Digital Cultural Politics

This chapter discusses the concept of cultural policy in relation to digital media, digital communication and digital culture. It sets out to account for the different definitions and roles that traditionally have been ascribed to cultural policy and for some of the challenges when “the digital” enters these conceptual and definitional frameworks. When cultural policy is framed on the premises of digital media and digital communications, the notion of participation and online participatory cultures is prominent. The chapter, therefore, engages in discussion on the cultural policies of participation, and how digital platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Spotify facilitate and condition participative patterns and agency of citizens.

This chapter discusses how digital cultural politics combines elements of cultural, media and communication policies. It particularly engages with the concepts of convergence and converging regulation, and how this challenge established regulatory frameworks. The chapter further accounts for the complex context of digital cultural politics and how this relates to concepts, such as global media policy, algorithmic cultures, platform society and data politics. This chapter also takes an example of how the production and distribution of a YouTube video travels through different regulatory frameworks and creates various tensions in EU regulation. The chapter, therefore, provides an analysis of Google’s contractual agreements, focusing specifically on Google’s terms of service and privacy policy, and the EU’s regulatory frameworks on audiovisual media services, telecommunications and data protection (the GDPR).

The aim of this chapter is to take four examples of digital archives and demonstrate how these further relate to digital cultural politics. This chapter therefore looks at Google Cultural Institute, Europeana, the Danish Cultural Heritage project and the Internet Archive. This chapter provides a concrete analysis of how these archives are discursively framed and in which cultural policy context they arise, how their interfaces serve as gatekeepers, in which ways users are conditioned in their online participation, and the archives’ terms of service and privacy policies. In the case of the Danish Cultural Heritage project, the path from policy to practice is traced even further as it refers to observations, interviews and focus groups conducted with users and experts which shaped the project.

This chapter looks at digital cultural politics from the viewpoint of public service broadcasters and museums. These cultural institutions have been greatly affected by digitisation, digital communication and digital media. In the case of public service broadcasters (PSBs), this concerns legitimisation, financial models and content distribution and consumption. For museums, the challenges are manifested in audience development, authority and knowledge production, and in changing roles which are exemplified in terms such as the digital museum, the media museum, the connected museum, the interactive museum and museum 2.0. This chapter further discusses some of the challenges that public service broadcasters and museums are confronted within digital culture and provides concrete analysis of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, the British Museum, Rijksmuseum, Te Papa Tongarewa and Brooklyn Museum. The analysis is focused on how the cultural policies which these cultural institutions are affected by and the external communications which they produce correspond to how they in practice manage their digital productions and collections. Finally, the museum’s activities on Instagram are analysed.

This chapter provides thoughts on user politics and scrutinises how different forms of digital communication and the tailoring of different platform interfaces and regulatory frameworks shape citizens’ agency. This chapter includes a discussion of data politics, citizen rights, privacy and how citizens are affected by algorithmic platform societies and surveillance capitalism. It therefore elaborates further on digital cultural politics as data politics, and how this relates to user politics.