Internet and Cultural Diversity – Reality or Myth: from the SEE Perspective
The International Congress on Culture and Development, Cuba, June 2007.
Aleksandra Uzelac, Institute for International Relations,
Internet is booming in Croatia as is everywhere in Europe and the world. Numerous news, commercial culture and entertainment sites are available to users, as well as sites providing blogs and personal web pages where users can post their own content. If we want to be entertained and informed about latest film or music industry news, this will be easily found on many sites and specialized entertainment news portals and readily translated in Croatian language. On the other hand,information relevant for Croatian cultural professionals and cultural activists does not get much coverage in the general portals, and in the mainstream media it is limited to special culture pages that occupy much less space than sports events. In addition there is no national cultural observatory in Croatia that monitors trends related to cultural changes, so both issues - cultural diversity and digitalization of culture are not presently monitored in any systematic way.
I will not present here one particular web-based case that contributes to the cultural diversity in Croatia, as most cultural diversity related actions take place in real and not virtual world. Rather I will briefly present some development trends that are affecting the situation that reflects on cultural diversity situation and how Internet is used in that respect.
The term cultural diversity is used widely today in the cultural sector as well as in politics. The term has rather broad meaning - besides ethnic diversity and diversity of cultural expressions it also implies existing cultural democracy, civil society, existing pluralism of ideas, tolerance and dialogue. In order to preserve and promote it we must make sure that we are protecting and communicating our cultural heritage, as well as enable new expressions and ideas of contemporary art forms to reach the public as well.
The region of the South East Europe, to which Croatia belongs, is in the geographical, historical and cultural sense both part of the Central Europe and the Mediterranean regions. It connects them and inherits from both of them, bringing the new diversity qualities into the European integration process. In the newly established states cultural identities are still not fully stable. They are marked with strong ethnic component and pressures for thewider European identification. Also as a consequence of the system change since the 90ies the civil society is growing stronger, initiating many grassroots initiatives in the cultural field as well.
The context that today defines Croatiais marked by the turbulent developments in the past 2 decades - Croatia is a country in transition[1] where at the beginning of the 1990ies an overall systemic change happened (from socialism to capitalism), the beginning of which coincided with the war in Former Yugoslavia and which has brought a significant destruction and breaking of previously existing cultural links in the region (media and other communication channels did not bring much news from other countries in the region). The change of the system (transitionfrom socialism to capitalism) meant that cultural sector came in a quite unstable period where underlying institutional structure and legislation have changed (and not only once) producing a certain dose of chaos that cultural sector had to deal with. It also meant that the cultural identities were also redefined. In addition,globalization processes and process towards EU integration are affecting directions ofdevelopment of Croatian society. Present developments are also marked by quite significant commercialization of culture and the change of values in society, as well by rather small and fragmented national and regional market for cultural goods.
There is a noticeable division when we look at cultural scene in Croatia– on one side there exist public cultural institutions (heritage institutions and other cultural institutions whose owner is a city or a national government and on the other side a very vibrant NGO cultural scene[2]. They function in parallel and compete for same scarce funding. Public cultural institutions are much more hierarchically organized and somewhat better funded than NGOs but they are not oriented so much towards cooperation projects. They are in charge of particular collections and their interest in digitalization projects is mostly oriented towards those collections. NGO scene funding must be secured for each of their project separately but they are much more oriented towards networking and cooperation. In their on-line activities they use Internet primarily as communication tool. In general, cultural sector has limited resources available that limits their virtual presence as well.
Due to the problems that Croatia was facing during the 90ies cultural policy was focused very much on the overall system change[3] (for which it was necessary to change complete legislative system) and on the heritage protection (induced by war destructions). So, cultural diversity issues and digitalization policies were not put in the spotlight inCroatia until recently. Although Internet infrastructure has been introduced in Croatia in 1994 this was not accompanied by any strategies that would promote development of virtual resources in culture. This was left to particular institutions to deal with as they see fit. Digitalization of cultural heritage has been proclaimed the priority only in 2006 and any serious projects are just about to start. So far, most initiatives related to digitalization of cultural heritage in museums and archives were not coordinated and mostly virtual projects would end with web pages of cultural institutions (presently about 60% of cultural institutions have a web page) and most information was presented in Croatian (only about 30% would have bilingual information). Cooperation in that respect was not much present and there was no frameworks supporting the existing initiatives. Exceptions are libraries that have managed to build relevant and effective virtual library network through which significant part of the library holdings related information is available to the users.
