Introduction
The last three decades have witnessed the widespread penetration of digital technology into various aspects of human life. This technology’s applications have reshaped how people engage in their various activities. Additionally, digital technologies such as the Internet and social media platforms have opened new spaces for both old and new forms of activity.
In this context, digital technology applications have affected how individuals engage in cultural activities and become part of the cultural life of their communities and the world as a whole. The methods by which individuals can present their cultural products to others and the ways they consume the cultural products of others have also been significantly impacted. In addition, digital technology has radically affected the means of cultural production in various forms.
While digital technology has already contributed to supporting individuals’ access to some of their cultural rights, its potential to support cultural rights is far beyond what has already been realized. Many obstacles prevent this potential from being realized.
At the same time, digital technology has exacerbated some threats to cultural rights and created new ones. Therefore, finding a harmonious balance between leveraging digital technology to enhance access to cultural rights while safeguarding these rights from potential risks posed by such technology is imperative.
This paper discusses the relationship between digital technology and cultural rights. It begins by providing background on the concept of cultural rights as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.
The paper first introduces its approach to the concepts of heritage and cultural production in the context of a digital world before discussing the main challenges facing the protection of cultural rights. Finally, it discusses what should change in the understanding, formulation, and protection of cultural rights in light of technological development.
The Intersection of Digital Technology and Cultural Rights
What Do Cultural Rights Mean?
Cultural rights encapsulate the entitlements of all individuals, both as unique beings and as members of groups, to nurture and express their innate human qualities, unique perspectives, and the significance they attach to their existence and growth. These rights encompass values, beliefs, language, knowledge, artistic expressions, social structures, and diverse lifestyles.
These rights encompass a wide spectrum of human experiences. They play a crucial role in shaping the unique identities of groups and individuals, which is essential for the well-being of each person, their connection to their community, and humanity as a whole.
Since their inception, human rights treaties have been keen to protect cultural rights. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in its first paragraph that:
“Everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”
Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights reaffirms the same rights. The article states that:
1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone:
(a) To take part in cultural life;
(b) To enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications;
(c) To benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for the conservation, the development and the diffusion of science and culture.
3. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to respect the freedom indispensable for scientific research and creative activity.
4. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the benefits to be derived from the encouragement and development of international contacts and co-operation in the scientific and cultural fields.
Heritage and Cultural Products in a Digital World
In 2018, the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) added “digital” to its name. The same year, it released its annual report titled “Digital Culture.”
The report’s introduction notes that “the use of digital technology in the cultural sector has led to an increasingly integrated landscape of creative activity and liberated new forms of artistic expression, distribution, and access.” This acknowledgment of this level of digital technology’s importance in the cultural sector reflects the significant permeation this technology has achieved within the sector.
Digital technology has revolutionized the empowerment of individuals worldwide to access cultural products in various forms, facilitating cultural production and making it widely available. Digitization offers unprecedented opportunities for preserving tangible cultural heritage, such as built heritage, inscriptions, coins, and manuscripts.
Additionally, digital audio and video recording methods are more flexible and easily reproducible, making them ideal for preserving intangible heritage, such as social practices, customs, and traditions. Alongside the expanded capabilities for recording and documenting cultural heritage, digital technology provides unprecedented opportunities for accessing this heritage.
Today, specialized researchers, amateurs, and the general public can easily access examples of the heritage of different peoples. Additionally, digital technology applications allow the average person to access cultural heritage and interact with it in attractive, engaging ways.
Furthermore, major museums worldwide now offer virtual tours of their galleries, allowing individuals to interact with their exhibits, thereby overcoming barriers of distance, travel costs, and time management.
Threats to Cultural Rights in a Digital World
With the rapid advancement of digital technology, humanity has entered a new realm: the digital world. This world creates new conditions that must be adapted to and coexist with. It also imposes new requirements on human activities and practices, including those related to participation in cultural life.
