Criticism Of The Digital Functioning Of The Russian Cultural Industry

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the main hidden guiding tools of the digital functioning of the Russian cultural industry. One of the objectives of the study is to clarify the specifics of the digital form of culture as a segment of mass consumption. The negative effects of the digitalization of culture identified by the author are focused on the formation of the digital reality of pseudo-culture. The digital format of culture acts as a temporary file of flat / not deep content for displaying freely transforming flowing forms of cultural works, formed at the request of an active consumer. The role of an active consumer is no longer limited to communication/transmission of information with a work of culture, but allows you to directly participate in the creation of a work of culture, on the basis of which the forms of interactive interaction with digital/information objects and environments are differentiated. The most important criterion for the digital form of a work of culture is the process of choosing an interactive consumer. A dematerialized work of culture loses its spatial depth characteristics and is defined in terms of time/speed/replication. The new information reality of culture coordinates the dematerialized digital resources of culture, thereby again transferring culture to the sphere of management, and, consequently, to the economic criteria of efficiency. The digital format of culture does not limit the possibilities for simultaneous / timeless representation of databases in a wide variety of combinations.

Keywords: Consumer society, culture industry, digitalization of culture

Introduction

Global interest in the culture and media industry in 2017-20 has grown significantly and is developing in the direction of digitalization «the volume of the global entertainment and media industry in 2019 amounted to $ 2.1 trillion. It is expected that in the period up to 2023, it will grow at an average annual rate of 4.3% and reach $ 2.6 trillion» (PWC.Ru, 2019). The main trends in the development of the cultural industry in the forecast period up to 2023 there will be continued digitalization and personalization of cultural products and services, active growth of user consumption of content from mobile devices, as well as, of course, consolidation, vertical integration and the formation of large digital ecosystems.

Problem Statement

Culture becomes a product of social consumption, adapting to the law of supply and demand. The consumption of culture is also considered as an instrument of self-improvement (Alexander & Bowler, 2018), the quintessence of intellectual (Bermingham, 1995), spiritual and aesthetic development of a person (Klamer, 2016), can be an instrument of social integration of society (Rodner et al., 2020), strengthening of national and collective identity, increasing the general culture in society (Malshina & Bryntsev, 2017). Society expresses itself through cultural consumption. Heuristic and theoretical separation of culture, creator / producer, viewer/consumer, and society is impossible in real life. In this study, the basic definition of culture is assumed to be an aspect of society, as one of the sides, attributes and forms of social existence, namely, as the information-semiotic side of the social system. It is possible to define the branch economic guide of culture – the creative industries-as a whole industrial apparatus for the production of uniform, standardized novelties in the fields of art, painting (Alexander et al., 2018), literature, and cinema, being, in fact, an entertainment business (Adorno, 2020), which makes a stable and significant contribution to the development of society.

Research Questions

The process of economization and industrialization of culture has taken over the entire modern system of culture, turning it into mass culture. Mass culture today is a high-tech synthesis of art and business, which is a consequence of the increasingly deep integration of culture and art in market relations.

The current state of crisis in the sphere of culture with the dominance of economic interpretation confirms the urgent need to find adequate tools for studying the entire complex of problems associated with the analysis of the information/digital format of the functioning of the cultural industry (Malshina & Garnov, 2020). One of the important tasks is to clarify the specifics of the digital format of providing cultural services, since the principles of modernity are already in the past and new mechanisms of mass consumption society prevail (Cooper et al., 2020). Modernism is rejected for two equal reasons: first, because of its material reality, and second, because of its inability to transform reality into a digital form.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is to identify the main hidden guiding tools of the digital functioning of the Russian cultural industry. The main objective of this study is to identify the components of modern digital form of culture as a segment of mass consumption.

Research Methods

The solution of the set tasks is based on the application of methods of institutional, economic and statistical analysis; comparative and system analysis (Shenkar, 2021). The methods of dialectics, including the works of domestic and foreign scientists on the problems of improving the efficiency of the functioning of the socio-cultural sphere, were used as a general methodological basis for the study.

