The Culture 3.0 paradigm

Prague, October 18, 2016

PIER LUIGI SACCODeputy Rector for International Research Networks & EU programmes Professor of Cultural EconomicsIULM University MilanVisiting Scholar, Harvard UniversityResearch Associate, metaLAB (at) Harvard

The structure of the cultural and creative macro-sector

• Non-industrial coreVisual artsPerforming artsHeritage, museums and archives• Cultural industriesPublishingCinemaMusicRadio-tvVideogames• Creative industriesDesignFashionIndustry of tasteArchitectureCommunication• Digital platforms

From Culture 1.0 to Culture 3.0

Three regimes of cultural production• The birth of modern cultural and

creative industries (CCIs) has only been possible when certain technological conditions have materialized

• This has only occurred at the transition between the XIX and the XX century (the ‘cultural’ industrial revolution)

• The industrial revolution proper has happened more than one century before

• At the moment, we are entering a new ‘cultural’ revolution despite the previous one has not been properly absorbed yet

Phases Types

Culture 0.1 Spontaneous, ephemeral popular culture

Culture 0.2 Transmitted popular culture

Culture 0.3 Ancient kingdoms commissioning

Culture 0.4 Proto-patronage

Culture 1.0 Classical patronage

Culture 1.1 Strategic patronage

Culture 1.2 Public patronage

Culture 1.3 Cultural proto-industry

Culture 2.0 Emerging cultural mass markets

Culture 2.1 Mainstream cultural industry

Culture 2.2 Counter-cultural industry

Culture 2.3 Immersive culture

Culture 3.0 Content communities

Culture 1.0: classical patronage

• Technological conditions for cheap reproducibility and circulation not existing yet: no structured cultural markets

• Limited audience, coinciding with the patron’s acquaintances

• Patronage choices determined by the patron’s tastes and interests, mainly for spiritual cultivation and social promotion

• Culture does not generate value added, but only absorbs value produced elsewhere in the economy

Culture 1.1: strategic patronage

• The target expands strategically beyond the patron’s acquaintances to pursue more ambitious consensus policies (civil or religious audiences)

• Patronage choices determined by ideological objectives, in a potentially conflicting dialectics with artists

• Culture is economically non-productive, but can generate a huge political and social payoff, and even economic insofar as it increases the patron’s image and bargaining power in economic trade or banking relationships

Culture 1.2: public patronage• Culture becomes a more and more universal

human right as a basic component of human development

• The State chooses what deserves to be patronized and what not, thereby fixing the dyadic categories of high-(brow) vs. low-(brow) culture

• Audience significantly expands, with outside the market context

• Culture absorbs relatively huge resources, and implies a redistribution from the citizens who don’t attend to those who attend

• Access to high-brow culture becomes a sign of bourgeois distinction

The 1.0-2.0 transition• Modern cultural markets are created by the

concurrent emergence of a wave of technological innovation at the edge between XIX and XX century: modern printing, radio, music recording, photography, cinema

• The fact that for more than one century through the industrial revolution culture is not industrialized, however, creates a permanent frame of mind in Europe according to which culture is un-economical and needs to be subsidized anyway

• The high-brow stigma of patronage makes commercialization of culture problematic to many cultural players and to part of the audiences

Culture 2.0: proto-entertainment

• Explores and defines the grammar of the new media

• Defines an alternative space w.r.t. highbrow culture, without explicitly reneging it

• Gradually expands the audience• Develops the business models• Creates the star system• Lays a bridge with the industrial and

commercial world (advertising)

Culture 2.1: mass entertainment

• Builds and reaches very large audiences• Is based on the virtually unlimited

reproducibility of creative contents once the matrix has been produced

• Generates significant turnover and profits• Is a distinct sector of the economy, and a

part of the entertainment meta-sector• Generates leisure experiences and

occupies (part of) free time of people• Needs intellectual protection (copyright)• May also increasingly extend the creative

element to functional domains (CIs)

Culture 2.2: Immersive entertainment

• Draws upon subcultures• Gradually segments the public into

niches with a common cultural and value orientation

• Creates contaminations between media and expands the scope of the experience

• Generates immersive, parallel worlds that acquire a status of alternate reality