Over time, the boundaries between different communities become weaker. In turn, a global cultural space is being formed, transcending traditional boundaries between different cultures and offering greater opportunities for human connection. Theoretically, it is assumed that all individuals can access this space and participate in shaping it equally; however, this is not practically the case.
This section of the paper addresses the threats digital technology poses to individuals’ enjoyment of their cultural rights. The hypothesis presented in the paper is that cultural life is significant for any community because it serves as the space through which community members share in the creation of their individual and collective identities.
The members of any community establish their individual and collective identities based on shared heritage and the forms of cultural expression they produce and share through their various cultural activities. These individual and collective identities are reflected in community members’ diverse practices and activities.
They also contribute to defining prevailing trends, potential for cognitive and technological advancement, and providing the community with the flexibility and capacity necessary to face future challenges. As the importance of a unified global cultural space increases, its role in shaping prevailing global cultural trends becomes more influential in communities’ lives than the impact of their local cultural spaces.
There is a positive aspect of all humans sharing a single cultural space in which they can formulate a common approach to address future challenges. The importance of this aspect becomes evident when considering that future challenges are inherently global, such as the risks of climate change and the dangers of developing artificial intelligence technologies beyond human control.
However, numerous factors create significant gaps in the extent and depth of individuals’ participation from different communities in the unified cultural space. This results in an unbalanced representation of them as individuals and groups with diverse cultures. This is necessarily reflected in the extent to which everyone in the world enjoys their cultural rights.
Threats to the Right to Participate in Cultural Life
When the fundamental international human rights documents were formulated, the prevailing vision for recognizing the right to participate in cultural life was largely confined to each country’s local scope. However, as the introduction to this section has clarified, cultural life in a digital world has increasingly become connected to a unified global cultural space.
Therefore, the conditions for an individual’s enjoyment of the right to participate in cultural life should now extend to their right to access this space and actively contribute to shaping and developing it.
The Internet plays a central and essential role in providing access to the unified global cultural space. Thus, the right to participate in cultural life intersects with the right to Internet access, one of the most important digital rights.
However, in the digital world, the Internet is also the main and sometimes the only gateway for individuals to access their countries’ and communities’ local cultural space. In principle, an individual’s chances of enjoying the right to participate in local or global cultural life can be measured by the extent to which they have access to the Internet. This indicator, in itself, raises a clear issue, given the ongoing low levels of internet access in many of the world’s poorest countries.
In addition to the inequality in merely accessing the Internet, another more considerable disparity significantly affects individuals’ participation in cultural life. While internet connectivity allows individuals to access available content, their ability to benefit from and engage with it to any extent depends on several other conditions; foremost among them is language.
For several reasons, there is a huge disparity in the content available on the web in terms of language. According to recent statistics, content available in English represents over 52% of the total content online. This is followed by Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, and French, which account for percentages ranging from 4.3% to 5.5%.
Notably, the list of the ten most used languages in web content excludes some of the most widely spoken languages in the world. For example, Chinese accounts for 1.3% of content, and Arabic represents only 0.6%.
The limited content available online in the local languages of many communities means: first, that these communities have a restricted share of the opportunities the Internet provides for participation in cultural life. Secondly, this limitation poses a barrier to individuals who cannot use the most common languages on the web in global cultural life.
This issue cannot be viewed merely as a relative deprivation of the advantages that digital technology adds to the enjoyment of the right to participate in cultural life. Today, the Internet is the main space for cultural interaction. This interaction, occurring through it, is currently reshaping the cultures of human communities around the world, regardless of the level of participation of each community in that reshaping.
Meaningful access to cultural life through the Internet is not a luxury or an additional benefit but a necessity for any individual in a digital world to enjoy their right to participate in cultural life.
