This week I’ll be speaking at the MuseumNext Green Museums Summit and Computers In Libraries (two separate conferences) about “digitality” and climate action in the cultural sector.

Here’s the gist of it: The climate emergency asks museums, libraries, and other heritage, knowledge, and memory institutions a series of tough questions about their purpose and relevance in society. How big can they work? Who do they involve? Who do they serve?

Compared to the scale and speed of the climate crisis and the mind-blowing scope of what we must accomplish together in the next 10, 20, and 30 years, what can the cultural sector do?

These questions are hard to discuss within the cultural sector. Though the humanistic, prosocial values in the sector are strong the sector’s institutions, in particular, are wary of disruption and have evolved to think in conservative, risk-averse ways. But the climate emergency acts like an X-ray or lie detector on institutional thinking, revealing gaps between values and practice that might go unnoticed when working on smaller concerns.

One of those gaps has to do with digital. Digital is currently a blind spot in our thinking about climate action, and in both of these talks I’ll argue that the museum and library sectors are operating with a confused and outdated concept of digitality that impedes our ability to think clearly about the kinds of impact we are obligated to create. An updated concept of what “digital” means in the 2020s — new tools, new skills (and learning to appreciate neglected old tools and skills) and a new understanding of the digital public sphere are all needed to help us find a new direction and unlock new capabilities within the sector and in the communities we serve.

But (or perhaps, and), going there — having a solid conversation about what digital is and can do requires us to question some tightly held assumptions about trust, disruption, and power.

Below are links to slides, references, and other useful/relevant information cited in the talks.

I’ll post slides transcripts from these talks ASAP.

Resources mentioned in the talks

Updates

From the Computers in Libraries Q&A:
Complicating the Narratives: What if journalists covered controversial issues differently — based on how humans actually behave when they are polarized and suspicious? Amanda Ripley, Solutions Journalism Network, 2018.
Long Twitter Thread: “I’ve been thinking a lot about digitality recently…”

General intro stuff from first 10 minutes

The Year Man Becomes Immortal, Time.com (2019) — The Law of Accelerating Returns
A Weasel Just Shut Down The Large Hadron Collider, Business Insider, 2016)
The Big Frikin’ Wall, Adapted from Kathy Sierra. Notes here.
Serious in Singapore, New York Times, Tom Friedman (2011)
Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing, Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone (2017)
Only 11 Years Left to Prevent Irreversible Damage from Climate Change, Speakers Warn during General Assembly High-Level Meeting. General Assembly, High-Level Meeting on Climate and Sustainable Development (2018)
No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, Greta Thunberg (2021, also cited below)
When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism, According to Stefan Zweig, George Prochnik, New Yorker (2017)
Aditi Juneja: “If you’ve wondered what you would’ve done during slavery, the Holocaust…you’re doing it now” (2017)

European climate and recovery initiatives

The European Commission has put €1.8 trillion on the table for the next 6 years’ work on The New European Bauhaus, pandemic recovery, and European Green Deal.

New European Bauhaus
A new EU initiative launched in 2021 to be the cultural front-end for the European Green Deal. “The New European Bauhaus initiative calls on all of us to imagine and build together a sustainable and inclusive future that is beautiful for our eyes, minds, and souls. Beautiful are the places, practices, and experiences that are: Enriching, inspired by art and culture, responding to needs beyond functionality; Sustainable, in harmony with nature, the environment, and our planet; Inclusive, encouraging a dialogue across cultures, disciplines, genders and ages.”
Pandemic recovery
€807 billion for 7 priority areas, including cohesion, resilience, natural resources/environment.
Green Deal
Targets 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and by 2050: “economic growth decoupled from resource use”, carbon neutral, and “no person and no place left behind”.

Workshop notes (Digital, Culture, and the Transformation of Europe)

Blog post and slides from the November 2021 workshop
Product Pinocchio, via GameStorming

Farhad Manjoo: “A bag of mixed emotions”

Why Tech Is Starting to Make Me Uneasy, Farhad Manjoo, 11 October 2017.

“In 2007, when Mr jobs unveiled the iPhone, just about everyone greeted the new device as an unalloyed good. That's no longer true. The state-of-the-art, today, is a bag of mixed emotions. Check might improve everything. And it's probably all so terrible in ways we're only starting to understand.”

Reactions to Trump withdrawing the US from the Paris accord

Trump Will Withdraw U.S. From Paris Climate Agreement, New York Times, 1 June 2017.
Symposium: What is the museum’s role in a burning world? Politiken, 27 June 2017 (see also slides in bullet below)
Field Museum and Natural History Museum response — see slide 89 of Shaking Hands with the Future: Museums and Heritage at a Moment Full of Change (this link will take you right there)
Teen Vogue, Weather Channel, Steak-Umm — slides 90 - 100. Here’s an interview with Steak-Umm Social Media Manager Nathan Allebach (2018)
Museums and libraries fight ‘alternative facts’ with a #DayofFacts, Washington Post, 17 February 2017

Pew Research

I cranked through about 10 years of Pew Research Center reports in trying to figure out the evolution of our concept of digitality over the years. The first link, Visions of the Internet in 2035 | Pew Research Center, was particularly useful for gaining some insight into how “experts” conceptualize the role of information technology in society. That being said, I was dismayed, but not surprised, to see so few mentions of the climate emergency in any of these reports. Overall, these Pew reports reminded me of how essential and empowering the Internet is in so many people’s lives.

Here are a handful of the most useful reports. The full list is on this spreadsheet.

“Cataloging projects”

I put this spreadsheet together after reviewing 1000 pages of my own notes on digitality, 30+ reports from the Pew Research Center from the last 10 years, and notes from our November 2021 workshop on cultural-sector climate action.

There are three tabs

References lists 323 digital-related sites, apps, technologies, concepts, patterns, phenomena, and attributes that I’ve tagged, subjectively, with some adjectives like prosocial, civic, empowering, and dangerous.
Sorted by tag count shows each tag on its own column, and then a list of all the digital-related things that have that tag. You can hover your mouse over each cell to see a note and link (if there is one)
Link to sources shows a list of 89 articles, books, and references mentioned on the References tab

The empowering side of digitality

See the “empowering” projects in the first column here (Google Sheets).
Slides: Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast (2015)
Slides: Dark Matter (2014)
Slides: The Age of Scale (2013)

The Dark Side

Slides (with lots of links and references): The Web We Want, Dealing with the Dark Side of Social Media (2020).
Also this Ignite Talk for the Museum Computer Network conference (video, 2019)

Disruption Theory

What Is Disruptive Innovation? Christensen, Raynor, McDonald, Harvard Business Review (2015)
The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen, (2003 reprint)
Video book summary: The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (2015)
Lecture: Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (2016)

Books, Articles, Videos

A big long list of relevant resources in this spreadsheet here, and a handful of the most relevant below.

No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, Greta Thunberg (2021)
Hot Money, Naomi Klein (2021)
Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya, Nanjala Nyabola (2018)
What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, Tim O’Reilly (2005)
The Wikipedia Revolution: How A Bunch of Nobodies Created The World's Greatest Encyclopedia, Andrew Lih (2009)
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirkey (2008)
Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufekci (2018)

"Digitality" references for MuseumNext and Computers In Libraries