Digital as Wings Helps High-Quality Cultural Development
——Analysis and countermeasures of the current status of my country's cultural digitization
From "Hundred Birds Returning to Their Nests" to "Florence in the Garden·National Beauty", the auspicious scene of a hundred birds flying and the colorful and colorful beauty of the country are presented in front of your eyes. The CCTV Spring Festival Gala for the Year of the Rabbit presented an immersive The full Spring Festival Gala "New Year's Eve Dinner"; when you come to Shanghai Yuyuan Lantern Festival, just scan the QR code, a fantastic ancient mythical scroll "Mountain and Sea Wonders of Yuji" will unfold slowly, the phoenix dances lightly, and the jade rabbit jumps in the corner of the eaves... Recently, digital technology lights up the 2023 Spring Festival. Compared with previous years, various metaverse technologies such as virtual digital humans, AI technology, extended reality, and virtual scenes have become the beautiful scenery during the Spring Festival.
Cultural digitalization is accelerating the reshaping of cultural production trends and changing the trend of mass cultural life.
What is the development trend of cultural digitization?
What opportunities and challenges are hidden behind it?
1. Digital technology expands new space for cultural production
From digital collections to AI paintings, digital technology promotes new trends in cultural products.
A Peking Opera singer with a crested crown of emerald red flowers, a Lingnan lion wearing Chinese red, a fashion sportsman holding a cool ski pole... the digital collection of "Guochao" independent IP copyright issued by CCTV Once the panda "Yangyang" and the dragon "Shishi" appeared, they aroused the enthusiastic pursuit of fans.
With the rapid development of digital technology, digital technologies represented by blockchain, digital twins, and artificial intelligence continue to enrich the form of cultural products, and more and more interesting and trendy cultural products gradually enter the daily life of the public.
Value co-creation is a distinctive feature of cultural production in the digital age.
Open the AI painting applet, by setting ideal keywords, select characteristic styles such as oil painting, Chinese painting, animation, virtual engine rendering, etc. In just a few steps and tens of seconds, a unique AI painting work is completed.
In the new digital context, the identity of the public has changed, from passive acceptance to active participation, from cultural consumers to cultural "prosumers". The professional threshold is gradually blurred in technological innovation.
From virtual digital humans to immersive projects, digital technology brings new experiences in cultural scenes.
Song Yun's virtual human "Gu Xiaoyu", the virtual band "Sanxingdui Rock and Roll Team", the super-popular virtual idol "Nanako Nanako"...virtual digital people are in full bloom in the New Year's Eve event on all major platforms.
In the 100% virtual RetaLand Metaverse New Year's Eve concert, audiences can turn into their favorite avatars, swim freely in different virtual scenes, open New Year's wishes in the virtual fireworks show, and open New Year's benefits in game interaction.
This virtual party not only uses "black technology" to directly fill the immersive experience, but also is an innovative attempt of a new year in the universe.
In the Shenzhen Sea World Culture and Art Center, the audience can see the mysterious style of the Forbidden City porcelain, and feel the moving pictures of the four seasons silhouettes and the vermilion walls of the Forbidden City; when they come to the North Bund of Shanghai, the Mona Lisa jumps out of the picture frame and leaps into the eyes. The strange aircraft flew out of the treasure cabinet, as if it had traveled to the European Renaissance in an instant... Through digital upgrading, the small real space brings infinite cultural experience to consumers, and continuously expands the boundaries of consumers' feelings; the boundless The digital space opens up a vast imagination of time and space for producers, and opens up a treasure trove of content creation.
It can be seen that the digitization of culture paints a very imaginative and creative picture for cultural production.
From e-commerce live streaming empowering villages to metaverse empowering cities, digital technology has built a new highland for industrial development.
"After the copied paper is divided into sheets and baked, the temperature does not exceed 50 degrees, and the time does not exceed 2 minutes, and a sheet of four papers is born." Opening the short video platform, the intangible cultural heritage of Qianshan County, Jiangxi Province is displayed in a panoramic manner In front of your eyes, the audience can feel the warmth of this intangible cultural heritage by clicking the link on the screen.
Entering the 5G era, digital technology has given birth to a new format of rural cultural economy.
With the rise of e-commerce live broadcast platforms, farmers use mobile terminals such as mobile phones as "new agricultural tools". On the one hand, they display folk cultural activities, rural scenery, and working life scenes. Bring a steady stream of popularity and considerable output value to rural cultural production.
Metaverse, as a new type of Internet business and digital social form that blends reality and reality, provides a leapfrog development prospect for urban cultural production, and has become an important area for major cities to pay attention to and deploy.
