The arts organizations represented in the survey tend to concord with the notions that the internet and social media have "increased engagement" and fabricated art a more participatory feel, and that they take helped make "arts audiences more diverse." They as well tend to agree that the internet has "played a major function in broadening the boundaries of what is considered art."
Figure 22

Nonetheless at the same time, the majority of arts organizations surveyed likewise thought that mobile devices, ringing jail cell phones and texting create "significant disruptions" to live performances, and that technology contributes to an expectation that "all digital content should exist free." Survey respondents were split up regarding their opinions of whether technology had negatively impacted audition attention spans for alive performance, simply they uniformly disconcord that information technology has "diluted the arts" past opening new pathways to arts participation and arts criticism.

Figure 23

Despite comments in open up-ended responses, only 35% of respondents hold with the statement that the net has shifted arts organizations' focus towards marketing and promotion, and even fewer (22%) thought that the internet and its endless offerings are leading to a decrease in attendance at in-person events.

Predicting impacts of technology and social media

Asked to forecast the impact that technology and social media volition take on the field equally a whole in the coming years, respondents mentioned everything from practical implications to broader, soul-searching ideas about the hereafter of creativity.

From a practical standpoint, many organizations state that technology will brand them more than efficient:

[We have the] ability to serve more people and at a lower cost.

The internet makes it possible for our organization to market ourselves more than effectively through online advertizing, blog presences, and social media exchanges. We have been able to subtract our budgets and increase revenue by utilizing online resources effectively.

It is also greatly facilitating their ability to book talent, and to know what to expect:

For arts programmers, the access to high quality media to review artists in advance of assessing them live has been a huge step forward. Spotify alone has made it so much easier to become a beginning impression of an artist–no more waiting for press kits, accessing just what they've posted on their websites, etc.

Others commented on how technology is changing the behavior of the ticket-buying public:

Final-minute ticket-buying and the trend away from traditional subscription packages will probably go on, as the net has freed people upwards from having to plan for most event omnipresence far in accelerate. This will affect the predictability of revenue. On the positive side, social media has been a wonderful tool for word-of-oral fissure marketing.

While information technology is impossible to know what cyberspace and digital technologies volition be like in 10 years, the trend of more information communicated more chop-chop to a more than finely targeted audience with more immediate feedback from the recipient is probable to continue. We believe that this leads people to delay their decision-making about how they volition spend their leisure time. For our field, this has generally meant a decline in subscriptions, a decrease in accelerate ticket sales, and an increase in final-minute box role sales.

Moving across the practical, one of the prevailing positive themes is that technology increases – and will continue to increment – access to the arts. In some cases, technology is simply seen as a way to improve marketing and communication to get more than "butts in seats," only many respondents noted its power to augment and deepen the audience feel.

Engineering science is helping them introduce more than audiences to art:

The digital world is a very populist force, leveling the world betwixt rich and poor, educated and uneducated. In our instance, an organisation with a name similar "Historical Society" has an invisible shield that bounces people who are below median income, do not hold higher degrees, who hold blue collar jobs, who are a racial or cultural minority, off. The ubiquity of the estimator, whether through your home motorcar, school, or local library, means that all of those things that crusade discomfort don't matter. That is a big deal!

It has extended our visibility to many isolated individuals who may never have heard about our services, explored the artform, or who may have financial barriers to membership. Nosotros bear witness to them every day what we practice, rather than await them to discover a printed annual report and programme summary. Social media are concrete and immediate examples of our living community in action.

Engineering is also helping arts organizations extend their impact, far beyond a i-time performance or event:

The net and digital media provide an astonishing opportunity for arts organizations to extend the impact of the arts. A live performance tin can be complemented greatly by opportunities for further date and education, and the ability to share information online maximizes our power to provide these opportunities at a more than in-scale investment ratio. We tin can reach many more than people with an article or video than with a 1-fourth dimension lecture, for example.

Nosotros are able to provide artwork that dates dorsum more than than 25 years to the communities we have worked with over the years. For many, these archives represent the merely media history of their community. The utilize of the internet has deepened and expanded the access for our constituencies that are often transitional, without a landbase, or have been historically isolated due to geography.

Technology is increasing admission to the arts by breaking geographic constraints:

I retrieve that it will greatly improve accessibility to the arts field – from a budgetary standpoint and from a logistical standpoint. People who live outside of urban areas will be able to experience performances that are somewhat limited to large urban areas. Arts organizations volition need to reconsider the level/type of interaction with their audience.

