Convergent New Media Technologies for Community Co-Creation in Cultural Institutions

1. Chapter 8 • By: Carly Williamson

2. Main Ideas • The potential for convergent new media technologies that connect cultural institutions to new audiences through community co-creation programs. • Curatorial mission from the exhibition of collections expand to the remediation of cultural narratives and experiences.

3. Literacy • “New Literacy” is the field of studies which describes the skills demanded of audiences as they negotiate the potential of expanding digital services. • “Media Literacy” is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create messages across a variety of contexts: • Access rests on a dynamic and social process • Analytic competencies include an understanding of the agency, categories, technologies, literacy, representations, and audiences for media • Evaluation - aesthetic, political, ideological, and/or economic • Content creation - the Internet offers increased possibilities for audience content production.

4. Community CoCreation • When cultural institutions can take a proactive role in developing new literacy by enabling direct experience of content production and creating environments for community engagement. • Example would be Informative Communication Technologies (ICT)

5. Schedroff • Nathan Schedroff proposes that we consider the meaning of interactivity as inhabiting a “Continuum of Interactivity” • This can be distinguished by: • The amount of control the audience has over tools, pace, or content • The amount of choice this control offers • The ability to use the tool to be productive or to create

6. Focusing on the Audience • Curators are providing resources to enable audiences to engage in cocreation of content • Digital Cultural Communication - Digitally enabled two-way interaction between community and institution

7. Remediated Networks • Museums and libraries are mediums which deliver messages supported by a network of processes such as collection, registration, publication, display, evaluation, and promotion • Cultural institutions occupy physical, social, and virtual spaces that are derived from patterns of human occupation and their historic and contextual interaction.

8. Culture Sector Changes • Remediated networks allow cultural institutions to be seen not as centers of knowledge, but rather as facilitators of networks of reliable, validated information. • Digital Cultural Communication can provide a framework for remediated networks by establishing systems which support two-way interaction between community and institution, the remediated networks can provide a “reality” that acknowledges and values not only the information coming from a community, but also the community from which it came. • Although the Web has the ability to connect spaces, places, people, and information,

9. Space and Display • The territory occupied by the museum is protected by physical borders, hierarchies of practice, and social/cultural structures derived from its program • Cultural institutions construct their own narratives through their galleries, and metaphorically through interaction with that space, providing audiences with individual experiences.

10. Remediated Networks: in Greater Detail • “Back-Telling” is a method of defining a narrative of existence based on the marks left in the environment by particular animals, humans, or activities. • Back-Telling provides an effective means of communication when access to diverse worlds and classes of information was restricted. • Back-Telling is not far away from the notion of Digital Cultural Communication

11. The End..