Page 63 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014feels, the way it smells and the fact that, once read, it can be sold and part of its original purchase price recouped. Furthermore, people say it is easier to lend to someone else.The study also publishes some of the comments made by those interviewed such as, “Books are status symbols, you can't really see what someone has read on their Kindle”.These are crucial days for the cultural sector in which a determined effort must be made to get ahead. In many cases a “paralysis of analysis” can be observed in which nobody makes a move until they see what other people are doing and so on successively. Meanwhile, the “great digital protagonists” are forging ahead, occupying ever more of the terrain once held by bookshops.All the people involved, authors, publishers, bookshops, have to realise that they are obliged to understand each other with the aim of evolving towards a model that is sustainable and comfortable for readers.One of the consequences of this integration between the two environments is the disappearance of intermediaries. Authors, working in any format, no longer need the whole administrative chain of publishers, curators, distributors and marketing, etc., to make their work known throughout the world. There are hundreds of initiatives, mostly quite significant ones, that enable any artist to publish and make their work known via the Internet.Today’s authors participate very actively in marketing actions to make their works known. They themselves keep their profiles up to date in the social networks, replying to followers and generating interaction through the content they publish to achieve greater exposure for their works and their creative process.They are the ones who converse with, encourage and stimulate their audiences with various events to make their work known. They even venture to join movements and groups that support theAC/Eenterprising, the ones that can decide to unleash a veritable army of departments, assuming a loss of security in return for the gain of liberty.They are the creators and administrators of culture with a digital frame of mind, they are hybrids between the physical and the virtual, with flexible time and space.To borrow an idea from Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said that the limits of the world were the limits of language, it can be acknowledged that technology offers a concept of culture that can be extended to limits that are hard to imagine.The language that has been spoken for some years now, is digital. It has its own codes and behaviours. It redefines what is understood by participation, conversation and even collaboration.MICROTHEATRE. WHAT’S NEW IS ON THE INTERNETThe question of what the model for integration between the digital and the traditional might be like is not confined to the world of books. All the other cultural expressions are living with the same doubts, and the same passion, about how to embark on new paths that will enable them to regain their balance and become beacons for others in the way they bring value to the cultural experience.An outstanding and curious case is that of Microteatro por Dinero. It is curious because of the concept behind it and because of the form in which its content has been propagated through the social networks, from mouth to mouth, causing a resonance in the media that would otherwise have been impossible from the financial point of view.In a venue formerly used for having a drink and “other things”, and taking advantage of the layout of small rooms, the authors have reinvented the concept of theatre through the performance of micro‐works lasting no more than 15 minutes, for anWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 5: CULTURAL SECTOR MARKETING AND CONSUMPTION THROUGH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY CURRENT PAGE...63