While Europe is involved in facing the social and economic difficulties heightened by the pandemic, there are several innovations that are ready to be implemented and to be part of our daily lives.
Among them, public debate pays great attention to the enormous possibility that 5G could represent for our development.
It’s out of doubt that 5G, and the subsequent development of IoT technologies, could be one of the “next great things” of the very next years. As well as it is out of doubt that this technology could sensibly transform many patterns in cultural production and consumption.
Nevertheless, there is a huge risk that the cultural and creative sector could misunderstand the real potential enabled by this kind of technology: a major understanding of non-technological needs.
The very real potentiality is not only in the development of new and powerful technological platforms. Neither it is only in the creation of new social platforms.
It is in the possibility to connect human beings with “cultural products and services”, it is the possibility to give human beings a more profound understanding of the place where they live and to engage with their own territories.
On the other hand, new tech-introduction could give new perspectives about how people react to specific cultural stimuli, prompting us in a data-driven interpretation of reality.
In this framework, however, the threat is that cultural and creative professional, organization, and public administrations could be only attracted by the Wow effect that often this kind of technologies produce, and, thus, interpreting it as a sort of a contemporary Wunderkammer developed in a global scale.
The possibilities of this new kind of technology are far greater than this: but to reach the real potentiality, we need to develop knowledge and competencies that could enable us in structuring a new system of thought.
A system of thought that uses tech to reach humanity, to understand cultural needs in an effective way, in order to understand how to better engage with cultural targets. A system of thought where tech is just a production factor into the wider cultural and creative value chain.
After all, as most of the people who love culture know, the famous McLuhan phrase claims that The medium is the message”, and not that the medium equals it.
