In January I was privileged to be invited to Perth by the Department of Culture and the Arts to participate as a Major Production Fund panel member and to meet with arts organisation to discuss the potential opportunities brought about by the rapid proliferation of Web 2.0 technologies, in particular Social Media tools. At that time, I was preoccupied with how the Royal Shakespeare Company could produce activity in the digital realm to connect and interact with a range of new, global audiences.

I am now Artistic Director of LIFT, the London International Festival of Theatre, and am keen to see this organisation at the forefront of thinking about our digital futures.

Digital technology trends

Everywhere we look the application of digital technologies is rapidly transforming our world and the way we communicate.  Only 5 years ago no one would have predicted that the mobile phone would become such a powerful tool in healthcare in rural communities in Africa; that 800,000 of Toronto’s 2 million inhabitants would communicate on Facebook; that over 100 million people would see a Britain’s Got Talent contestant sing on YouTube, catapulting her to international fame; or that the polymath Stephen Fry would have half a million people following his daily life on Twitter.  As Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, a seminal book that brilliantly captures the zeitgeist states:

“Billions of connected individuals can now actively participate online in innovation, wealth creation and social development in ways we once only dreamed of.  And when these masses of people collaborate they collectively can advance the arts, culture, science, education, government and the economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways.”

Yet despite being a trend setter in so many areas, the arts world is blinking into the headlights, paralysed by the fear that the communications revolution will either pass them by or run them down.  As a sector, we have just started to ultilise these new digital tools for our marketing and audience development activities: to help us push product more effectively to audiences down the cultural pipeline. But this belies their real power: the rise of web 2.0 social media technologies – Facebook, YouTube, RSS Feeds, wikis, Twitter, etc – are changing the rules of the rules of engagement between arts organisations and audiences forever.  We can no longer see audiences as segmented groups to communicate to, but networked individuals and communities sharing information and producing their own content.   The new web is changing society by changing the way we communicate: it is creating a new architecture of participation and engendering a new, participatory culture.  The impact of this technology has seen the emergence of new creative communities and artistic collaborations forged online that transcend the barriers of venues, professional and non-professional practice and will lead to a profound transformation in the way we innovate, communicate and produce. And it is only the artists and companies that engage with the explosion of creativity unleashed by these new and powerful tools that will discover the true dividends of collective capability and genius.

This paradigm shift has been borne out of a perfect storm where young people’s ease of using technology has met with falling costs.  In many places younger generations have no barriers to cross when using technology, for them it’s invisible, like the air we breathe (I recently witnessed a 3 year girl show her father how to use his iPhone!).  And the cost of technology has fallen so sharply that experimentation and failure is now cheap.  I bought my first Mac computer for $6183 in 1994 and my last PC lap top, with several hundred times the processing power, for around $620.

Revolution

This revolution is manifesting itself across all areas of society, including commerce, culture and politics. It is changing the way we organise and do business.  Wikinomics cites the inspiring story of GoldCorp a, US gold mining company on the verge of bankruptcy because they literally hadn’t struck gold in years.  Their new CEO did what his in-house geologists thought was the unthinkable: he published all of their mining data – their intellectual property online – and ran a competition inviting the public to analyse the data and suggest new gold seams.  And guess what this ‘crowdsourcing’ achieved? 77 detailed surveys that led to the discovery $5.51billion of gold, rocketing the market value of their company from $90million to $10billion (US) within a year. 

These technologies are also having a massive effect on the way we organise. Perhaps the most obvious example is Wikipedia the on-line encyclopaedia that is added to, updated and edited by users on-line.  It’s now the world’s most used encyclopaedia (which I noticed last week is being used as the interpretive materials in Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces), and yet it only employs a handful of people. 

Digital technologies have accelerated the development of collaborative production and the rise of what the British thinker and academic Charles Leadbetter terms the “pro-am” (or prosumer): innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to professional standards who fundamentally challenge our notion of where creativity emerges from.  Leadbetter argues that our traditional view is that creativity is about “special people in special places” - elite universities, rehearsal rooms, writers’ garrets etc.  In this new age creativity is increasingly collaborative and being influenced by Web 2.0 tools. For example, script development for the TV series Lost is now done by panels of non-professional writers sharing ideas online. Leadbetter tantalisingly asks us the question, “Imagine if 1% of your audience were co- developers – imagine what resources would be available to your organisation?”

What does this mean for the arts sector?

All of this has radically changed the expectation of our audiences: they are no longer prepared to only passively receive cultural experiences, because their experience of using technology helps them shape and tailor their own cultural experiences, to make and remake their culture. They are demanding a new, dynamic and collaborative relationship with us and they are bringing a new set of expectations to their exchanges with arts and cultural institutions.  As the founder of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig stated at LIFT’s Imagining a Cultural Commons enquiry, ‘All of us are ‘us’. We consume culture. The ‘them’ I want you to focus on are people who consume and create. They are our children. We experience culture as something that we take. They increasingly understand culture as something they make, or something they remake and remix and remake, something that they get and through the tools of this technology, recreate’. 

So in this striking new world what are the implications for artists and arts organisations?  Well put simply, if we fail to embrace the opportunities offered by these new technologies - especially those that enable our audiences to tailor their own experiences and to develop creativity collaboratively – then the arts increasingly won’t be seen as relevant by a large proportion of the population that has grown up digital.  Increasingly we need to start playing on the audiences turf and work much harder to understand our current and potential audiences. To understand the situation we are in, you only need to witness how the collapse of the traditional music industry model was precipitated by technology transforming the delivery of music: the growth of MP3 downloads, blogs, band sites and peer-to-peer networks allowed musicians and music organisations to reach their audiences in new ways.

So what might this look like in practice?  It might be My Fierce Festival  www.myfiercestival.co.uk a performance festival taking place in theatres but curated on-line by the public, following a debate between artists and 20,000 web visitors. Or Click, a crowd-curated exhibition at Brooklyn Museum www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click. Or Shoot Yourself Shakespeare, a festival organised by the Royal Shakespeare Company inviting people to film and submit their favourite Shakespeare scene to a YouTube partner page and with online tips on directing and acting from the company.  Or a theatre director twittering about their directorial approach live from the rehearsal room.  Or LIFT placing the first 20 years of its records on a publicly accessible digital archive to act as an inspirational resource for educators and the next generation of theatre makers www.liftfest.org.uk.

To succeed we will all require a new spirit of openness and a commitment to sharing and developing a culture of participation.  But the benefits, should we choose to embrace these technologies, will be immense. They will lead to a bright new future for the arts where more and more people are engaged not as audiences but as participants, providing a platform to encourage mass participation and collaboration in arts and culture and creating real cultural democracy. Far from being outdated and outpaced by this technology, we can adopt the kinds of behaviours forming in society, through the sheer force and pervasiveness of the new web, and adapt them. We can turn to the massive asset we have - the passionate army that is our public - and partner with them to help transform our sector.

About Mark Ball

Mark Ball is well known for his work with the Fierce! Festival as well as being both the Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the London International Festival of Theatre.  He has spent many years investigating the impact and opportunities of Web 2.0 on arts organisations. 

* Please note that this story is a third party contribution and the personal opinion of the author.The content of this article does not necessarily reflect the work or opnion of the Department of Culture and the Arts.