Engineering science is helping organizations achieve more diverse communities – even on a global scale:

The greatest impact will be the power for not-profit organizations to share educational content and stimulating art and performances worldwide. It volition also spark conversations between diverse communities and help individuals develop a greater understanding – and hopefully, a life-long appreciation for the arts.

The internet volition enable the performing arts to reach beyond a local audience, promote tourism, and brand cultural arts created within a region accessible to the nation – and globe.

Technology is making it possible to create community around a piece of fine art:

There is a powerful opportunity for the arts to create communities effectually performances, shows, exhibitions and their themes and history. For example, a Broadway show similar 'Next to Normal' could (and probably has) created communities to discuss and share resources on mental illness.

Some organizations enthusiastically talk about the democratization of art and cosmos, while others expressed excitement about the challenge of meeting new demands and expectations:

Standing the transition from passive to participation, from hierarchical to autonomous, from traditional media to online media, from unmarried art-grade to inter-disciplinary.

The possibility to profoundly expand and create a more than diverse audience is very exciting because traditionally our audience has been older and whiter than the area we live in. Increasingly, we're seeing some of our content getting traction in surprising nooks and crannies of the internet – which definitely ways a shifting audition. The challenge will be for that audition to identify our content with the creators and the institution, and not simply accept it exist as more entertainment or dissonance out on the internet. In the next couple of years, the role of mobile devices will but continue to shift how people curate their own experience and engage with artistic content. In radio, this presents an exciting AND daunting claiming in terms of our funding structure and station loyalty.

The challenges that digital applied science nowadays

These arts organizations realize that with these benefits come drawbacks. While digital technologies have led to the creation of ever-more dazzling tools and apps, many arts organizations worry most the long term effect on audiences, the field, and their very mission.

A number of respondents worry nigh meeting increased audience expectations:

People will take higher expectations for a live event. For audiences to invest the time and effort of going to a live performance, the work they meet will have to be more than engaging and of higher quality. Events will accept to be more social and allow for greater participation and behind-the-scenes admission. The event spaces will have to be more beautiful, more than comfortable, more inviting and more than attainable.

The audience has already moved from "arts attendance equally an event" to "arts attendance equally an experience." This want for a total-range of positive experience from ticket purchase, to travel, to parking, to treatment at the space, to quality of performance, to exit – this volition merely increase over the side by side x years.

The greatest touch on of the internet on independent publishers will be audience expectations. Audiences will await everything to be available digitally, and will require an engaging experience instead of a static i.

Some point out the trouble of meeting audience expectations on a express budget:

Managing expectations. The internet and digital technologies are powerful tools. The public expects content to exist free. At that place is a lack of awareness of the resource (funding and staff) that it takes to manage and preserve digital content. These costs will need to be passed on to users.

Others limited business organization that the effort to run across audience expectations will influence artistic choices, even entire art forms:

Some ideas cannot be condensed into 140 characters or less. I hope technologies do not negatively touch on the playwright. I hope the playwright does not write solely for a Twitter generation.

Live functioning will be diminished. Younger people don't want to show up at a specific time, specific identify for live functioning — they want to download music at their own convenience. The ability of alive performance is lost and the civic convening – the community building is lost.

Some arts organizations take recognized this modify, and are doing their best to accommodate:

I believe digital technologies are here to stay, and we as an artform should cover them and learn how to work aslope them. We provide scripts to those sitting in our tweetseats, so they get the quotes correct. We must work aslope or face alienating them.

I believe that audiences will keep to accept shorter and shorter attention spans and volition insist upon existence able to use smartphones and other devices in the context of a performance. As an industry, we should stop fighting and try to notice ways to incorporate that reality into our daily lives.

We will need to become much less tied to live, in person programming and certainly less ties to anchored seats in concert halls. Programming will need to incorporate much more personal involvement by the consumers or they volition not be interested in engaging.

A number of respondents worried about audiences' decreasing attention spans, and the long-term bear on on the field:

Every bit attention spans subtract, programming of longer works (due east.g., Beethoven's Symphony #ix) will become more problematic. As we move frontwards, nosotros may need to consider ways to embrace the digital, connected world to better engage alive audiences or run the adventure of making live music performances irrelevant.

The greatest impact could exist the expansion of our audiences, only the worst impact is the attention span of the moment of interaction. I worry that it may shorten our artforms' performance times.

Applied science has blurred the lines between commercial entertainment and noncommercial art, forcing arts organizations to more directly compete with all other forms of entertainment:

Basically, we are competing for the "amusement slot" in people's schedules, and the more entertainment they can go via Hard disk drive TV, Netflix, Video Games, etc., the less time they have for live performances, which also entails making an endeavour to become to the venue (as opposed to slumping on the couch in front of the Hd screen). Besides, movies, video games, etc., are both more convenient and cheaper than alive performances.

