A digital strategy for the UK cultural sector

I’ve been thinking about shared understanding a lot recently.

“Understanding of what AI is, and what AI can do varies. Similarly, policy and technical experts’ understanding and capacity to consider how AI impacts populations differs hugely. Shared understanding of the specific whos, hows, whats and whys of AI are crucial to societal efforts towards responsible AI.”

This statement was made as part of a co-produced artwork with Blast Theory, Constant Washing Machine*. It was also the phrase I chose when asked to volunteer words to be embossed on bars of soap as part of Blast Theory’s wonderful response to our findings of the FRAIM (Framing Responsible AI Implementation and Management) project.  

I was intrigued by the instability of the language around responsible AI, but also the fact that making AI responsible lies in mundane, everyday small actions (like handwashing), as much as in policy documents. We all have a role, and we all have a right to it.

What do we mean by shared understanding?

I have used the phrase shared understanding before – most recently in recommendations to the government on digital policy. So, what do I mean by it? During Covid, we were all advised how to wash our handwash responsibly. In academia – and the arts too – we tend to be bound by shared understanding. This could be practice – whether ceramicists or social scientists.

Shared understandings are sets of rules and traditions, methods and tools that enable us to communicate with each other – about how to make sculptures or statistics for example, according to a set of principles. This allows us to trust the credibility of the form of that sculpture or statistic. Without such credibility, the statistic wouldn’t be robust, neither would the sculpture, jeopardising their ability to communicate as intended.

A badly made social policy metric may fail to account for a marginalised population because of the bias in the dataset, or in the statistician’s approach. A badly made clay sculpture might explode in the kiln, the hours of artistic effort to communicate emotions, personal story or political message lost. So, the shared understanding of practice enables us to communicate meaning.

What do you even mean by digital?

But what if the raw materials of what we are talking about aren’t agreed upon? Last year, I reported on my understanding of digital culture, which I gained from two years’ working in-and-with DCMS on a research/policy fellowship**. From being embedded in the department and talking to people across cultural sectors and other arm’s length bodies, I concluded we lack a shared understanding of what we even mean by digital. This hinders digital cultural policymaking and development.

Every interview began with the question: ‘What do you even mean by digital?’ This was not a surprise. This slipperiness is very common in the arts. However, unlike culture, the lack of shared understanding is rarely acknowledged in cultural policy documents. Interviewees and the evidence indicate that the word digital, often used as shorthand and without specificity, is unhelpful as it could entail a wide range of activities.

When offering a workshop on the report’s findings to DCMS policy advisors, I set a task. I asked participants to google the word digital in isolation and set the results to images. The results were a series of infographic style images either saying ‘what is digital?’/’what does digital mean?’ or the word digital as a word preceding something else: strategy, technology, image, marketing, transformation.

Even a digital search engine struggles to share its understanding of the word without more information. Digital rarely enables shared understanding without qualification.

What is digital culture?

I used digital culture in the report primarily to refer to the creation, consumption, production and dissemination of arts and culture using information and communication technologies (ICTs). Elsewhere the term digital culture is used to describe how we live our lives online more generally. 

Digital activities in cultural sectors exceed what I describe as digital culture. These include the digitalisation of business operations, including accounting, box office and HR; the digitising of cultural products (such as online museum collections); production (virtual reality immersive theatre) and dissemination (online streaming of dance performances); and the digitalisation of access to culture. Some find it helpful to distinguish between administrative vs creative or mission-driven activities

Digitalisation – meaning digital processes to replace non-digital, that is manual or analogue ones – is different from digitisation, which is the digitising of something, or turning something analogue into something digital, such as converting and recording data, artistic productions or archives.

Again, this distinction is unclear and rarely acknowledged, but important when sharing understanding of intention. Intention is important when consulting sectors on their digital resources and future needs or when distributing or responding to a funding call. It is also crucial when developing policy and writing strategy documents which commit to priorities and directions of action.

What I found during my placement is that digital holds varied meaning, value and importance across cultural sectors, across artforms, across practitioners and between different areas of a cultural organisation. These differences also exist across stakeholder groups – policymakers, participants, practitioners. Crucially, this also means digital policymaking for cultural sectors requires nuanced understanding across sectoral and stakeholder differences.

We need a new digital strategy for culture

Digital strategy comes up as one of my top google results. Given the above, you might assume adding the word strategy to digital would offer clarity. Ironically, it transpires that a digital strategy is not one thing either. In fact, a digital strategy for culture in the UK is quite hard to find.

During my placement, I spent time in government, in meetings and in interviews, but most time was spent on what I call an ‘embedded evidence review’. In academia, we ordinarily review what is already known about a subject before beginning a study. It is unusual to do this while embedded in the sector you are studying.

I reviewed some 200 published documents from across social, cultural and digital policy. Part of this involved a historical policy analysis which traced what digital strategy looked like for cultural policy. As a result, my report argues that we need an explicit national government digital strategy for culture.

Surprisingly, despite the common-sense ways that digital and culture go together, the creative industries has not produced one before now. Documents emerging from the Culture is Digital Consultation in 2018 are often understood to be one. They say the right things about digital infrastructure for culture and situate this in the Industrial Strategy, the Digital Strategy and The Culture White Paper.

Amazingly, the last document called a digital strategy that was published by DCMS was the 2012 Becoming Digital: Digital Strategy. Yet, its focus was on digitalising public administration as a Cabinet Office imperative. In other words, it was administrative or operations, rather than creativity or mission-driven in its focus.

The most recent Digital Strategy is from 2022, but this year has seen a wave of policy and media discussion around the AI Opportunities Plan and The State of Digital Government Review. Now is the time to advocate for strategy around digital for UK cultural sectors to be set out in a document that is explicitly named a strategy.

To explicitly commit to sustainable infrastructure and have a plan for the challenges and opportunities of AI. Without such an explicit strategy, as a tool of policy-making practice, it’s difficult to communicate the intentions effectively, and lead to shared understanding, not just in relation to the government’s primary focus of growth, but how it can serve our values of inclusion, of sharing unheard stories and enabling them to reach ears that want to hear them. 

*Constant Washing Machine is the outcome of Blast Theory‘s work as Artists in Residence for the University of Sheffield’s Framing Responsible AI Implementation and Management (FRAIM) project, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Bridging Responsible AI Divides.

**Dr Oman’s placement at DCMS was an AHRC-funded Fellowship in Digital and International.

Dr Oman’s report ‘Digital culture – a review of evidence and experience, with recommendations for UK policy, practice and research‘ was published by DCMS and is on the gov.uk repository.

Their book ‘Understanding Well-being Data: Improving Social and Cultural Policy, Practice and Research’ is available Open Access, with further information on latest and related materials the website.