Modelling Cultural Value in New Media Cultures of Networked Participation

This collaborative and interdisciplinary research project between Tate, the Royal College of Art and London South Bank University (2013/14) was based upon the recognition that contemporary professional practice, policy-formation and understandings of cultural value remain resolutely analogue despite the profound changes in how knowledge and contemporary culture is being produced and experienced. This is due to the fundamental changes in human communication that digital technologies and network cultures are creating. Prevailing accounts and concepts of cultural value are essentially based upon representational systems and forms, which were originally developed in relationship to analogue technologies. Whilst our social, political and cultural value systems remain tied to representational forms through which society and the individual are constructed and identified, network culture is defined by new non-representational forms of distributed communication and exchange of value in which both the social and the human are being reconstituted. The key problem which this project addressed was that despite the substantial amount of research analysing the impact of digital technology and the rise of network culture, this research has yet to easily translate into the professional practices of new media nor the policy field of new media and cultural value. The reason for this is rooted in the separation of the practical spheres of theory, practice and policy which itself is historically based upon representational systems of knowledge. This project sought to develop new understandings of network culture required to develop new modes of knowledge production which are closer to and connected with the new conditions of network culture. The project aimed to address the problem of both the limits of representational thinking and the separation of its modes of knowledge production in relationship to analogue and digital cultures by a practice-led enquiry. The project experimented with dialogic and interdisciplinary modeling of new knowledge by bringing together practitioners, theorists and policy-makers who are inter-connected through existing institutional practices and partnerships. In collaboration with Tate the project adopted a situated approach to engage with Tate's own networked practices as a means of tracing value in network relations and producing a dialogic response from the network. It focused upon Tate's digital projects and research initiatives across Tate Media, Tate Learning, Tate Collections and Tate Communications to examine its modes of digital access and co-production. The publication is an account of the final research findings of the project which are currently being developed for a new AHRC grant application