There is a cultural revolution going on right in front of our eyes. Consumers are becoming producers, an unprecedented move within cultural history and within our economies. Pier Luigi Sacco, Guido Ferilli and Giorgio Tavano Blessi delve into European history to highlight just how important this new transition is.
The misconceptions about the role of culture in the contemporary economic framework can be traced back to the persistence of obsolete conceptualizations of the relationship between cultural activity and the generation of economic (and social) value added. For centuries such a relationship has been structured according to what we could call the Culture 1.0 model, which basically revolves around the concept of patronage. The Culture 1.0 model is typical of a pre-industrial economy. In this context, culture is neither a proper economic sector of the economy nor it is accessible to the majority of potential audiences. The actual provision of culture is secured by the individual initiative of patrons: people with large financial possibilities and high social status, who derived their wealth and status from sources other than cultural commissioning in itself but decided to employ some of their resources to ensure that cultural producers could make a living, thereby getting the possibility to enjoy the outcome of creative production and to share it with their acquaintances.
Patronizing culture may of course be an effective means of further building the patron’s social status and reputation. But it is clear that this is made possible by the availability of resources that are gathered outside the cultural sphere, and that cultural production here entirely lives on subsidies and could not survive otherwise. In the patronage relationship, the wage of cultural producers tends to be regarded not as part of a market transaction, but rather as a sort of symbolic, mutual exchange of gifts between the patron and the artist –
a practice that still survives in some cultural realms and finds intriguing applications in new, culturally-mediated social platforms. Clearly this model can support only a very limited number of cultural producers who entirely live upon the discretional power of the patron and very limited audiences. Both the production of, and the access to, culture are therefore severely limited by economic and social barriers where cultural production is related to the promotion of the elite of a society, more than to the development of a sense of belonging and inclusion of the entire civil society.With the massive social changes produced by the Industrial Revolution and with the concurrent political revolutions that led to the birth of the modern nation states, we witness a widening of the cultural
audiences made possible by a few concurrent circumstances. Firstly, the political revolutions questioned all sorts of privileges of the ruling classes and a new view emerges that gradually legitimizes access to culture as a universal right that is part of the very idea of citizenship . Secondly, with the steady improvement of the living conditions of the working classes, there is a corresponding increase in the willingness to pay for some forms
of cultural entertainment. Access to cultural goods and opportunities remains limited until the outbreak of the “cultural Industrial Revolution” occurring in the decades just before and after the turn of the twentieth
century, which create the technological conditions for the creation of cultural mass markets. Even before this crucial phase the development of the modern nation states led to the emergence of forms of public
patronage. States devoted public resources to the support of culture and the arts to the benefit of the society as a whole. Thus it becomes possible to speak of cultural public policies and of the corresponding cultural policy
models. It is during this period that cultural policies acquire a greater awareness of their role in fostering the sense of citizenship, even though the approach persists in being top down with the risk to foster extremism
and nationalism. It is important to stress that the notion of cultural public policy is still rooted in the Culture 1.0 model, however advanced and mature it might seem. The patronizing role is no longer exclusively
in the hands of single individuals but becomes a public function.Culture is still an economically unproductive activity which absorbs resources produced in other sectors of the economy. When the “cultural Industrial Revolution” occurs around the turn of the twentieth century the
technological possibility of cultural mass markets becomes a reality with the introduction of modern printing, photography, cinema, recorded music, radio broadcasting and so on. This not only allows for new cultural
products but also makes them available to much wider audiences and at increasingly affordable prices. We have thus entered the Culture 2.0 phase. In Culture 2.0 audiences expand significantly, whereas cultural production is still severely controlled by entrance barriers as the access to productive technologies is difficult and financially expensive. As a result many wouldbe cultural producers are filtered out by complex selection systems which differ from one cultural sector to another. Culture 2.0 is a new form of the relationship between cultural production and the generation of economic value, dominated by the expansion of the cultural and creative industries. Unlike Culture 1.0, in Culture 2.0 there are cultural and creative activities that produce economic value and are even profitable, but they represent a specific and minor sector of the whole economy.
A new revolution
At first, the idea of cultural mass production is not universally welcomed, as it is regarded as a powerful tool of mass manipulation and deception, but with time cultural industries become a fully legitimized and
At first, the idea of cultural mass production is not universally welcomed, as it is regarded as a powerful tool of mass manipulation and deception, but with time cultural industries become a fully legitimized and
sought after economic and social driver, stimulated by a marked increase in leisure time among the populace. The discovery of the economic potential of cultural and creative industries may be seen as a mature
development of the Culture 2.0 phase. In this advanced phase, public policies are increasingly addressing not only issues of enhancing access of audiences to cultural products and experiences but also of enhancing
productive and entrepreneurial capacities in these sectors in the light of their increasingly relevant contribution to the macroeconomic level of activity. A drawback of an excessive focusing on the economic potential
of cultural and creative industries is the misleading emphasis given to the profitability of the single value chains which cause the concentration of resources toward supporting the best performing sectors at the expense
of the others, with the consequence of compromising the viability of both in view of the complex inter-sector relationships that tie them together. In creating appropriate policies for the cultural industries, it is a particularly
difficult task to use familiar economizing models of profit maximizing. In the cultural and creative realms, expressive rationality, intrinsic motivation and social exchange are essential aspects which often lead to forms of interaction which are not mediated by markets.