• Maintains a dialogue with cutting edge experimentation

The 2.0-3.0 transition• We are now witnessing a new regime transition

that is driven by two concurrent streams of innovation: digital content production + digital connectivity

• Standard digital suites provide people with semi-professional packages that are cheap and easy to learn; with a modest investment they can be upgraded at the professional level

• The same packages less than 2 decades ago would have been expensive, would have required bulky hardware and would have been difficult to use

• Contents can be distributed almost without mediators to highly segmented and profiled audiences by means of increasingly specialized social media

Culture 3.0: Communities of meaning and open platforms

• Blurred distinction between producers and users of content: cultural access and production of new contents are two phases of the same process: prosumers

• Culture can be massively produced and distributed also outside market channels

• Economic and social value is produced not only through priced content, but also through generic participation

• Culture becomes increasingly a precondition of all kinds of economic value generation processes (‘culturalization’ of the economy)

• Culture is no longer an aspect of free time use but is entrenched in the fabric of daily life

Culture 3.0: Amateurs.com? Not quite

• With open platforms, there is a multiplication of prosumer-generated creative contents which totally changes the scale and the filtering, selection, transmission rules

• This does not weaken the role of creative professionals, but further expands their scope and possibilities in terms of co-creation and participation (creative leadership, orchestrating participation)

• Other forms of sustainability of creative production become possible (reciprocity, crowd-funding, club affiliation etc.: we are at the very beginning and the real things are yet to come)

Cultural ecologies: Culture 1-2-3.0 coexist

The articulation of the cultural and creative sub-sectors reflects the coexistence, stratification and hybridation of the various regimes:

Core (Culture 1.0): visual arts, performing arts, heritage

Cultural and creative industries (Culture 2.0): publishing, music, cinema, radio-tv, videogames, design, fashion, industry of taste, architecture, advertising

Open digital platforms and social media (Culture 3.0)

A changing cultural geographyCulture 1.0 Culture 2.0 Culture 3.0

Europe USA Far East

Highbrow vs. lowbrow Copyright Anmoku no ryokai

Gatekeepers Markets Communities

How to remain relevant in the new scenario• Leaderships could change very quickly in the

current scenario• Critical factors: 1. being part of effective and far-reaching global alliances for

investment, entrepreneurial development, and circulation of talent

2. Investing in massive capability building/creative participation skills

3. Maintaining a system-wide perspective of horizontal integration among cultural and creative sectors and with the rest of the economy

4. balancing effectively the relative role of market- and non-market-driven cultural sources of economic and social value creation: switching from a Culture 2.0 to a 3.0 perspective

Culture 3.0 as an ecology of meaning

• From cultivation to entertainment to co-creation

• It is not the media anymore, but the media mix

• Don’t look at value chains, look at nonlinear feedback systems (e.g. YouTube + Facebook + Flash Mob + Book + TV…)

• Culture 3.0 exposes the construction of meaning, so judging the quality of single bits (Culture 1.0) or measuring their market impact (Culture 2.0) is myopic

Becoming a global cultural contents leader, 3.0 style: South Korea

• No distinction between high-brow and low-brow culture

• Strong emphasis on User Generated Content• No interest in defending intellectual property

through tough copyright enforcement viral diffusion of contents, creative re-elaboration

• Matching to a massive capability building strategy in digital literacy

• Re-discovery of cultural tradition through contamination with contemporary culture and creativity

Culture 3.0 and the advent of decentralized production and dissemination of content

• Culture is evolving way beyond Patronage (Culture 1.0) & Cultural and Creative Industries (Culture 2.0)

• Practically everybody today has the technology and skill empowerment to participate in social processes of content creation, circulation, and remix

• The distinction between producers and users of contents becomes blurred

• The ubiquity of contents creation in everyday practices makes of culture the primary crossover agent

• Culture becomes a systemic factor like education or the environment

An 8-tiers approach to the indirect effects of cultural production (and participation)

• Innovation• Welfare• Sustainability• Social cohesion• New entrepreneurship• Soft power• Local identity• Knowledge economy

3.0 participation: indirect social and economic effects

• Platforms of pre-innovation: cultural participation as a precondition for local innovation systems

• Cultural welfare: cultural access improves subjective wellbeing and abates hospitalization rates

• Sustainability: cultural access improves effectiveness of waste recycling

• Social cohesion: cultural access prevents and corrects juvenile marginalization and crime and improves schooling rates and performance

• And more!...