Threats to Heritage and Cultural Diversity
Digital technology offers immense possibilities for documenting cultural heritage; however, this role comes with challenges and threats. These challenges relate to integration, compatibility, and long-term sustainability. The rapid evolution of digital technology brings concerns about the swift obsolescence of digital content. Over time, digital file formats may become unreadable or unusable due to aging, replacement with newer formats, and lack of support from specialized software.
In addition, digitizing heritage requires technological and material capabilities that vary depending on the type of heritage element. The cost of these capabilities increases when considerations are made to ensure greater reliability or when a desire is expressed to make the digital representation of heritage accessible to the widest possible audience.
The ability to access the mentioned capabilities varies significantly among different communities. This means that diverse cultures do not have the same opportunities for digitally documenting their heritage or making it available to the public through digital technology.
The disparity in capabilities and language leads to a significant imbalance in the representation of different cultures on the Internet. This, in turn, causes the global cultural space shaped by the Internet to lack diversity, rendering it limited and less flexible.
Even more concerning is that the dominance of a particular culture in the global cultural space formed in cyberspace turns it into a tool for establishing a form of cultural hegemony. Such cultural hegemony represents an aggression against the cultural rights of those belonging to less-represented cultures; it contributes to the creation of a hierarchy that justifies discrimination against their heritage and cultural production.
Threats to Cultural Production Processes
Digital technology has introduced many threats that may hinder cultural production processes or undermine the rights of those involved in various ways. Making cultural products available in digital form means that copying and distributing them has become easier, and modifying them in any way has become more accessible.
There are issues related to the copying and distribution of cultural products in violation of copyright laws in different countries. These issues represent a gray area where positions vary. Copyright laws have been widely criticized for being rigid, inflexible, and favoring narrow interests over the public interest.
Society is deprived of the full potential benefits of cultural products, particularly in scientific research, due to the need to protect the often excessive financial profits generated by their distribution. This is accomplished by restricting access to these products.
On the other hand, intellectual property protection laws have been criticized for not keeping up with the new forms of cultural production made possible by digital technology. Unlike traditional cultural products, there is no protection for intellectual property rights for content published through blogging sites and social media platforms. To this day, the laws do not regulate mechanisms to protect the moral rights of these content producers or to ensure their right to any financial returns resulting from their publication.
Finally, with the rapid advancement of generative AI, cultural production processes face an unprecedented type of threat. Until recently, there were no competitors to humans in cultural production. While it has always been possible to plagiarize a cultural product and infringe upon the moral rights of its creator, there was never any doubt that any cultural product was backed by a human being.
Language models that underpin generative AI applications can now create textual, visual, or audio content or a combination of visual and audio. These applications threaten the rights of human cultural producers on the one hand and cultural production processes as a whole on the other.
For example, language models can produce content attributed to specific individuals in ways that are difficult to refute. However, these language models are trained on datasets available through the Internet, and most of the time, the companies developing these models do not disclose the sources of the datasets used for their training.
This raises legitimate concerns that the training processes for these models may violate the intellectual property rights of the content owners included in the datasets. While existing intellectual property laws already protect some of this content, proving such violations is extremely difficult. This difficulty arises from several reasons, primarily because these laws are inadequate in addressing the new situations created by AI technology.
Digital Cultural Rights
The previous section discussed how the use of digital technology has produced a number of conditions that challenge and threaten the protection of cultural rights. This necessitates adjusting our understanding of some of these rights or modifying the legal tools, policies, and practices that seek to protect them.
These modifications should be based on an integrated conceptualization of the nature of cultural life in a digital world. This conceptualization is based on two main pillars:
- First, cultural life in a digital world relies mostly on interactions, activities, and practices through digital technological media. These media allow individuals to access various forms of cultural production and allow individuals and groups to practice and share these forms of cultural production.
- Second, cultural life in a digital world is increasingly moving towards removing geographic and political barriers, forming a single global cultural space.