A Study about the information society development in Croatia in 2005 is an available source of the relevant internet statistics (although it does not monitor culture). It illustrates the general internet development trends and in general there is a certain lag in relation to EU average but not very significant one.
Croatia% / EU average %% of citizens regularly using Internet / 35 / 43
Mostly using it for email / 69 / 42
Mostly using it for information seek / 63 / 39
Mostly using it for reading online newspapers / 54 / 17
Mostly using it for downloading music and games / 23 / 16
Mostly using it for financial transactions / 14 / 19
% of companies having web pages / 58 / 61
% of companies having intranet / 29 / 34
% of companies having extranet / 6 / 15
Prices of broadband / Double price than in EU
Cultural sector web presence / 60%
Although the lag is visible it is not very significant. In Croatia today, the Internet culture is developing very fast. Internet became very accessible to an ordinary user. Commercial culture is taking advantage of this medium and many entertainment oriented sites and portals are quite prosperous. Numerous commercial news portals also cover cultural happenings (mostly the mainstream culture) but they are oriented towards mass audience and they do not promote or analyze issues related to cultural policy situation nor are theyparticularly interested in promoting cultural diversity. They are in the news selling business. News related to cultural sector that is not related to announcement of current cultural happenings and that put in focus diversity issues are not in their focus of interest and can be found there sporadically. They do not promote users participation.
On the side of cultural heritage institutions, the e-culture development initiatives are present, but they are not as advanced as one would hope considering that they are custodians of significant part of national cultural heritage. In the heritage field there are a few digital heritage initiatives that would bring together different cooperating institutions - these are mostly referral services built to provide information infrastructure for cultural workers. It is noticeable that the organizational patterns of network challenges the established ways of working in the public cultural institutions that are hierarchically structured. In most cases, heritage institutions work on a small scale isolated projects that they present over the Internet or more frequently on CDs and DVDs. This is mostly due to situation that cultural institutions were left to their own devices in development of virtual culture with no strategic aims set, no significant support from local or national government departments and no extra resources they could claim for such projects. Also, until recently main focus of the heritage sector was ensuring protection and restoration of heritage damaged during the war.For that reasons they managed to build their web sites and some referral points bringing information aimed for cultural professionals, but joint virtual projects thatrepresent the Croatian cultural heritage are not very numerous.Their main focus is on representational dimension of culture on the Internet and they are not questioning much issues related to e-culture, information society and its relation to cultural issues.
Many initiatives related to promotion of cultural diversity in Croatia have originated in NGO scene that try to put in the spotlight various newly emerged topics and issues (issues that public cultural institutions are not addressing in their work) and they are the main agents that try to ensure presence of different points of views, pluralism of ideas and dialogue. They are constantly questioning the existing cultural policy and the development directions of Croatian society, advocating for the transparency of the decision making system and preservation of public goods. They were the first to get interested into issues related to e-culture and the overall impact of technology on society and culture as well as issues of social inclusion, cultural democracy and minorities related topics. They are approaching issues related to information society from users/citizens perspective and they managed to put in the spotlight topics related to public domain, free software, copyright issues and accessibility of our cultural and intellectual heritage.
The independent cultural NGOs have managed to form different networks through which they ensured a lacking infrastructure for cultural cooperation, and through networking (building regional, national and local networks and participating in European ones) they have developed many projects which had no official support in the country (especially during the 1990ies). For their operation, they are much more oriented towards international cooperation and foreign grants than public cultural institutions and this also influences the opening of different topics that might not be in the focus of interest in Croatia’s cultural public sector.
The importance of festivals must be emphasized here as this is mostly astructure that has in recent period allowed culture outside the mainstream to reach the public. In most cases organized by cultural NGOs or particular artists,these festivals have managed to present artistic works that was outside interest of official culture. They had significant role in educating and sensitizing audiences/citizens to new issues and they are trying to ensure active citizens participation in their projects. Some festivals were focused on politically engaged art, or they were dedicated to a particular thematic issue – focusing on the methods, experiments, laboratory work etc. They sometimes aimed to regroup new and fresh initiatives from the region,thus contributing to presenting each other works in area - not very popular for cultural decision makers. This is particularly relevant as during the 1990ies cultural links were broken and cultural information and cooperation in the region was almost non-existent.