The most innovative countries in Europe are also those with the highest cultural participation

Innovation Union Scoreboard 2014 (top 23) Index of Cultural Practice Eurobarometer 2013 (top 23)Sweden Sweden

Denmark Denmark

Germany Netherlands

Finland UK

Luxembourg Luxembourg

Netherlands France

Belgium Spain

UK Estonia

Ireland Germany

Austria Ireland

France EU

EU Finland

Slovenia Slovenia

Estonia Malta

Cyprus Austria

Italy Lithuania

Czech Republic Belgium

Spain Latvia

Portugal Croatia

Greece Italy

Hungary Czech Republic

Slovakia Bulgaria

Malta Romania

Croatia Poland

Culture-innovation clusters

• Top innovation + culture: Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, UK, Ireland, Luxembourg, France, Germany

• Top innovation + culture lagging: Finland, Belgium, Austria

• Top culture + innovation lagging: Spain, Estonia

• Lagging innovation + culture: Slovenia, Malta, Croatia, Italy, Czech Republic

• Bottom innovation + lagging culture: Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland

• Bottom culture + lagging innovation: Cyprus, Portugal, Greece, Slovakia, Hungary

Culture as a pre-innovation platform?

Culture as a ‘pre-innovation’ platform

Active cultural participation stimulates the capability building of people in terms of attitudes toward the un-experienced:

• questioning one’s beliefs and world views, • getting acquainted with, and assigning value to,

cultural diversity,• learning to appreciate the transformational

impact of new ideas,• building new expressive and conceptual skills…

Strong link with innovation systems

Hierarchy of factors affecting psychological well-being

Hierarchy of factors affecting psychological well-being

1 Diseases2 Cultural participation3 Income4 Age5 Education6 Gender7 Job8 Geography

Classical music concerts

Towards a cultural welfare perspective?• The well-being impact of cultural

participation is especially strong among the severely ill and the elderly

• Systematic cultural participation in these categories might bring about substantial improvement in their quality of life

• At the same time, cultural participation might significantly reduce hospitalization frequency and duration for chronic pathologies

• If this is true, the whole program could be financed through the consequential saving on general welfare costs

Does culture improve recycling?

Sustainability• There is a strong relationship between

performance of differentiated waste recycling systems and cultural participation (Crociata, Agovino and Sacco, 2014): the cognitive development from cultural participation spills over to motivation and ability to classify different waste items

• An indirect systemic effect similar to the innovation one in fostering awareness toward the consequences of individual behaviors for the environmental common good (Agenda 21): from innovation systems to sustainability systems?

Cultural access and waste recycling

Does culture improve recycling?• The answer is yes: people with access to cultural

experiences recycle more, no matter whether recycle bins are close to or far away from home: not only better capacity, but also better motivation

• There is a statistically significant causal relationship from cultural attitudes to recycling habits

• The same mechanisms are likely to work also for other forms of environmental responsibility (reduced use of pollutants, resort to ‘green’ mobility networks, etcetera) more ongoing research

• Does relatively poorer performance in recycling of MED countries relate to poor levels of cultural participation?

In a nutshell…• Culture is not simply a large and important sector of the

economy, it is a ‘social software’ that is badly needed to manage the complexity of contemporary regional societies and economies in all of its manifold implications

• The total indirect macroeconomic impact of cultural participation is likely to be much bigger than the (already remarkable) direct one

• Cultural and creative professions in the future will find space in various, unexpected fields (welfare, innovation, social service, etc. and will serve as catalysts od co-creation processes)

• These effects are further strengthened by the growth of the cultural and creative industries, but only insofar as such growth is designed and understood in a Culture 3.0 perspective

THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION!

pierluigi.sacco@iulm.it @PierLuigiSacco