Summary

This research overview aims to contribute to building knowledge about the consequences of the ongoing digitalisation process for Nordic cultural sectors. The overview focuses on two areas crucial to digital cultural policy: the opportunities and challenges of digital cultural heritage as well as AI and its impacts on cultural life, cultural workers and cultural policy. The overview is based on research and cultural policy documents concerning the consequences of digitalisation for arts and culture in the Nordic countries. Its results are summarised below.

Digitalisation in Nordic cultural policy

Three themes on the opportunities and risks of digitalisation recur in Nordic cultural policy documents: opportunities for participation, and challenges regarding copyright and language:

Nordic cultural policy documents identify opportunities for increased participation and accessibility as a result of the digitalisation of arts and culture. Digitalisation is associated with democratic potential and opportunities for wider inclusion: digital tools are considered to be able to lower thresholds for the publics' cultural participation and to facilitate the inclusion of new voices in cultural life.
Digitalisation entails challenges for the copyright and livelihood of cultural workers in, e.g., music, literature and the film industry. The solutions are located to regulations at an international level considering the use of material on international online platforms.
The Nordic countries are minor countries with minor languages, and language strategies in Nordic digital cultural policy are applied as counterstrategies to Anglo-American cultural dominance on global digital platforms.

Alongside the common themes above, certain specific characteristics can also be identified among the digital cultural policies of various Nordic countries regarding, for example, a focus on diversity (Finland), computer games (Norway) and the business sector (Sweden).

Digitalisation in the cultural sector

Digital cultural policy is characterised by convergence, i.e., an integration of all media as well as cultural content, platforms and technological tools. Furthermore, cultural policy goals are implemented through digital tools, and cultural policy overlaps with other policy areas that affect digital production, distribution and consumption. Digital platforms have become crucial to the infrastructure of arts and culture and to cultural practices in the Nordic countries. Platform rules and automated recommendation systems shape the content and dissemination of culture. This leads to new cultural policy challenges, given that a few global platform companies dominate the digital market, whose priorities do not necessarily coincide with the cultural policy goals of the Nordic countries.

Crucial Nordic cultural policy goals are enabled by digitalisation: increased participation and increased cultural democracy. However, scholarly perspectives identify both democratisation as well as increasing polarisation and digital divides in the wake of the digitalisation of arts and culture. Since the early 1990s optimism over the democratic potential of the Internet and digitalisation, sceptical and critical perspectives have increasingly emerged. This also includes questioning the determinism that has characterised digital cultural policy.

The digitalisation of cultural heritage

Digitalisation of cultural heritage aims to ensure the publics' right to cultural heritage and to increase accessibility by making cultural heritage more attainable to everyone, regardless of when and where. However, digitalisation in and by itself neither guarantees increased participation, nor relevance: the existence of digital cultural heritage does not automatically entail that people will be able to locate, navigate or understand it. Nevertheless, interactive technology has meant new digital tools and opportunities for cultural heritage dissemination, as well as increasingly higher expectations on the digital presentation of cultural heritage information. Memorial institutions have gradually developed a large part of their digital presence on digital platforms in order to reach wider audiences. Simultaneously, the heritage sector’s use of new technologies has evolved into a balanced use of digital technology as a complement to physical collections and settings, where digital technology is used in specialised ways in order to facilitate understanding of the physical collections.

Memory institutions' digitalisation of material, as well as immaterial, objects and phenomena involves a critical selection of which aspects and characteristics to preserve, and which not to. Another challenge facing the heritage sector is the management of large amounts of data, especially when it comes to 3D scans. Technical expertise as well as standardisation is necessary in order to store data and to present digital heritage to the public, but a large part of the sector lacks sufficient resources and skills to meet these demands. At the same time, both the Covid pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine have reinforced the importance of digitising cultural heritage and changed memorial institutions’ understandings of their mission statements as well as their approaches to using digital tools.

AI, cultural production and cultural policy

Artificial intelligence (AI) is used to produce cultural content, such as drama, music, illustration, photography and film. Today it is difficult, even for experts, to differentiate between human and machine-generated cultural products. This has led to a scholarly discussion about the implications of AI has for the labour markets of cultural workers, specifically considering income levels and copyright. At the same time, the impact of AI on the conditions of cultural creators varies between sectors, and certain sub-sectors (e.g., illustration, graphic design and translation) are considered to be more at risk than others. Simultaneously, there are scholars who identify an increased demand for human creativity as a competitive advantage in the wake of machine-based creativity.

Research on copyright points to the limitations of existing regulations when facing AI. There are scholars who suggest some type of licensing or fund to compensate for cultural creators' loss of income.

The development of AI also challenges the idea that only products deriving from solely human creativity should be protected or regulated. In addition, AI challenges the idea that creativity is a prerogative to be reserved for humans only. An updated digital cultural policy therefore needs to discuss whether the protection, regulation and remuneration of human creation should always have precedence over machine-generated creation.

Key policy issues and future knowledge needs

Based on the material presented, Kulturanalys Norden draws the following conclusions:

In addressing digitalisation, the cultural policies of the Nordic countries have generally revolved around three themes: possibilities for increased, widened and deepened participation; the risks of digitalisation in relation to cultural creators' copyright and financial conditions; and the conditions for minor languages to persevere on an international digital market.
In relation to participation in cultural life, research identifies a number of positive impacts associated with digitalisation, for example, increased opportunities to participate in arts and culture, and increased possibilities for interactivity and co-creation. At the same time, research identifies risks considering digital divides and the continued correlations between socio-economic factors and cultural participation. When it comes to the social and economic conditions of artists and cultural creators, research points to new possibilities regarding new production tools and new opportunities to disseminate artistic and cultural content. At the same time, there are risks of diminishing compensation for artists. Research also raises concerns with digital platform relations, algorithm-controlled cultural consumption and algorithm-controlled creative processes. The consequences differ between cultural areas, and the specific effects remain largely unexplored.
Digitalisation has brought new opportunities to document, store and present cultural heritage. This does not in and by itself guarantee increased participation or relevance. Research indicates that socio-economic inequalities continue to affect access to cultural heritage despite its increased digital presence.
AI has meant that the digital cultural policies of the Nordic countries need to address risks to cultural creators' copyright and livelihood. By extension, this means determining whether human creativity should always be prioritised over machine-generated creativity.

Digitalisation has brought new possibilities for participation, but it remains to be further explored how, for example, socio-economic inequalities affect access to digital arts and culture as well as to cultural heritage. It furthermore remains to be explored in what ways cultural creators’ livelihood, in different cultural industry segments, is affected by digital tools, algorithms and AI – and how the relation between participants, cultural creators and digital platforms has evolved over time in the Nordic countries.

Another question that could be further explored is the relationship between the computer game industry and digital cultural policies in the Nordic region.

A future issue for the Nordic countries is the digital preservation of cultural heritage in the light of heightened international risks (prompted by war and security threats), and subsequent directives. This calls for the further investigation of digital heritage strategies as well as the provision of relevant skills and resources.

The consequences for ecological sustainability, as a result of cultural digitalisation as well as digital cultural heritage, is a crucial issue. A life cycle analysis is thus required to estimate the environmental consequences of digital culture and digital cultural heritage.