Digital as… Culture, Medium, Service

As “The Digital” becomes a headline theme in many institutions I have been thinking about ways in which it can usefully be split into high-level areas so that various lines of activity and discussion don’t become confused. For my institution, the University of the Arts, I’m proposing the following three areas which I believe map quite well to existing groups/units/services within the university (although there are healthy overlaps). I was tempted to neaten this into a nice diagram but thought it was better to capture it before succumbing to the desire to squeeze out the blurry edges. The result is three key areas:

Digital – Culture

A set of spaces and behaviours
  • “Resident” online behaviours – co-presence
  • Teaching and learning
  • ‘Open’ scholarship and research
  • Identity and visibility
  • Discursive – collaborative – communal

Digital – Medium

A set of techniques and practices
  • Digital as a medium for expression and critique
  • Digital ‘making’
  • Design – graphic, fashion, architecture etc
  • Video, photography – ‘native’ practices
  • Digital in the context of the disciplines
  • Both “Resident” and “Visitor” modes

Digital – Service

A set of tools and transactions
  • “Visitor” modes online – leaves no social trace
  • Infrastructure
  • Access – connectivity
  • Information
  • Storage – curation
  • Entertainment
  • Commerce

I’ve arrived at these three areas by bringing together the perspectives of colleagues who are invested in differing aspects of the digital. So it’s a group effort with a modicum of ‘clustering’ added by me.

Overarching these areas for me are two principles which I believe should be fundamental to all of our digital activities:

  1. How does the activity proposed foster belonging?
  2. How does the activity proposed reduce anxiety?

Both of those could be condensed into “increase confidence” and both of them apply to students *and* staff. Obviously there are many nuances hiding in these principles, such as the idea that good pedagogy will often require all involved to take risks. Having said that, I feel that anxiety is now a default state and we need to reduce ‘bad’ anxiety before we can be constructive with risk taking.