Rapids and backwaters. Adapting fast and slow to a digital cultural turn.

This project has investigated how digitization has affected different types of value creation in the cultural sector, and how regulation, copyright and cultural policy have adapted to the digital production and distribution of culture. What do we know about cultural production in the digital cultural economy? How has digitization affected how different cultural workers work, earn money and create value? How can digital culture be regulated nationally and internationally, and what consequences does this have for a national cultural policy? Although there is little doubt that digitization is a major force of change, it does not affect all areas of culture at the same pace. This applies not least to culture. The title of the project suggests that the digital stream moves fast and slow at the same time. While some cultural sectors, such as music, have fundamentally changed in a couple of decades, other fields, such as theatre, are far less influenced. In addition, completely new types of cultural workers have emerged who work exclusively with digital tools. Cultural policy and the regulation of the field of culture have also been influenced in various ways. When culture is produced and communicated digitally, it creates some obvious challenges for a cultural policy that often has a national starting point and a national set of regulations and legislation. What possibilities exists for a national and not least border-based cultural policy when culture is increasingly borderless? The project has investigated how different countries have adapted to this dilemma and has described some possibilities for a digital cultural policy in the 21st century. The project was launched in March 2020, roughly around the start of the corona pandemic. This meant that the first project meeting, in April, was held digitally. In April and May, the project participants collected information about their respective countries' digital cultural policy, and about what measures have been put in place to support the cultural sector's challenges as a result of the pandemic. After the summer of 2020, work was particularly carried out with interviews of informants from three different groups of cultural workers: visual artists, digital cultural workers and performing artists. What role has digitization played for their artistic work, their income and their career development? In autumn 2021, preliminary results from WP2 were presented at the Nordic Conference of Cultural Policy Research in Borås. In 2022, the work in the project was largely about communication and analysis. Among other things, the project was well represented at the International Conference of Cultural Policy Research in Antwerp in September 2022. In addition to writing work in several of the sub-projects, work was done in 2022 to prepare and begin work on an anthology for the project. A contract with Routledge on this anthology was written in August 2022. In 2023, the project has been working on analysis and writing within the various work packages. The final script for the project anthology, entitled Digital Transformation and Cultural Policies in Europe, was delivered to the publisher at the beginning of July. The project started a month before the pandemic broke out, and some of the perspectives in the project were actualized in new ways. This meant that, among other things, we examined the rise and importance of digital distribution of culture, as well as how different countries' cultural policies were affected by the pandemic. A clear result here was that the pandemic led to a temporary, crisis-based digitization, both for cultural communication and cultural policy. This was the case in several European countries. To a far lesser extent than expected, the pandemic led to a lasting change in a more digital direction. The project has also shown that the income streams for cultural work in a digitized cultural sector are far more complex than both cultural research and cultural policy has taken into account. We have also seen that cultural workers' relationship to social media is both complex and ambivalent. This also applies to those cultural workers who we are used to seeing as influencers, YouTubers, or, in general, as digital content producers. The distinction between those who work with purely digital cultural production and those who work with more traditional cultural production is also becoming increasingly less clear. The comparison of the digital cultural policy of seven different European countries (Norway, Sweden, Germany, England, Spain, Croatia, Switzerland) shows that these countries are far less similar in this area than one might think, and more characterized by national peculiarities, national history and their own political tradition than by the influence of the EU. On the other hand, all the countries have in common a digital cultural policy which still has major challenges in adapting to a digital cultural reality.

Dette prosjektet hadde som mål å undersøke hvordan digitalisering på ulike måter påvirket både kulturproduksjon og kulturpolitikk, særlig gjennom å se på hvordan digitalisering påvirker ulike former for verdsetting av kulturen. Siden prosjektet startet opp en måned før COVID-19 ble en altoverskyggende sak for de fleste sektorer, ble noen av perspektivene aktualisert på nye måter. Det gjorde at vi blant annet undersøkte oppblomstringen og betydningen av digital kulturformidling, samt hvordan ulike lands kulturpolitikk ble preget av pandemien. De mulige virkningene av prosjektet er flere. For det første har kulturpolitiske aktører i sju forskjellige europeiske land fått et oppdatert kunnskapsgrunnlag for sin digitale kulturpolitikk. For flere av disse landene hadde denne delen av kulturpolitikken ikke blitt analysert på systematisk vis tidligere. Den komparative analysen i denne delen av prosjektet er også nyttig på et europeisk nivå. En annen virkning av prosjektet er at det er etablert et faglig nettverk mellom prosjektdeltagerne som vil utnyttes i kommende arbeid med digitalisering og kultur. Analysen av hvordan tradisjonell kuturproduksjon og sosiale medier er sammenvevet på nye måter vil også kunne ha påvirkning på hvordan vi forstår forholdet mellom kultur og medier, og mellom den kulturproduksjonen som får offentlig støtte og den som ikke får det. Slik vil analysene i prosjektet også kunne påvirke hvordan kulturpolitikken innrettes fremover.

There is a need for an updated analysis that examines how different kinds of values and revenue streams are generated digitally and/or affected by the digital turn, and furthermore how such value generation has been and can be regulated by cultural policy and/or copyright. This kind of analysis also needs to take into account the variety of adaptation in the broader field of culture; the simple fact that there is a co-existence of adapting fast and adapting slow; of rapids and backwaters. Rapids and backwaters is a project that aims to investigate how digitization has affected different kinds of value generation in the field of cultural production, as well as how legislation and regulation; copyright and cultural policy; has adapted to digital production and distribution of culture. This project asks these primary research questions: How have producers and policy-makers adapted to a digital turn? In what different ways have digitization affected value generation and revenue streams for cultural workers, and how might copyright regulations and cultural policy accommodate these changes? To answer these questions, the project combines policy, economy and practice analysis through five integrated work packages: 1) What is the knowledge and policy state of the art in the digital cultural economy? 2) How has digitization affected the strategies, revenue streams and value chains for producers in the fields of performing arts, visual arts and content production in social media? 3) What kind and categories of revenue streams constitute the income for cultural workers in performing arts, visual arts and for the new digital/social media influencers? 4) How can national and/or international copyright regulation best accommodate digital production and distribution of culture? 5) What public policies ensure that the Nordic model of cultural policy can make the best of digitization in the cultural sector?