Findings

The modern way of self-determination of services is impossible outside the horizon of modern digital technologies, outside the digital reality of the world, which definitely qualifies as the digital fourth revolution. The reality of the digital age is disappearing from all screens, but we still realize that we are at the beginning of it, so the most important results of its consequences are far from obvious. The critique of the digital mind takes only the first steps, since the digital mind has not yet fully revealed itself. Reflecting on and pointing out the compensating negative effects of the digitalization of cultural services, it is necessary to orient society towards the formation of the digital reality of authentic traditional cultural values (Hofstede, 2017).

Even Benyamin (2021) pointed out that "since ancient times, one of the most important tasks of art has been to generate a need for the full satisfaction of which the time has not yet come" (p. 104), based on the development of technical media and the influence of social processes on the formation of sensuality. New forms of meaning expression are formed and implemented. All that contributed to the destruction of the integrity of the perception of meanings, led to a mobile view, a plurality of consumers, flattening of objects, interactivity of both the consumer and the producer of culture. The viewer finds an active position in relation to the work of culture. Here the author's classification of the activity of the activity of the subject-object relationship of culture is closed. "The point of vanishing perspective has been transformed into the point of view of the observer", which determines the ontological status of a work of culture (Vaybel, 2011, p. 109). The opposition of external and internal, rigid boundaries of cultural works lose their power.

The avant-garde practices of postmodernity were consumed and adapted by mass culture, giving rise to the prototype of digital/information reality in the future. The postmodern principle of identity and difference continued in the principle of dividing the whole into parts – discretization, decomposition, constant stream transformation, as a structural principle of digital logic. The meaningful postmodern (Jameson, 2020) confrontation/collision of reproduction of the copy and the original is leveled by transmediynost, interactivity of the consumer, freely flowing from one consumer to another intertext, the flow of digitized replicated cultural objects. Cult objects are transformed into a dematerialized digital / information stream of indeterminate connections, structures, and relationships. The consumer is doomed and abandoned to actively participate in the production of dematerialized works of culture or false culture.

Spatial relations are neutralized to the ground in the process of digital transformation of culture, and therefore there is no need for the depth of cultural works, there is an illusion of depth – pseudo or pseudo - culture.

In Russian culture, it is the mass culture that dominates, it is the market simulacrum of culture-the culture industry (Adorno, 2015). The culture industry is defined by cyclicity — recurring fashion trends, TV show cycles, remakes, prequels, and movie sequels. Another important characteristic of the cultural industry is the absolutization of imitation. The industry itself assigns ideals, values, and prohibitions /patterns to society. And it does this not openly, for example, but through the proposed idols, trend-setters and opinion leaders that society voluntarily imitates. Therefore, today we have a phantom mass culture, divorced from the way of life of a real mass society, generating a virtual mass consciousness. The cultural industry generates imaginary needs, inculcates opinions and ideals in order to ensure the total dictate of the current social order.

The successful perspective of modernity can be seen in the combination of the potential of mass culture and the personality of the producer / consumer of culture as the center of identity. The identity of the consumer as a co-creator and co-producer of a work of worship and art, a cultural social good, determines the final result of the process of cultural production, being a necessary condition for its implementation (Klamer, 2016).

Conclusion

The negative effects of the digitalization of culture are focused on the formation of the digital reality of pseudo-culture. The digital format of culture acts as a temporary file of flat / not deep content for displaying freely transforming flowing forms of cultural works, formed at the request of an active consumer. The role of an active consumer is no longer limited to communication/transmission of information with a work of culture, but allows you to directly participate in the creation of a work of culture, on the basis of which the forms of interactive interaction with digital/information objects and environments are differentiated.

The process of producing a work of culture becomes itself a non-materialized product of an idea in culture. The most important criterion for the digital form of a work of culture is the process of choosing an interactive consumer. A dematerialized work of culture loses its spatial depth characteristics and is defined in terms of time. The digital format of culture does not limit the possibilities for simultaneous / timeless representation of databases in a wide variety of combinations.

This leads to another important feature of the cultural industry, which is the focus on the elimination, subordination and absorption of any counterculture. Consequently, any attempt to modernize within the concept of cultural industry only leads to increased commercialization. Culture is always a movement against established patterns, overcoming them. And in the cultural industry, we are dealing with a pseudo-culture, an imitation of culture.