In July 2022, Shanghai released my country's first metaverse city development plan, announcing that by 2025, the scale of related industries will reach 300 billion yuan.
Immediately afterwards, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chongqing, Xiamen and other places released action plans for the development of Metaverse industries.
Tongzhou, the sub-center of Beijing City, proposed that in the next three years, more than 100 metaverse ecological chain enterprises will be cultivated and introduced, and more than 30 "metaverse +" typical application scenario projects will be completed.
2. Multi-factors contribute to the full blooming of cultural digitization
The national cultural digitization strategy empowers cultural total factor productivity improvement.
In August 2022, the National Cultural Big Data Trading Center was established to promote the transformation of cultural digital achievements from a practical level.
Cultural leaders such as China Digital Culture Group Co., Ltd. and China Audio-Visual Copyright Collective Management Association have successively entered the market, and multicultural digital resources such as art, opera, cultural relics, and ancient books have been "on shelves" in cultural data "supermarkets".
As an overall and systematic project, the national cultural digitization strategy runs through the digitization of all links and chains such as cultural production, cultural dissemination, and cultural operations, and fully realizes the transformation of cultural big data into cultural production elements.
From the supply side to the demand side, from the resource end to the cloud, the production end and the consumer end, the platform advantages of the National Cultural Big Data Trading Center will break the market segmentation of cultural data, effectively empower the circulation of cultural elements and the efficient allocation of cultural production elements, It will effectively promote the rapid development of cultural digital productivity and give birth to new cultural formats.
The digitalization of consumption has forced the integration of cultural production across the board.
With the "live broadcast" to pursue beautiful scenery and exhibitions, to buy joint hits with "mobile games", to watch performances and listen to podcasts online... With the gradual development of the public's digital consumption habits, the scale of digital cultural consumption has expanded rapidly, especially It is "planting grass" online and "pulling weeds" offline. The genes of online experience and deep following offline have been deeply embedded in the generation Z consumer group.
Statistics show that as of June 2022, my country's short video users and webcast users will reach 962 million and 716 million respectively.
In 2022, the 16 industry sub-categories with obvious characteristics of my country's new digital culture business form will account for one-third of the revenue of cultural enterprises.
The huge productivity created by digital cultural consumption is becoming an important support for cultural enterprises and even my country's economic and social development.
In addition, cultural consumption is more and more experiential, quality-oriented, and personalized, and promoting the construction of "on-the-spot" cultural consumption immersion scenes has become the only choice to meet the new needs of mass consumption.
At the 18th China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industry Expo, the digital cultural scroll "A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" in the Zhejiang exhibition area attracted many audiences to stop.
Different from the dynamic reproduction of scenes in the painting in the past, by waving their arms at the interactive screen, the audience can enter the ancient painting as a "digital clone" and have a "face-to-face" dialogue with historical celebrities.
The digital cultural consumption scene integrating vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch and even perception is becoming a new focus of cultural content shaping.
The development of digital technology depends on the panoramic presentation of culture.
The development of science and technology has always been accompanied by the development of culture. Science and technology have greatly promoted the transformation of cultural production methods and the innovation of content, and culture has also become an important field for the application of technology.
As an integrated field that integrates a variety of cutting-edge digital technologies and social investment hotspots, Metaverse will realize the cross-integration of the virtual world and the real world at all levels of economy, social interaction, entertainment, and identity. The comprehensive empowerment will also accelerate the panoramic presentation and innovation of the digital cultural ecology.
During the World Cup in Qatar, a Metaverse short video linking football with Chinese excellent traditional culture was screened online.
The puppet "Monkey King" waving a golden cudgel, the majestic "door god", and the dexterous "opera singer" are all invited from Zhangzhou Puppet Puppet Show, Zhangzhou Woodblock New Year Pictures, Southern Fujian Gaojia Opera and other intangible cultural heritage. New star", showing the new style of traditional culture in football delivery.
The cultural digitization strategy is rooted in the excellent traditional Chinese culture, presents the national culture in a panorama, and integrates excellent traditional cultural elements in all fields, which will provide a steady stream of creative power for the development of Metaverse.
3. Market worries behind the fiery digitization of culture
In the field of cultural production: the problems of short-term pursuit of profit and symbolic collage are highlighted.
Concepts such as the popular metaverse have attracted many cultural enterprises to enter the "new track". Among them are practitioners who are brave enough to explore, and there are also speculators who "speculate hot spots", "cut leeks" and "eyeballs".