Positioning their activities to the area in-between social and cultural activism and new technologies the independent NGOs have well understood that information society is not just about virtual services on the Internet but that its importance is visible in all spheres of our lives and culture especially. They aim to promote and develop those approaches to new technologies that have broader social and cultural relevance and that promote diversity of choices. Cultural NGO sector is widely using the Internet to present its activities and often this was the main way of their promotion as modest budgets they in majority of cases have, did not allow for other promotional activities. In most cases they used the Internet as their billboard and they did not necessary aim their activities towards developing virtual projects. This is due to financial constraints that they meet, as their virtual activities are not much supported. Still by taking advantage of Internet networking potential (web resources and international cultural mailing lists) they managed to gain good visibility nationally and internationally and could use it as a working tool. The NGOs and festivals however have not been focusing much on representational side of virtual culture, so mostly their web resources are using simple technological tools to bring information to interested users. In some cases they managed to use virtual dimension to complement the limitations faced in the real sphere. (Eg. Motovun film festival used the Motovun Online project to be able to show selection of short films that could not fit into the festival screening schedule and this has attracted a lot of views from the festival audiences and other users. This year they are also inviting blogers to write on their site and the best ones will be invited to the festival as the festival guests.)
Financial limitations prevent cultural institutions and NGOs to invest much effort in their web related activities. What have contributed significantly to the visibility of cultural sector (and particularly the NGO initiatives) are several cultural portals that started operating in recent years. In the absence of already developed systematic information infrastructure in cultural sector the portals were the ones that have developed initial referral services that enhanced communication among cultural professionals and provided them with two way communication channel through which they could communicate their news. They have managed to create efficient tool that has addressed problem of filtering the relevant information and getting users attention. As “information abundance still leaves the problem of attention scarcity” portals contributed significantly to the online promotion of cultural sector activities that could slip users’ attention buried in the institutions web pages - the fact that something is available online does not mean that it is really accessible, i.e. easily reachable for potential users (Hargittai, 2000: 2).
There are several cultural portals that operate in Croatia and that are oriented towards promoting cultural activities, cultural cooperation and that are tackling issues related to cultural practice, cultural development and cultural diversity. The two most significant portals in that respect are Culturenet.hr and the Kulturpunkt.hr portals.
Culturenet.hrportal was the first cultural portal in Croatia that was jointly established by civil society actors and the Croatian Ministry of culture in 2001. It is an interdisciplinary cultural portal that was built with the aim to contribute to the systematic promotion of cultural sector, to be a tool for enhancing cultural cooperation andit has made the first mapping of the Croatian cultural resources on the internet. By bringing news from various cultural fields (theatre, museums, cultural research, civil society activism…) in one place it has managed to broaden the circulation of information that was before distributed only within narrow circles (eg. particular cultural sector mailing lists). It has managed to provide cultural professionals with communication channel through which they announce their activities and also distribute information they received from abroad about calls for cooperation, conferences, residencies, grants, etc. Unlike other cultural portals in Croatia it is the only portal that presents information in English as well, so it is also main entry point for foreign artists and cultural professional when looking for cooperation partners in Croatia. The portal has established the relations with a wide network of cultural professionals that contribute information to be published on the portal and it has established itself as a relevant point that many cultural professionals visit daily for quick info on what is going on.
Kulturpunkt.hr is a portal that was established by the network of cultural NGOs Clubture and it is oriented towards independent cultural NGO scene and issues related to contemporary culture. Portal wanted to contribute to enhancing the visibility of the non institutional cultural sector as it recognised that network’s core activities that were aimed at encouraging programs sharing and cooperation is not enough for strengthening of independent cultural scene in Croatia and for ensuring their long term stability and sustainability. Production of the independent cultural scene has been acknowledged and recognized in cultural circles in Croatia and due to its considerable level of networking and quality of the program it is the subject under discussion within the European cultural context. However, cultural NGO scene still lacks appropriate media coverage in Croatia. Despite considerable quantity and also quality of this production, the media and press do not cover their activities very thoroughly and in most cases they neglect this production in their coverage.