The new information reality of culture coordinates the dematerialized digital resources of culture, thereby again transferring culture to the sphere of management, and, consequently, to the economic criteria of efficiency. It is possible to identify two pairs of main oppositely directed patterns that determine the current state of the cultural system – "value" and "cost" / "information" and "education". Value - as a non-economic concept that treats culture as a system of meanings; cost - as a fully economic concept that considers culture as a system of paid services / cultural industry aimed at making a profit by replicating copies. Information – as a set of accurate information about something, characteristics, object in its qualitative certainty; education - as the transfer and receipt of information, knowledge, relations necessary for the development of culture and civilization, being the basis of education, upbringing and training. Meaningfully, enlightenment integrates science, religion, and culture and is structured as a philosophy.

Depending on the initial goal, the basic components of these two patterns and the main elements of the final structure of the culture system for a specific consumer in a specific time period are selected.

Acknowledgments

The reported study was supported by Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project “Development of organizational, economic and financial mechanisms of support and strategic development of the cultural industry in the regions of Russia” № 19-010-01004/21

References

• Adorno, T. (2015). Sociology of music. In John Shepherd & Kyle Devine (Eds.) The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music (pp. 67–72). Routledge.

• Adorno, T. (2020). Izuchenie avtoritarnogo haraktera [The study of the authoritarian character]. Silver threads.

• Alexander, V. D., & Bowler, A. E. (2018). Scandal and the Work of Art: The Nude in an Aesthetically Inflected Sociology of the Arts. Cultural Sociology, 12(3), 325-342. DOI:

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Alexander, V. D., Blank, G., & Hale, S. A. (2018). Digital traces of distinction? Popular orientation and user-engagement with status hierarchies in TripAdvisor reviews of cultural organizations. New Media and Society, 20(11), 4218-4236. DOI:

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Benyamin, V. (2021). Kratkaya istoriya fotografii [Brief history of photography]. Ad Marginem Press.

• Bermingham, А. (1995). Introduction. The consumption of culture: image, object, text. In A. Bermingham & J. Brewer (Eds.) The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800 (pp. 1-20). Routledge.

• Cooper, J. T., Stanley, L. J., Stevens, C. E., Shenkar, O., & Kausch, C. (2020). Switching analytical mindsets: A person-centered approach to the analysis of cultural values. International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 20(2), 223-247.

• Hofstede, G. (2017). The universal and the specific in 21st century management.. In D. Tjosvold & K. Leung (Eds.), Cross-Cultural Management: Foundations and Future (рр. 29-42). Routledge.

• Jameson, F. (2020). Aesthetics today. CLCWeb - Comparative Literature and Culture, 22(3). DOI:

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Klamer, A. (2016). The value-based approach to cultural economics. Journal of Cultural Economics, 40(4).

• Malshina, N., & Bryntsev, A. (2017), Support of Cultural Services Through the Integrated Service Centers: Prospects for Development. JARLE-ASERS Publishing - Journal of Advanced Research in Law and Economics, VII(6(28)), Fall. https://journals.aserspublishing.eu/jarle/article/view/1833

• Malshina, N., & Garnov, A. P. (2020). Modern principles analysis of resource flows in crisis conditions culture and creative industry. Academus Publishing, Inc.

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• PWC.Ru (2019). Tendencii razvitiya industrii razvlechenij i media v mire (2019). [Trends in the development of the entertainment and media industry in the world]. https://www.pwc.ru/ru/publications/media-outlook/mediaindustriya-v-2019.pdf

• Rodner, V., Roulet, T. J., Kerrigan, F., & vom Lehn, D. (2020). Making space for art: A spatial perspective of disruptive and defensive institutional work in Venezuela’s art world. Academy of Management Journal, 63(4), 1054-1081.

  Google Scholar

  Crossref

• Shenkar, O. (2021). Using interdisciplinary lenses to enrich the treatment of culture in international business. International Business Review, 30(2), 101-199.

• Vaybel, P. (2011). 10++ teksty programm dlya vozmozhnyh mirov [10++ program texts for possible worlds]. Logos.