It has also blurred the lines between a virtual and existent experience:

As the realism of participatory digital entertainment (video games, etc.) and the immersion power of non-participatory digital entertainment (3D movies, etc.) increases, it threatens the elements that make the live arts unique–the sense of immediacy, immersion, and personal interaction with the fine art. We've long hung fast to the belief that in that location's nothing like a alive experience, but digital entertainment is getting closer and closer to replicating that experience, and live theatre will struggle to compete with the former'due south convenience and price.

Some respondents addressed issues specific to their field or bailiwick. Motion picture and cinema organizations talk virtually the pressure they face to preserve the "specialness" of the big screen when on-demand habitation viewing is already prevalent:

Every bit a movie theatre approaching our 5th anniversary, we take seen significant audience growth in spite of the fact that many of the films we play are existence released "day and date" on-demand. While streaming and piracy are increasing, nosotros've been able to deliver the bulletin that seeing films on the big screen with an audience is a singular, of import cultural experience. I can't emphasize the importance of the cyberspace and social media in our marketing efforts enough. It's about certainly a net positive value.

As a film exhibitor, our challenge is to go through the digital convergence for projection and exhibition, a supremely costly change that doesn't fifty-fifty have a long-range viability (these systems will accept to be upgraded and/or changed every 3-5 years). Finding the acquirement for these digital systems is an enormous challenge and threat to our ongoing activities.

Others working in film worry that the quality and quantity of movies will diminish:

In the field of picture production and distribution, more cyberspace and digital access will result in far fewer picture theaters, as audiences have greater access in their homes to the medium. Already, as marketing dollars get more than express for films, production companies are shortening the pic lifespan in a movie theater and moving them to digital and television media sooner and sooner.

Organizations in the literary book tradition are facing similar challenges with ebooks:

Literature and the book are being very impacted by digital technologies due to the growing popularity of ebooks and to the influence of huge online booksellers like Amazon. There are both skillful and bad effects associated with these technologies. These days books are more than easily accessible to a greater number of people however it is difficult for the book industry to produce a sustainable amount of income whether for individuals and for organizations. Information technology is crucial that the public understand the importance of supporting nonprofit literary orgs, publishers, independent bookstores, libraries and other supporters of book culture and in turn it is crucial for foundations and government to provide this back up.

All literary magazines are in peril right now, so if magazines such as ours continue to exist it will be because of a paradigm shift in how literature is funded every bit an art grade in the U.Southward. I am loathe to believe that impress publications will cease to be because they are even so more than beautiful, but all publishers will somewhen take to create simultaneous digital and impress editions, I imagine, which volition make the whole enterprise more than expensive.

Some respondents worry that these confusing technological and cultural forces will make it harder for some big scale artforms to survive:

I believe that the more expensive arts producers ­– symphony orchestras, for instance – volition find it more difficult to draw enough audience to go along in the same manner they've operated for the by decades. Smaller groups will find it easier to adapt because they're more flexible (they don't require a large stage and hall). I am very concerned well-nigh losing some of the greatest music ever written — symphonic music — for this reason.

Others pointed to innovative experiments — similar the Metropolitan Opera'due south performances in movie theatres — as an case of what big institutions with funding tin can practice:

For opera, it has made it more accessible, by providing low-cost performance broadcast of Met performances. This has increased the potential audience for our live performances. Information technology is our companies responsible to promote effectively to those audiences. Overall I believe the effect is positive.

Museums have a unique perspective on technology's impact. Information technology has greatly improved their cataloging efforts, simply some worry that it will somewhen reduce audition involvement in the "existent affair":

Information technology will radically shift the fashion in which we catalog and share information about collections; the museum as less the all knowing authority and more than the conduit for rich institution-driven AND user-driven information. It will besides allow regional collections the ability to link to similar collections worldwide – as such our local collections tin can be recontextualize and fabricated meaningful in ways not possible without linked data and semantic web technologies.

Digital technology and the resulting accessibility of data and images, while fostering accessibility of collections online, have the negative impact of diluting the want of individuals to visit the museum to run across works of art in person.

