Building new culture participation in hyperconnected environments: agencyoriented approach

ENDigital transformation is providing a new societal context, where individuals, as active sociocultural actors, can experience cultural environment in completely different ways, while engaging in creative partnerships rather than remaining a silent audience. As a result, the development, distribution, and reception of cultural products, including arts and culture, are changing and increasingly rely on the media logic. New digital resources provide new spaces and locations to experience arts and culture in a more accessible, interactive, creative, and engaging way, leading toward a more decentralized, individualized, and diversified cultural environment. On the other hand, by providing audience with an infrastructure for co- creation, cultural institutions are facilitating rather than producing authentic cultural content. Reaching out to wider audiences through education, innovation, and digitalization is a new opportunity, as well as a challenge, for the cultural establishments and individuals. To analyze these changes and their implications in cultural domain, the chapter draws on digital culture and agency discourse and contributes to the interdisciplinary research, integrating different theoretical and analytical perspectives, from media and cultural studies to museum and audience studies.The main questions encountered here are as follows: How are cultural practices transformed and communicated in a new digital media environment? What are the specific media- related transformations taking place in the cultural domain? How can rich- media environments enhance participative practices and increase public engagement in culture? What are the digital challenges and concerns for cultural organizations? To address these questions and to exemplify new directions, developments, and potential for cultural actors, the chapter integrates exploratory case studies and secondary data collected from 2015 to 2020. Keywords: cultural participation, digital media technologies, mediatization, communicational figurations, new cultural ecosystem, cultural agency, cultural and learning practices. [From the publication]