Metaverse games that sell alcohol as a gimmick, "Blockchain Air Mooncakes" worth 10,000 yuan, "real-scene tour-style" Metaverse scenic spots... In order to catch the "hot spot express" and achieve quick profits, a few have no figures Cultural enterprises with scientific and technological genes actively participate in malicious hype, which not only misleads the positive spread of the concept and value of the "Metaverse", but also hinders their own strategic thinking about the long-term development of cultural digitalization, exposing enterprises to the danger of a short-term "shelf life" .
In addition, some cultural products equate cultural digitization with the symbolic collage of culture and numbers.
"Old wine in new bottles" "What you buy is not a digital collection, but an 'ID card' of a picture"... On a social platform, many netizens collectively complained about the "copy and paste" phenomenon of digital collections.
Simple reproductions and random collages of cultural production lack a deep understanding of cultural connotations and ignore contemporary interpretations of cultural values. It is difficult to create cultural products that are "rememberable and resounding", and it is not conducive to the value-creating production value. chain construction.
In the field of cultural governance: regulatory blind spots, copyright disputes, and hidden dangers of data security are emerging.
"The platform opened a secondary market in violation of regulations, luring others to spend on the list to get rewards" "False promotion of collections, customer service collectively lost contact"... On the black cat complaint platform, there are nearly 2,000 complaints about digital collections "thunderstorm" and "running away". strip.
Due to the many fields involved in cultural digitalization, scientific and complete regulatory standards and supporting legal basis are still in the absence of a state. Regulatory agencies have given lighter punishments for suspected violations of laws and regulations in operating platforms. Trading has become a "blind spot" of supervision, and hidden dangers in the cultural market need to be addressed and eliminated urgently.
At present, problems in cultural copyright, confirmation, ownership, etc. have become increasingly prominent.
Avatars are suspected of plagiarism, and dance works of other artists are copied without authorization; digital collections are pirated "cottages", unauthorized appropriation of other people's ideas, and product rights are controversial; AI painting copyright ownership has become a mystery... NFT based on blockchain technology has Features such as uniqueness, high transparency, and non-tamperability are considered to be able to effectively empower the copyright protection of the cultural industry, but how to effectively confirm copyright rights through legal means and new technologies, how to deal with the principle of power exhaustion, and how to protect digital collections Issues such as legal characterization need to be explored and resolved in depth, and the lack of technical standards and legal measures has brought new worries to the security of digital cultural copyrights.
In addition, issues such as cultural data falsification, tampering, and leakage risks are also worthy of attention.
From the perspective of the demand side of cultural big data, some cultural enterprises use traffic as the only basis for creating commercial value, defrauding "one-click three-link" volume and tampering with transaction volume data.
The "data footprint" of cultural life on the cloud also exposes user privacy outside the "wall", and consumers' personal legitimate rights and interests are threatened and challenged.
Issues such as leakage and loss of cultural big data on the supply side should not be underestimated. Security loopholes in alliance chains and smart contracts continue to lead to data theft and infringement of digital collections.
In order to seek benefits, they will not hesitate to resort to deceit, which will not only affect user choice and corporate reputation, but also the healthy development of the entire industry and the establishment of an orderly cultural market ecology.
In the field of cultural consumption: the digital divide and the information cocoon coexist.
The digital culture divide between regions needs to be bridged.
With the comprehensive advancement of the rural revitalization strategy, "digitalization" is becoming the fulcrum to leverage rural development. The supply of digital cultural products and services in rural areas is increasingly abundant, and diversified digital application scenarios "fly into the homes of ordinary people", but homogeneity, Problems such as vulgarization and unsuitable "digital culture omnivores" are still prominent.
Due to the unbalanced construction of digital infrastructure, weak market and industrial development, and the absence of digital literacy, the rural digital culture gap is widening.
For a long time, cultural production has been criticized for degrading the humanistic value of cultural products and causing mediocrity.
At present, digital interconnection technology may accelerate the solidification of consumers' knowledge structure through "information cocoons", incubate niche culture, and promote the tendency of Internet pan-entertainment.
In order to earn traffic and meet the rapid consumption needs of the public, many cultural enterprises regard the "speed" of production, "entertainment" of content and "precision" of communication as the supply standard, which leads consumers to become accustomed to increasingly narrow and fragmented And virtualized entertainment carnival weakens the cultural thinking ability of consumers and hinders the diversity and creativity of cultural production.
4. Promote the high-quality development of cultural digitalization
Technology shaping: use technological innovation to consolidate the foundation of cultural digital development.
