Page 47 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014GARTNER HYPE GRAPHtransformation of the artistic experience itself, as the figure tries to show in a very simplified way.HORIZON 2020The technology consultants Gartner annually publish their famous Gartner Hype graph of technology evolution. To understand it, it is important to pay attention to the horizontal axis, which represents a very well‐known model developed by this consultancy to explain the curve of technology adoption. According to Gartner, in the most optimistic scenario technologies begin with a “technology trigger”, reach a “peak of inflated expectations”, pass through the “trough of disillusionment”, progress to a stage of “recognition of utility” and finally some of them are consolidated and “stabilised”, while others are left by the wayside and slide into the abyss as they descend into the trough of disillusionment.With the modesty that any prediction demands, and in reverse order of appearance, probably those that will have the greatest impact on the cultural sector have already been mentioned in this article, and they are virtual and augmented reality, the NFC technologies used in mobile payments, the new wearable user interfaces, Big Data, gamification and the Internet of things we have just discussed.According to a report by Jupiter Research, today only 60 million people use augmented realityAC/Eapplications regularly, although is calculated that there will be 333% growth by 2018 in the use of smart phones and smart glasses that involve augmented reality. It is also expected that by then they will have slipped out of their gaming stronghold and invaded daily life. By 2018 the same consultancy estimates that there will be 200 million users of augmented reality mobile applications. Regarding the evolution of the IoT, analysts disagree; Morgan Stanley predicts there will be 75 billion devices connected to the Internet of Things by 2020 and a market analysis by Berg Insight predicts a growth of 360 million by 2016.CONCLUSION: DIGITAL CULTURE AT THE FRONTIER BETWEEN ART AND TECHNOLOGYThe study Digital Culture2 by Aleksandra Uzelac and Biserka Cvjeticanin, published by UNESCO, begins with the following idea:Digital culture is a new and complex notion [...] The new possibilities created by communication and information technologies—global connectivity and network growth—challenge our traditional way of understanding culture, extending it towards digital culture too. So that culture today must be understood as an open, dynamic process based on communication and interactivity, and we must not think of it as a closed system that turns us into a cultural mosaic in comparison with other, similar or different, cultures.The benefit for society of the new technological possibilities, in terms of the elimination of cultural frontiers and the cultural inclusion of the most disadvantaged societies, is clear. But not everything is positive: there is also the risk of a growth of the digital divide as the new technologies involve more complex and costly technologies3. Although access to the first Internet has been cheap, the world that is emerging around it is already not so cheap. Concerns over the use of Big Data to avoid our entering a truly hellish technological empire are not trivial. In this regard, in his article “ReinventingWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 4: CULTURE IN THE CLOUD CURRENT PAGE...47