Bjarki Valtysson’s research while affiliated with IT University of Copenhagen and other places

Aula is a mandatory public school platform in Denmark with more than two million users. The idea behind Aula was to provide a shared space for communication and cooperation around children, both within the school/municipality setting and between teachers and parents, while adhering to the requirements of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. In this article we examine the incorporation of Aula in the daily practices of teachers, especially as they relate to children’s privacy and data protection. Based on qualitative interviews with nine teachers and four experts, and drawing on practice theory, platform theory, and theories on children’s privacy, we find that Aula – despite the intentions behind it – fails to support the complex nature of teachers’ work practices and, therefore, to provide a solid data protection framework for the children. As such, the teachers mainly view the platform as being conducive to their non-sensitive communication with parents and deploy a range of other digital tools to support, for instance, cooperation with colleagues. Consequently, gaps in children’s privacy and data protection arise.

Platforms are instrumental to cultural production and consumption. This is so in terms of how their affordances and algorithmic logics form, manifest and prioritise cultural products and trends. Platforms are therefore influential in shaping the cultural habits and identity formations of their users. This article explores the repercussions of the platformisation of culture on cultural policy, beginning with an investigation of the characteristics of platforms, pointing to features that are central to cultural policy. This article then suggests a framework for digital cultural politics to widen the scope of cultural policy and to include media- and communication policy, data protection, digital markets and digital services policies within its boundaries. Finally, it demonstrates how regulatory frameworks within the EU affect policymaking at the national level, focusing on recent examples from Denmark, and engages these in a wider discussion on the challenges confronting cultural policy when culture becomes ‘platformised’.

This article explores how the British Museum and the National Museum of Australia tailor their digital cultural politics, and how this corresponds to their management of online collections and presence on social media. The article applies textual analysis to examine how the two museums discursively frame their policies; interface analysis to demonstrate how they organise their online collections; and platform analysis to scrutinise their communication on Instagram. Findings indicate that the museums’ policies align with writings on democratic, participative, and user-generated digital museum communication. In practice, however, their design of digital collections and use of Instagram does not reflect their digital cultural politics as policy. There is therefore a disconnect between their policies and practices. This disconnect does not indicate that their digital collections and presence on social media are poorly designed and executed, but rather that the democratic, engaging, user-driven and participatory discourses of new museology are overstated.

Google is the gateway to the Internet for billions of people. However, to use Google’s multiple platforms and services, users must accept Google’s terms. With the advent of the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), Google made significant changes to these terms. In this article, we scrutinise the intertextual relations between Google’s privacy policies and terms of service (ToS) and the GDPR – and the discursive co-constitutive complexity within and between these frameworks. We argue that the material and communicative articulation of Google’s privacy policies and ToS should be understood as deliberative data politics delimiting users’ agency, consent, and privacy. Furthermore, we emphasise complexity and the demands of reducing complexity as two opposing dynamics. While the GDPR required Google to make its terms and policies clearer and more understandable, ironically, in the process of accommodating GDPR’s demand of increased transparency, the discursive complexity of Google’s policies has in fact increased.

This chapter introduces the topic and structure of the book Digital Cultural Politics: From Policy to Practice. It, therefore, briefly touches upon the subject of individual chapters and further explains the narrative structure and the spatial metaphors of moving from macro perspectives, to meso perspectives, to micro perspectives; and the analytical strategy of moving from policy to practice. The two first chapters provide the foundations and explain how digital communication and digital media further relate to cultural policy, and the advantages of treating cultural policy, media policy and communication policy together, when seen from the perspective of digital cultural politics. The next three chapters provide concrete manifestations on archival politics, institutional politics and user politics; and how these can be analysed as digital cultural politics. Examples of analysis include Google Cultural Institute, Europeana, the Danish Cultural Heritage project, the Internet Archive; the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC; the British Museum, Rijksmuseum, Te Papa Tongarewa and Brooklyn Museum.