CULTURAL INDUSTRIES - International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science

A term used to describe the commercial activities that promote or facilitate the use of culture in the broadest sense. It thus includes publishing, cinema and almost all broadcasting. It also includes many other activities such as entertainment, sport and many aspects of cultural heritage in general, including access to much of the built and natural environment such as historic houses and national parks. There are several parallel concepts such as entertainment industries, knowledge industries, creative industries andcontentindustries. The concept of content industries became particularly common in the European Union in the 1990s.

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History of cultural industries

The concept of cultural industries was created by members of the Frankfurt School of social sciences working in Los Angeles, and was embo- died in theDialectic of Enlightenment, by Theo- dor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, originally published in 1944 (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). Walter Benjamin believed that multiplied and industrially produced cultural industries could function as a source of enlightenment to the masses. Unlike him, Adorno and Horkheimer criticized the phenomenon of cultural industries as a passive mass culture. Adorno himself de- scribed mass culture as ‘the bad social conscience of high culture’. According to them, the cultural industries can be traced back to the European cultural monopolies at the beginning of the twentieth century. The history of the cultural industries during the twentieth century reflects the continuing debate between these two ways of approaching the issue: the positive attitude to cultural industries as a democratic force, and the negative attitude that identifies an increasing cultural passivity among the masses.

The proportion of immaterial exchange in the economy is continuously on the increase and it is evolving into a central growth factor for national economies in the future. At a global level, this development is already visible. Competitiveness is increasingly dependent on the level of control and knowledge of the international market of cultural significances. Successful products are charged with symbolic value, be they intangible goods or traditional commodities. Culture is the innovation reserve for this immaterial production. Cultural industries provide new economic opportunities for creativity in a world where immaterial exchange, and in particular the exchange of cultural significances, is a rapidly growing area, and of important potential for the innovation of economy both at national and international levels.

As a form of exchange of symbols and social meanings cultural industry is by no means new;

on the contrary, it is an ancient action concept of human communities. In the long run, however, the focus is shifting more and more from commodity production to production of symbols.

The future will see a shift of focus from the information society towards the society of meaning, which emphasizes production of signification, or meaning industries. Cultural industries

may also be considered from an ecological point of view as an alternative form of sustainable development to support living and material culture, as a key element of social and economic development that results in social inclusion, environmental protection and the reduction of poverty.

Definitions

The concept of cultural industries is problematic, because it combines two separate spheres, traditionally far apart from each other: artistic creativity and economic production. This combination forces us to evaluate the points of convergence and the section surfaces of these two spheres in a new light; therefore, the concept of cultural industry may function as a producer of new questions and solutions. In addition, the concept is well adapted for describing the increase of immaterial exchange in the global action environment. Symbolic exchange is a typical growth area of the supranational economy in post-industrial production.

The concept of cultural industry can be defined on several levels. Existing definitions can be classified into four groups as follows.

According to the most general definition, cultural industry is production based on the meaning of contents. This general definition covers traditional commodity production mar- keted by cultural meaning, for instance design, clothing or any kind of brand product. According to this general definition, cultural industry is a perspective on several sectors of industry, because, in addition to the different core areas like, for instance, the entertainment industry, it en- compasses sports, the clothing industry and almost every form of trade in the world, for the meanings connected to commodity production dictate demand, supply and consumption. The definition is interesting, but it easily leads to the conclusion that ‘everything is cultural industry’

and makes it, therefore, difficult to grasp in specific terms. On the other hand, the general definition enables us to visualize and compre- hend ongoing social processes and development of perceptions in society. It enables us to deter- mine the new infrastructure of a society of cultural industry, and the educational needs of the citizens in this environment.

On another level, cultural industry could be defined as an industry covering both the fields CULTURAL INDUSTRIES 113

of traditional and modern art and culture, from artistic creation to distribution: the creative work of an artist, its further development and commercialization to a piece of work, the presentation of the work and its distribution and reception. According to this definition cultural industry covers literature, the plastic arts, music, architecture, theatre, dance, photo- graphy, cinema, industrial design, media art and other fields of creative and performing arts. It also includes the production and distribution systems of art and culture, such as publishing (books, newspapers and magazines, music in recorded and printed form), programme production, galleries, the art trade, libraries, museums, radio, television and Web-art. This definition provides an opportunity to present action pro- posals for new guidelines for traditional art and cultural institutions in the context of a society of cultural industry.

The third group of definitions is based on the criteria of replication and multiplication, which emphasize the role of electronic production. In this definition, the criteria for determining the extent of the cultural industry are mainly related to commercial success, mass audiences and the reproducibility of works of art. In this case cultural industry comprises cinema, television, radio, publishing activity, music industry and production of cultural content. Cultural content production can be linked with a particular field of activity. Cultural content production means producing cultural material, and then distributing and presenting it through various media in such a manner that it gener- ates business activity. The ‘culturality’ of this material is determined according to the community’s prevalent views of culture; it is, therefore, a variable definition.

