 4
The Guardian, however, made a corporate decision to engrave onto the stone sign
outside their offices the logo of their online brand “Guardian Unlimited”, alongside
those of their established newspaper brands (the Guardian and the Observer). It was a
critical message to those in and outside their business of the importance of the role
they saw the online world having in their future.
This status for online activities is mirrored by Tate 5 who have called their website
their fifth gallery (the other four being physical galleries around England). Both of
these examples demonstrate the recognition, at the highest level within an
organization, that online technologies are new challenges that need their own specific
skills and considerations.
This view is also inevitably reflected in the staff structures of both those
organizations. At Tate, they have a whole department called “Tate Media”
(previously “Digital Programmes”) with a Director at a senior level. They are not
aligned with some of the traditional departments that online usually is, such as
marketing or IT. The Tate team has in-house expertise and skills in new media. A
similar story is true at the Guardian: Simon Waldman was the first person to have the
job title that recognized digital publishing as an area in its own right.
2 http://www.guardian.co.uk
3 http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk/meetings/2-2007.shtml
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
5 http://www.tate.org.uk
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