Communication of cultural institutions: open source and consumer as producer

The Italian economist Pier Luigi Sacco, a representative of the European Expert Network on Culture, in his presentation “Culture 3.0: A new perspective for the EU 2014-2020 structural funds programming” claims that contemporary situation in European culture is marked by the transition towards a new stage in the historical development. Characteristic to this new stage is the expansion of the possibilities of the production as opposite to the expansion of the demand and audiences in the previous stage, called Culture 2.0. New digital technologies make the professional tools for producing, treating and communicating texts, still and moving images, sound and multimedia available to almost everyone. Eventually, it is getting impossible to make a distinction between cultural producer and consumer. Such situation, as well as many other modern practices and grounding theories, that emphasize a changing consumer’s position in the field of economy, computer software, politics, media, institutions and finally in the cultural and creative spheres, is described by the term “prosumer” proposed by Alvin Toffler in 1980’s. Both Sacco and other theorists of the new developments in contemporary culture point out that the new possibilities came up mostly due to the technological factors such as ICT, Internet, Cellular Network, etc. For example, such prevailing concepts for productive participation as open source or interactivity are used to pinpoint alternative cultural practices (open access, free content, creative commons, crowdsourcing, open research, peer-to-peer, co-creation, free culture, etc.) retaining however the undertone of their prior technological context. However, the article argues, that by putting too much stress on the technological factors we risk to underestimate other, namely, political, economic and above all institutional contexts and their significance for real cultural change. The recent technological possibilities for involving the user, the spectator, the consumer of cultural goods may remain a purely formal appearance or even submerge him/her into even deeper passivity as the user becomes still deeper dependent on the “user-friendly” software programmes. Thus, technology, as well as audience involvement, interactivity or participation has to be considered in a complex relationship to the totality of social, economic and material production and reproduction, the Apparatus. A good example of how digital technologies can be used for art communication in a traditional way or participation-based way is described by Christie Carson in her article “Technology as a Bridge to Audience Participation”. The comparison of two examples of how theatres use the Internet for communication, points out that eventually it is not the technology as such that makes the difference but rather the willingness of the institutions to change the deep-rooted understandings of Creation, Artist, Theatre, Audience, etc., in short the traditional apparatus (as described by Bertold Brecht and Walter Benjamin). The recent developments of audience communication in Lithuanian theatres also often stand for technological, formal and aesthetical notion of audience involvement rather than looking for a true solidarity of artists and their public and breaking the barriers of the specialized professionalism