2020

			
21 Apr 2008

			
What About the Digital Agenda?

			
By Stuart Cunningham

						

																											

						
2020's focus on traditional arts funding came at the expense of our creative growth sectors, writes Creative Australia delegate Stuart Cunningham

			The Australia 2020 Summit brought people from the heights and the streets together to meet and exchange ideas. It was an exciting concept that produced many valuable ideas. 


In Creative Australia, there was a general consensus around the need to value the arts and to argue for a more sustainable future for the sector. Urgent as this agenda is, it tended to come at the expense of ideas development in areas such as architecture and built environment (a key link to the sustainability agenda), design (a key link between creative and other industries, from manufacturing to services) and the emerging area of digital content and the creative economy.



In the 10-15 years-into-the-future timeframe that the Summit was predicated on, I thought these emerging trends, and core creative industry sectors, could have received more attention.



I was intrigued that when mention was made of "digital content", it was mostly assumed that this meant infrastructure or digitising the content of cultural institutions. These are both crucial aspects of the digital agenda, but the key point is that there is a whole new industry sector emerging out of the convergence of communications, culture and social innovation. By 2020, Australia should be participating strongly in a rapidly expanding digital economy. 



The digital agenda includes facilitating the growth of industry sectors that will provide today's young "digital natives" with career opportunities that are barely on the horizon now. It means a major overhaul of teacher training and school curricula to embrace digital and creative literacies, using rather than banning social media in schools. 




And understanding the "creative economy" means grasping the fact that there are more workers in creative occupations outside the creative industries than inside them. Creative skills are needed right across the economy. Digital content creation is set to become the general purpose technology of the 21st century.



There will be many participants who will be distressed about the Creative Australia strand's late reframing of its priorities. This reframing, seen to some extent in the final communiqué handed to the Prime Minister on Sunday afternoon, and in his own final address to the assembled multitude, placed less of an emphasis on artistic practice and sought to connect the arts to science, innovation and the economy. As long as this rhetoric of linkage is accompanied by tough targets to deliver on the aspiration, it is a rhetoric that I support.


						

	
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					andl 21/04/08 2:22PM

					

						
This seems a little too close to Geert Lovink’s recent post/ideas here

http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/2008/04/03/future-of-the-internet-i…


You might want to give him a credit :)

					



					jasmine 21/04/08 3:05PM

					

						
Huh? they’re nothing like each other. wrong link??

					



					ben.eltham 21/04/08 3:08PM

					

						
Andl, I don’t know if Stuart was really borrowing anyone’s ideas but his own - Stuart has been writing about these areas for many years now and is a well-respected academic in the fields of creative industries and digital media.


I happen to agree with Stuart and Gert - the ideas that seem to have emerged from the summit were disappointingly conventional. Some of them were noble but poorly defined ("doubling cultural output" sounds great until you stop to consider that we don’t even have an ABS measure of what "cultural output" is). Some off them, like the 1% funding outlay from each federal government department, were downright bad policy, as I’ll be writing about later this week.

					



					andl 21/04/08 4:48PM

					

						
Hi,

the two key points of Geert’s comments are

- cultural institutions should stop focussing on merely digitising the past

- we need to come to terms with the realities of ‘digital natives’ and look towards the future


Points i agree with, perhaps it’s mere coincidence but the same ideas were repeated in this story. Obviously it’s possible to come to the same conclusions, but uncanny to use the same phrases such as "digital natives". 


Anyway, I’m not accusing anyone of anything, just pointing out a coincidence.

					



					rachelhills 21/04/08 5:18PM

					

						
andl - I’m pretty sure the phrase ‘digital native’ is in wide circulation amongst those who are interested in these issues. I’ve heard it many times before. It even has its own Wikipedia page (it was coined by Marc Prensky, it seems): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native

					



					gracog 22/04/08 12:58PM

					

						
It certainly is, rachelhills. Prensky’s paper "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" was published in 2001. It’s available at http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Di…

					



					tonywalker 23/04/08 1:35PM

					

						
antipodes


Stuart, I couldn’t agree more with your point: "…understanding the "creative economy" means grasping the fact that there are more workers in creative occupations outside the creative industries than inside them. Creative skills are needed right across the economy. Digital content creation is set to become the general purpose technology of the 21st century."


I’ve read only the initial summit report, while finding it hard to navigate through the mix of cynical and smarty pants media commentary. But it’s my impression that the extent of the paradigm shift being delivered by always-on digital networks, accessible, low-cost digital production tools, an emerging generation of digitally literate citizens and an almost boundless new capacity for participation in the manufacture of meaning, completely eluded most of the politicians and policy makers who were at the summit. In fact, so enveloping is this emerging new context, that I find it difficult to consider any of the 10 subject areas that were up for discussion as not being profoundly affected by it.


My guess is that high-speed broadband (if Australia’s proposed 12 MB can be considered that when compared to 40 to 100 MB in Japan, Korea, France, Germany and increasingly more countries) will bring some further realisation of just how big these changes are when we get hit by another wave of engagement and creativity generated by the better quality experience and added opportunities. But sadly, I doubt that it will be the policy makers who will get it, or the senior managers in our corporations. They just don’t seem to get how much opportunity is there to be realised. They regard the digital natives in their departments and corporations as ferals, not be taken seriously, when they should be seen as the people who can show them how to innovate and survive in a vastly different future.


At the moment all the focus here is on the technology, which is just an enabler. We need to understand exactly what new behaviours are being enabled and how they are game changers for all the policy areas that came under the 2020 spotlight. That’s the challenge, and when it we start to grapple with it some genuinely new ideas could emerge.

					



					stuartcunningham 23/04/08 10:40PM

					

						
Stuart Cunningham


Thanks for the comments one and all. Yes digital natives was being used from the early 2000s. Rupert Murdoch, for one, used it to assert that News Corp had to change and change fast. Well before Gert, and me!

					



					Chris-Hudson 24/04/08 12:41PM

					

						
Yeah it’s sad that 2020 didn’t look at how to help government use digital technologies to make the world a better place, stuff like:


* using gaming for community imput, eg in urban design

* engendering localism

* helping direct digital content creation towards sustainablilty