Twenty portals for culture in the South East Europe got together in Belgrade to the conference Cultures of the Region Online!_Future Goes By! in order to rethink common problems and promote culture on the internet.
From the title of the conference, especially from its second part (Future Goes By) it is clear that this region is not aware what is the relevance of presenting cultural contents on the internet. The state of cultural policies of these countries towards the digital culture is also unclear. One of the consequences of such situation is that many portals for culture were not financed by national or local governments or they received minimal funds which are not adequate for their sustainability. Furthermore, in many of these countries users still use dial up connection to access the internet. Numerous cultural institutions do not have their web sites or these webs are not updated regularly.
Gathered representatives of the portals for culture collected new knowledge in order to improve their work. Through sharing their professional experiences and through the workshops of social and cultural aspects of the web 2.0, but also through the practical usage of portals, blogs, social media and free software, they learned how to use social media in a better way. With presentations of existing portals for culture in SEE and through the discussions on possibilities and challenges of the art and culture in the digital era, they also promoted importance of digital culture.
Discussions showed that context of participatory role of the internet is changing cultural and artistic practices. There are no longer exclusive controllers of the content, and user is now as important actor of this networked communication channel as their creators. So it was evident that the portals for culture are important bridge between content and users, but to approach their complete role it is necessary to follow requests of the social media and provide active participation for the users. Only in this kind of participatory communication we can expect that portals will reach measurable score. However, it is impossible to expect qualitative development of the digital culture without systematic support of cultural policies in countries in question.
This conference was held in the framework of the triennial project Informal Network of South-East European Cultural Portals which was initiated by Goethe Institute Belgrade, SEEcult.org and supported by Stability Pact for SEE.
At the end, I am wondering: what is the position of the portals for culture in other European countries? Do we have the same problems? If we offer all the achievements of the web 2.0 is it enough for user to start communication on our portals? Or we, as Vuk Ćosić asked us during the conference, just organise a party with food, drinks and great music, but without people? What are your experiences? How to avoid this kind of problems? Can the useful content be adequate to attract users? Please, feel free to add other questions and you can also try to answers some of these.
Getagged als:
conference, digital culture, participation, portals, see
What makes me re-thinking constantly is that idea how to be more interesting to all those kidz which are heavily using technology?! Are we ready? Are we enough interesting?
Cultural sector usually think that being ‘cultural’ is absolutely enough to get the targeted public on portals… well, it’s not enough! We have to be also interesting and cool in order to get the potential audience at our sites...
Then, there is this technology ‘issue’, a kind of an attitude: we don’t need these techno-geeks that rock the medium, we need ‘cultural’ audience! Well, ‘cultural’ audience (what ever it means!) likes to be served; they are not on social services… we have to pick up all those people that are spending their free time on Facebook, MySpace, etc… and to show them that Twitter is a tool for spreading culture, not just everybody’s daily ramblings… And that’s an issue for cultural portals EVERYWHERE…
Thanks a lot for your post, marking all aspects of the SEE region… Deborah Hustic | 12 dez 2008