But despite the fact that the Culture 2.0 phase is relatively young, a new wave of technological innovation has laid down the tracks for the transition to a further phase. We could call this Culture 3.0. It is still in its
very preliminary stage, so that we could characterize the present moment as a complex, transitional situation. Such a new phase is characterized by innovations that, unlike the previous one, not only cause an expansion
of the demand possibilities but also, and mainly, an expansion of the production ones. Today one can easily have access to production technology that allow professional treatment of text, stills, moving images,
sound and multimedia with impressively quick learning curves and at very cheap prices. This is something that, before the explosion of the personal computing revolution and thus no longer than a couple of decades ago,
would have simply been unthinkable. If the Culture 2.0 revolution has been characterized by an explosion of the size of cultural markets, the Culture 3.0 revolution is characterized by the explosion of the pool of producers, so that it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between cultural producers and users. They become interchanging roles that each individual assumes. Likewise, the predominance of cultural markets is
increasingly challenged by the diffusion and expansion of communities of practice where members interact on the basis of non market-mediated exchanges – a change that is made possible by the scale and speed of
connectivity among players being made possible by online platforms. The hallmark of the Culture 3.0 phase is thus the transformation of audiences – who are still the reference of the classical phase of cultural
industry – into practitioners thereby defining a new, fuzzy and increasingly manifold notion of authorship and intellectual property. Accessing cultural experiences increasingly challenges individuals to develop their own
capabilities to assimilate and manipulate in personal ways the cultural contents they are being exposed to.The passive reception patterns of the “classical” cultural industries phase are now being substituted by
active, engaging reception patterns. The other hallmark of this phase is the pervasiveness of culture which ceases to be a specific form of entertainment to become an essential ingredient of the texture of everyday life, as is by now particularly apparent in consumption practices. To keep focusing upon the cultural and creative industries as a separated,specific macro-sector of the economy may be seriously misleading. It is necessary to develop a new, system-wide representation of the structural interdependencies between the cultural and creative industries and the other sectors of the economy – and even of society. This change of
perspective has important consequences in the approach to policies as well, which in turn may also have positive effects for the development of the sense of belonging and citizenship within the European Union.
Unexploited potential
A clear signal that there is a widely felt need to overcome the traditional Culture 2.0 focus on the mere sectorial growth of cultural and creative industries is that, in making cases for the developmental role of this macro-sector, increasing attention is being paid to the effects that it may produce in terms of creative spillovers positively affecting other sectors. So far arguments about the spillover effects of culture and
A clear signal that there is a widely felt need to overcome the traditional Culture 2.0 focus on the mere sectorial growth of cultural and creative industries is that, in making cases for the developmental role of this macro-sector, increasing attention is being paid to the effects that it may produce in terms of creative spillovers positively affecting other sectors. So far arguments about the spillover effects of culture and
creativity have been brought rather casually and without a well-defined conceptual background. This has not helped to capture the attention, let alone to convince, policy makers. Reasoning on the basis of the Culture
2.0 to Culture 3.0 transition, it becomes easier to explain why and how culture matters for the general economy.
The key of the argument lies in moving the focus from the economic outcomes of cultural activity to the behaviors that cause them. In order to understand the effects of culture outside of the cultural realm, we have
to consider how cultural access changes the behavior of individuals and groups.One of the most evident effects has to do with the cornerstone of the Culture 3.0 phase: active cultural participation. By active cultural participation, we mean a situation in which individuals do not limit themselves to absorb passively the cultural stimuli, but are motivated to put their skills to work. This means not simply hearing music, but playing; not simply reading texts, but writing, and so on. By doing so individuals challenge themselves to expand their capacity of expression, to renegotiate their expectations and beliefs and to reshape their own social identity and cohesiveness. In particular, it is important to stress that capability building and skills acquisition is not merely an individual activity but a highly social one and crucially depends upon the social environment in which individuals are embedded. The interesting aspect of active participation is that individuals are not simply exposed to cultural experiences, but take a dive into the rules that generate them. They have to learn to play with the “source code” that is behind the generation of cultural meaning.Active participation fosters further interest and curiosity toward exploring cultural experiences and goods produced by others; a classical positive feedback dynamics where each component reinforces the other. In the Culture 3.0 context individuals structure their cultural interests as densely interwoven runs of expression and reception, i.e. micro-phases in which they are active and “transmitting” and phases in which they are passive and ”receiving”. The acquisition of cultural skills motivates them to transmit, raises the level of attention and critical filtering toward the received contents, prompts further willingness to transmit new contents and so on, thus paving the way for a variety of new forms of open innovation and co-creation, for the increasing role of social media platforms, for all forms of knowledge-intensive and experienceintensive socio-economic practices and more.
Some of the positive systemic effects of cultural access can be generated also within a traditional mode of passive reception, but if we limit ourselves to this (obsolete) perspective, we are unable to appreciate
the whole picture. The system of interdependences between the indirect developmental effects of culture (including social cohesion, welfare, sustainability, innovation, local identity, lifelong learning, soft power and new entrepreneurship) give us the sense of a proper Culture 3.0 framework where active cultural access and participation becomes the social norm and the natural orientation of knowledge economies and civil
societies. This is not to say that the direct social and macroeconomic effect of the growth of cultural and creative industries becomes negligible or less important in this phase. Quite the contrary. As we have argued,
there is a strong complementarity between the direct social and economic channel and the indirect ones, in that they concur to increase individual participation and access to cultural opportunities and stimulate further
culturally-related capability building.
Auteur: Pier Luigi Sacco is Full professor in Cultural Economics at the University IULM of Milan. Guido Ferilli is Senior fellow at the University of Milan IULM Economics and teaches at the University IUAV in Venice and University San Raffaele in Milan. Giorgio Tavano Blessi is postdoctoral fellow at the University of Milan IULM and teaches at the LUB -Free University of Bolzen and Trento University.