The fourth, and the narrowest, definition of cultural industry is from the perspective of cultural entrepreneurship. In this case, the production of art and culture is seen as entrepreneurship: cultural contents are the commodities, and the value and distinction of the exchanged products are based on significances, whether the products and services are material or immaterial.

The concept of cultural industry is more a general perspective on producing and distributing creativity than an exactly definable, strictly limited operational starting point. It might be better to talk about ‘producing creativity’ or

‘creative production’ than about cultural indus-

tries. On the other hand, a concept that links the arts and culture sector to the economy as a whole and to the concept of production is useful in the sense that it questions traditional modes of thought and can, at its best, create new kinds of bridges between these areas that now are seen as separate. Creativity always involves new kinds of combinations of the existing definitions and classifications.

The concept of cultural industry is still fluid and, therefore, controversial. The concept must be redefined for each context. For example, there is a need for definitions that permit the collection of better statistics about the sector, which can in turn underpin the future planning process.

Cultural industries is an umbrella concept that combines the phenomena of creative production, such as opportunities for employment in cultural professions, differentiation of audiences and fulfilment of their diverse needs, with current cultural policy, recognizing the possibi- lities of creative human capital in the development of national and international innovation systems.

Value chain of the cultural industries Cultural activity can be analysed by dividing it into different phases of action with the help of the concept of the ‘value chain’, used in economic theory. The value chain consists of content creation, content development, content packaging, marketing and distribution to final audience, or consumers. As regards cultural industries it is important to emphasize the importance of feedback and reformulate the value chain into the form of a circle (see Figures 7–9).

The value circle covers all the phases of cultural production, from the artist’s idea to the audience or customers and the effect on them.

The value circle includes content creation, development and packaging for different channels of distribution, and marketing and distribution to consumers. Actors in the various phases of the value circle include artists, producers, marketing professionals and the audience itself. The cultural industries value circle has a positive potential in society: if a society has high capacity for cultural signification it produces more and more cultural signification. Thus, cultural signification is in principle a resource with no limits.

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Figure 8 Value circle of cultural production Copyright Hannele Koivunen, www.hanneleinen.com

Figure 7 Value circle of the cultural information society Copyright Hannele Koivunen, www.hanneleinen.com

Libraries and information services as cultural industries

In the value chain of cultural industries, libraries belong most evidently to the phase of distribution, but, if we consider the issue more closely, the role of libraries is more complicated, and actually libraries penetrate the whole circle.

Creativity always depends on knowing the signification of the community. Library collections are a crucial resource of cultural heritage for the information society, from which all kinds of creativity get raw material. Innovations are developed as continuity from the past or in reaction to it. Libraries form an essential infrastructure for a networking information community, and for realizing the right to knowledge for citizens in the information society. Libraries also develop information and signification products for information retrieval, and have a pivotal role in the distribution of information. Through libraries new cultural products go into the value circle as feedback, and strengthen the capacity of society for new cultural production.

Library products

The core of library know-how comes from designing and creating products in the field of metadata. Metadata can be defined as creating the knowledge of both form and content that describes various meanings of documents. Tradi- tionally this means cataloguing, classification andindexing bibliographic data and the information content of cultural products. The use of information and communication technol- ogy has, however, added new elements to this process, and we can define three dimensions of metadata: technical surroundings, the traditional field of metadata and the added-value development of products.

The traditional field of metadata consists of cataloguing, classifying, indexing and all kinds of description for the content of documents. The dimension of technical surroundings consists of all kinds of technical solutions like standards and formats (such as the anglo-american cataloguing rules(AACR) or dublin core), which are essential for distributing information, for example, on the Web. Technical solutions Figure 9 Electronic applications of cultural production

form the basis for such distribution, but very often they simultaneously intermingle with choosing content opportunities, and creating functioning metadata products. In the cultural industries, as in other sectors, post-industrial production is characterized by networking, flex- ible action models and the use of new technol- ogy, where technical solutions, products and services are blurred.

The field of library products development will in the future be creating more and more focused on-demand added-value metadata products. Li- braries may develop metadata products creating quality portals (see portals and gateways) on the Web, and, while fulfilling classical information roles with abstracts, summaries, criticism and packaged information on different themes for special audiences and customers. Libraries have traditionally networked both locally and globally with each other, but the development of library products will increasingly be mixed with creating new kind of network solutions. We might even say that library networks form the interface and infrastructure for distributing metadata.