A number of organizations mentioned the demise of trusted critics and filters, which has happened every bit print media — especially local newspapers — take cutting dorsum on staff and struggled with decreased ad acquirement as role of this digital transition. Without critics, they worry about how arts audiences will judge quality:

Digital technologies have substantially fabricated information technology impossible for book critics to back up themselves in traditional ways; possibly the next x years will bring the shift of book criticism to academic world, where salaries are paid for educational activity, and reviewing is a secondary activity. Xx-5 years ago, working critics had full fourth dimension salaries from newspapers, magazines, other publications. Today there are simply a handful of critics able to exercise this.

Our chief concern for the literary arts is the increasing "validity" of cocky-publication among reviewers, readers, and writers. Online publishing and book sales through Amazon (for case) contribute to this problem. If there are no gatekeepers, it will become even more difficult to draw attention to works of genuinely high quality.

For some, the absence of critics and mainstream media previews of arts events means that arts organizations are shouldering an fifty-fifty greater burden:

The demise of daily and weekly newspapers and the increasing fragmentation of traditional radio and television media outlets combined with the increasing consolidation of media ownership due to revised FCC regulations has marginalized arts coverage and criticism to a point where it no longer plays a function in the larger civic chat. Hence, information technology is becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish and appoint potential audience members and arts participants, and has shifted the unabridged brunt (and costs) to arts organizations that are ill equipped and unprepared to both engage in their traditional function (i.due east., support the creation and presentation of art work) equally well as build back up structures to have the place of traditional media organizations.

Some responses addressed the hereafter of artists themselves. At that place is recognition that today'southward artists must also exist entrepreneurs:

Digital technologies will level the playing field for all and onetime school, professional person artists will be left backside. It is the advent of the amateur. For those who are savvy and ahead of the curve, at that place is money to exist fabricated if the content is stiff. It means the consummate reversal of a contributed based model founded on single funding sources and moves toward an earned acquirement model and crowd sourced funding. Now more than ever, artists need to be entrepreneurs and not just artists. You can't survive at present as an creative person unless you lot take a potent business model.

Nevertheless others worried openly about how artists will brand a living as traditional revenue streams shift or disappear:

[The cyberspace] is becoming the major distribution platform for documentaries, which is what we do. The DVD will exist gone in ten years. Artists are going to struggle to monetize their piece of work on the Spider web.

Admission volition be expert for educational purposes and to increase awareness of the arts particularly historical textile in performance of all types. Yet, issues of copyright and payment for that textile, such as in apps and in streaming or downloading, are murky and difficult to navigate for artists themselves as to value and fairness of payments to the creative person for original content.

There were also some contemplative responses near the impact of technology on culture. One respondent pointed out that the power to interact globally could lead to more cultural homogeneity while some other worried about the future of non-digitized art:

Digital technologies allows for students and artists all over the globe to be inspired by one another. In some ways this is fantastic, in other ways, this breaks downward the cultural differences that is then beautiful about having multiple countries involved in an art form.

Materials we have that aren't available digitally will be lost from the human record.

Finally, several respondents summed up the bug facing arts organizations, connecting the challenges of meeting audience expectations with limited funding options:

Attendance at live performances will favor more fervent fans and those with disposable incomes who reside in cities, and the increased prevalence of simulcasts and livestreams will alter the viewing experience while also making it more than democratic and affordable. Audiences will await the digital presence of institutions to be well maintained and curated.

Organizations will continue to need to conform and incorporate digital technologies into their programming. This volition be a good thing for art consumers and patrons by increasing accessibility and improving collaboration. At the aforementioned time, organizations will struggle with funding to proceed up with engineering science. Funders and then rarely fund some of the infrastructure necessary to create meridian-notch digital programming, and that will be a major struggle.

Survey results reveal that on a purely practical level, the internet, digital technologies and social media are powerful tools, giving arts organizations new ways to promote events, engage with audiences, accomplish new patrons, and extend the life and telescopic of their work. "We can reach more patrons, more than frequently, for less money," said one respondent. "That's been a huge modify in the xxx years I've been in the business."

Only, technology has besides disrupted much of the traditional art world; it has inverse audience expectations, put more than pressure on arts organizations to participate actively in social media, and even undercut some arts groups' missions and revenue streams.

Beyond the practical, the net and social media provide these arts organizations with broad cultural opportunities. Comments in this survey reveal an array of innovative ways that arts organizations are using engineering science to innovate new audiences to their piece of work, expose more than of their collections, provide deeper context effectually plays and exhibits, and intermission downwardly cultural and geographic barriers that, to this bespeak, have made it difficult for some members of the public to participate. Their responses suggest that the bulk of these arts organizations, with enough funding and foresight, are eager to use the new digitals tools to sustain and amplify their mission-driven piece of work.