Continue to support the integrated application and innovation of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, 5G, and the Internet of Things in cultural frontier fields, and promote the formation of a broad layout of cutting-edge digital technologies; improve infrastructure construction such as data centers, cloud platforms, and intelligent computing centers , Open up the full digital chain of cultural creation, production, dissemination and consumption.
Aim at the innovation needs of cultural digital technology, gather national key laboratories, high-level technological enterprises and scientific research institutes, accelerate technological research and development and breakthroughs in the field of core technologies and high-end cultural equipment; promote the integration and innovation of key technologies, strengthen virtual reality, cloud computing, and digital twins In-depth integration of technologies such as virtual reality will enhance the empowerment capabilities of virtual reality and build a number of high-quality cultural digital application scenarios.
Take multiple measures to promote the deep integration of technology and culture, and empower the application of digital technology to develop and innovate.
Encourage technology companies and cultural companies to carry out in-depth cooperation and exchanges, and promote cultural product innovation, business innovation, and model innovation through technological innovation; strengthen the application and promotion of digital technology in the fields of cultural heritage protection and inheritance, and cultural experience.
Content forging the soul: Consolidate the core of cultural digital development with content innovation.
Fully implement the national cultural digitization strategy, promote the digitization of excellent cultural resources, and enrich the cultural creation supply library.
Relying on the promotion of Chinese excellent traditional culture, the inheritance of revolutionary culture, and the development of advanced socialist culture, an excellent cultural digital resource library with distinctive features and wide coverage will be formed.
Strengthen the shaping of high-quality cultural products and extend the cultural value space.
Deeply grasp the attributes of digital cultural content, strengthen the construction of cultural digital originality, encourage creative innovation and cross-border linkage of creation among all people, cultivate and shape a group of outstanding original IPs with distinctive characteristics; improve cultural digital production capacity, adapt to the new characteristics of digital communication, create rich, Diversified and personalized high-quality cultural content products.
Pay attention to the needs of multiculturalism and improve the matching degree of cultural product supply.
Focus on unbalanced development, take the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy as the guide, and accelerate the construction of localized and characteristic rural cultural digital resources; provide policy preference for cultural enterprises, encourage them to pay attention to the construction and development of rural and elderly cultural products, and create more Cultural products and services in the style of "rural dialect", "suitable for aging", easy to use and useful.
Industry as the body: Integrate and innovate the value chain to strengthen the industrial body.
Promote the integration and development of cultural digitalization and related industries, and expand the scale of industrial development.
Promote the integrated development of cultural digitalization, manufacturing, and modern service industries, enhance industrial cultural connotation, creative level, and added value; promote the integrated development of cultural digitalization and the real economy, promote the integration of digital culture and the high-quality development of the real economy, and create innovative cultural industry clusters .
Strengthen the cultivation of cultural brands and strengthen the resilience of industrial development.
Adhere to the brand development strategy, encourage cultural enterprises to create a group of cultural brands with strong competitiveness and high reputation around characteristic culture; strengthen the use and promotion of cultural creativity and copyright, and enhance the brand value of cultural products in the form of brand authorization and image marketing and cultural value.
Cultivate world-class cultural leaders and enhance the influence of industrial development.
Cultivate a group of top digital cultural leaders with the core competitiveness of "giant platform" and "head content"; give full play to the leading role of leading enterprises, and lead and drive the development of small, medium and micro cultural enterprises through production collaboration and open platforms.
Regulatory Escort: Use governance innovation to help cultural digital voyage.
Improve the system of policies and regulations, and optimize the regulatory environment for cultural digitization.
Accelerate the promulgation of relevant laws and regulatory policies in the frontier field of cultural digitalization, clarify the legal nature, transaction methods, supervision subjects, and supervision methods of cultural products, and provide effective regulatory basis; strengthen supervision, improve the regulatory rules of the cultural digital market, establish a negative list of operational transactions, and The intensity of dealing with major illegal business activities.
Introduce technical and management standards for cultural digital content platforms, clarify the requirements for underlying technology, platform qualifications, platform review, and original review, and deepen platform review; optimize the construction of cultural digital copyright laws, clarify the ownership of rights and responsibilities; promote the promotion of copyright collective management organizations Blockchain technology promotes the healthy development of the copyright market.
Establish cultural data security standards to ensure that the entire life cycle of cultural data resources is manageable and controllable; establish a full-process, classified and hierarchical cultural data protection management system, and clarify important cultural data security management measures; increase protection against hype, fraud, theft, damage Penalties for illegal acts such as cultural data.
(Author: Members of the research team of Communication University of China: Wei Wenkun, Tian Hui)
Guangming Daily