Heritage 3.0 New challenges and opportunities Pier Luigi Sacco IULM University, Milan Harvard University

The Culture 3.0 paradigm

• Culture 1.0 (Patronage): Highbrow vs. lowbrow, culture as spiritual cultivation, no industrial organization

• Culture 2.0 (CCIs): copyright, culture as entertainment, market organization

• Culture 3.0 (open communities of practice): blurred distinction producers/users, culture as collective sense-making, networks organization

Culture 1.0: patronage

• The pre-industrial regime: no possibility of organized markets; culture does not produce major economic value added but absorbs it; small, elite audiences that gradually expand as more sophisticated sub-regimes emerge

• Initially founded on the virtue of parsimonia: emphasis on human cultivation and balance – Classical patronage – Strategic patronage – Public patronage – Committed patronage – Civic patronage – Entrepreneurial patronage

Museums 1.0: temples of knowledge

• In the patronage regime, the museum is mainly focused upon the conservation, development and presentation of its collections

• The creation of value is connected to the strengthening and cultivation of the museum audience, and to the transfer of knowledge and competences that this implies

• Economic sustainability concerns are seen as an interference with the pursuit of the mission of the museum, and the very goal of patronage is that of freeing the museum from the pursuit of activities that are extraneous to its educational mandate

Culture 2.0: cultural and creative industries

• With the massive urbanization that follows the industrial revolution, and with the ‘cultural’ industrial revolution that happens at the turn of the XX century, cultural markets can finally emerge

• The industrialized forms of culture become profitable, the size of the audience expands dramatically, and culture becomes increasingly linked to entertainment

• Emphasis on profitability and audience response: – Proto-industry – Mainstream – Counter-mainstream – Subcultures – Fan ecologies

Museums 2.0: entertainment machines

• Although the museum cannot be properly ‘industrialized’, there is an increasing expectation that the museum is generating income, is managed efficiently, and contributes to the development of the tourism industry

• Economic returns are not seen as an interference in the pursuit of the museum’s mission

• Audience response increasingly becomes an explicit success factor and significantly constraints the museum strategies and policies

• The museum environment itself performs a spectacular function

Culture 3.0: content communities

• Collapse of the separation between producers and audience: a blurred continuum of active/passive participation

• A new wave of technological innovation that enables massive, shared and shareable production of content and instant diffusion and circulation

• The production of value moves to the social domain and connects to all of the main dimensions of civic functioning: innovation, welfare, sustainability, social cohesion, lifelong learning, social entrepreneurship, local identity, soft power

Museums 3.0: participative platforms

• The idea of a passive audience is gradually substituted by a spectrum of forms of direct engagement

• Museums can create value in terms of innovation hubs, welfare hotspots, sustainability facilitators, social cohesion gateways, etcetera

• The new forms of value entail different forms of social interaction and exchange as constituent factors

• The museum opens its collections to the possibility of creative appropriation and remix of its contents by users

The Heritage 3.0 framework

• Heritage 1.0 (Conservation): Preserving ‘stones’ is the priority, Heritage is for connoisseurs

• Heritage 2.0 (Entertainment machines): Attracting people and making profit is the priority, Heritage is for customers

• Heritage 3.0 (Community sense-making): Involving everybody in the production, circulation and conservation of culture is the priority. Heritage is made, preserved and enjoyed by the community

The nature of the challenge

• Changes in the connotation of heritage

• Changes in the production of heritage

• Changes in the experience of heritage

• Changes in the preservation of heritage

• Changes in the transmission of heritage

Is participatory governance only a rhetoric?

To generate real social responsibility for heritage we need to: • Create culture-driven

expendable social capital • Making space for the

weaker constituencies • Leverage upon intrinsic

rather than instrumental motivations for cultural participation

The adverse selection effect in participatory governance

• Taking responsibility for heritage is linked to identification with the community and the place

• People who are better off identify more, and moreover are more educated and more able to participate proactively, and to drive goals and processes toward their vision and objectives

• Worse off people are less inclined to participate culturally and are less able to represent their point of view and interests within the participation rituals

Which voices are (to be) heard?

• The creative class paradigm profoundly conflicts with participatory governance by focusing culture-led development exclusively from the viewpoint of the imaginary class of creative people

• It has become one of the best tools for advocates of gentrification and cultural exclusion

• Has dramatically collapsed the payoff of culture and creativity upon instrumental dimensions and economic value

It’s the other way round!

• There is no real ‘class’ divide between creatives and non-creatives in an epoch where the very distinction between producers and users of contents is dismantled by the easy accessibility and usability of content production technologies.

• The real issue becomes empowering all kinds of people to participate in the process in an increasingly coordinated and cooperative way

• What is particularly urgent is that this happens especially for people who are not engaged in what are conventionally classified as creative activities and professions, to ensure true participation and active citizenship

• This deeply changes in turn how creative professionals can contribute to creating social value through heritge in terms of community enablers

Participatory governance of heritage is (also) about conflict

• Cultural public participation processes can resist external pressure and accommodate open dissent the more the pre-existing social and cultural community assets

• Effective self-governed participation is more likely in socio-economic and cultural conditions that make participation itself less urgent

• Why should more (culturally, socially, economically, educationally) endowed stakeholders give up their strategic leadership to make space for the less entitled into the public conversation?

• Participatory governance can only work if it questions and re-designs the architecture of the representation of interests through participation

• It is about trust building

The Heritage 3.0 canvas

Cognitive Social Cultural

Connotation Mapping Curating Filtering

Production Empowering Connecting Co-creating

Experience Accessing Sharing Responding

Conservation Legitimizing Adopting Indexing

Transmission Storing Entitling Narrating

Mapping • As heritage grows in dimension,

heterogeneity and complexity, new, participative mapping systems are needed where everyone may be enabled to participate and maintain the mapping process

• Mapping calls for a high number of attributes being reported in order to maximize selective retrieval and to enhance monitoring and control

• AI-based techniques are necessary to code, update, revise, represent and mine complex heritage mappings

Filtering • In the Culture 3.0 framework,

the amount of cultural and creative contents that is generated in the last few years equals to all that has been generated in the whole human history – and it is going to accelerate further

• The very notion of cultural filtering increasingly puts traditional gatekeeping under discussion and develops new social modes. How do we decide what should be preserved?

Indexing • Facing a massive, hard to organize

amount of content, metadata and curation becomes a key component of heritage itself: the organization of data acquires as much cultural value as contents themselves

• Heritage is now mainly navigated, through concurrent platforms and media, and the system of biographical, emotional and conceptual relationships that everybody establishes with it, both individually and collectively, is part of heritage itself

Responding

Entitling

• The only way to entitle the next generation to the transmission of heritage and to defend it from threats and attacks is to help them build an intrinsic motivation through active cultural participation

• Economic instrumentalism about heritage puts at risk the future sustainability of everything that has not a clear economic return

• In an ever-expanding heritage domain, if no-one is entitled to transmit the heritage, it will inevitably get lost

Physical vs. intangible vs. digital heritage?

• Heritage 3.0 does not cancel the 1.0 & 2.0 dimensions, it builds on them.

• The only way to preserve physical heritage is to ensure that it gets meaning and importance not only for experts, but for the whole community (legitimizing).

• The entertaining dimension of heritage is sustainable only if the whole community takes responsibility & monitors its impact, contra the Venice effect (adopting)

• This calls for a strategy of massive cultural capability building (empowering)