On the meeting we had with Dick last Tuesday he talked about the role of culture on our contemporary society, pointing out the changes that had occurred on the last few decades by the development of the communication technology.
He said:
Culture used to be a sector of the society, like economics, politics, ecology, healthy, and so on.
The role of culture has changed on our contemporary society. The process of producing and giving meaning to human activities, that was the function of the cultural sector on a recent past, is now spread over a wide net of communication in witch the common citizen is able to share all sort of information in a constant process of configuration and reconfiguration of meaning.
What does it means in a local level?
Every city has their physical cultural institutions. They have to adjust to the new reality we live with the rise of the virtual environments. How to reconfigure the role of the cultural institutions in order to make it possible for them to cope with these changes?
How to redefine their way to relate with the society?
What we will have to find out is what is meaningful to be done on the city. For something to be meaningful doesn’t means that it has to be meaningful for everybody – can be just for a certain number of people or community.
It’s important to find the interactions between people from Gouda and the institutions, the streets, the houses and the cafes. Network implies that there are nodes and they are connected to another nodes. And in this sense it’s important to know witch are these nodes.
There are already some communities on the city, how to connect them? Which relationships we can find between then, or how to make it visible? How to specialize the citizens on the things they are interested on?
What can the institutions do on this direction?
The big question is how information produces meaning.
No comments:
Post a Comment