Protecting Heritage and Cultural Diversity
Protecting heritage in a digital world requires establishing internationally agreed-upon mechanisms to regulate the digital documentation of heritage in its various forms. These mechanisms should include setting a minimum set of metadata that guarantees the reliability of the representation of the digital content of the heritage item in question, as well as the integrity and clarity of its attribution.
Countries must be obligated to include provisions in their legislation mandating the application of the agreed-upon minimum metadata and implementing appropriate measures against non-compliant content and its publishers to enforce these mechanisms.
International mechanisms for regulating the digital documentation of heritage should also include the following:
- Standardization of documentation methodology to ensure the best possible representation of the heritage item in question.
- Standardization of the digital file formats used and ensuring their compatibility and sustainability.
- Setting specific requirements for the equipment and facilities used in documentation and permanent preservation.
- Setting requirements for content accessibility, recopying, and republication in ways that ensure that the moral property rights of the heritage item are not infringed upon.
On the other hand, international mechanisms should be established to achieve a fair representation of the heritage of different cultures in the unified global cultural space. This includes initiatives and projects for cooperation in technology transfer, sharing expertise, and providing technical and material support to countries with limited capabilities. Additionally, greater balance in the representation of different cultures can be achieved by providing unified gateways that allow access to the digital documentary content of diverse global heritages.
Perhaps striving to maintain a suitable level of cultural diversity is the most challenging goal, given the multiple factors influencing this diversity and the various stakeholders involved. While efforts can be made to achieve a degree of diversity in the documentary content of the heritage of different cultures, achieving this diversity in the continually evolving cultural production representative of cultures worldwide is a more difficult task.
Striving to achieve and maintain cultural diversity requires a clear understanding among international actors of its importance for a harmonious and compatible future among humanity and a greater capacity for humankind to face future challenges.
Through this understanding, international initiatives can be developed to promote cultural production in less fortunate countries and provide opportunities for access to this production in its various forms. This also encourages the interaction of individuals from different cultures with the cultural products of cultures distinct from their own. It provides supporting mechanisms for this, such as translation between different languages.
The Right to Participate in Cultural Life
Participation in cultural life in a digital world is increasingly related to accessing the unified global cultural space that the Internet enables. Therefore, the equal right of everyone to actively participate in the cultural life that affects their lives primarily requires protecting the right to access the Internet.
This highlights the close and necessary connection between the protection of cultural rights in a digital world and the protection of digital rights in their fundamental form. However, safeguarding the right to effective participation in cultural life in a digital world goes beyond mere internet access. The concept of the right to participate in cultural life should be broadened to include a minimum set of necessary conditions for this participation to be effective within both local and global cultural contexts.
Any expansion of the concept of the right to participate in cultural life must include the obligation of countries and relevant private institutions to work on eliminating the barriers to this participation, the foremost of which is the language barrier. This obligation can start gradually by determining basic cultural services that concerned entities are obligated to provide in the most common languages in the world so that as many people as possible can benefit from them.
These entities should also be obligated to continuously expand the availability of cultural content in as many languages as possible within their capabilities. The rapid progress of AI technology can be utilized to support this objective. Machine translation can be facilitated when possible, but only if it meets a minimum standard for quality and accuracy in the translations.
Conclusion
Cultural rights are among the human rights most affected by the rapid evolution of digital technology. This evolution has profoundly digitalized cultural life as we experience it today. While this situation has many advantages, it also poses challenges and threats to protecting cultural rights that need to be understood and addressed.
In this context, this paper has sought to present a vision based on the conviction that the primary aspect of digital technology’s impact on cultural life is its globalization. In other words, the advancement of digital technology has created a unified global cultural space that is digital and fundamentally supported by the internet.
In its first section, the paper discussed essential definitions, clarifying the concept of cultural rights based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
The paper also presented an approach to understanding heritage and cultural products in the context of a digital world. Based on these definitions, the paper discussed the most important challenges and threats to protecting cultural rights in light of the rapid evolution of digital technology and the dominance of a unified global cultural life through cyberspace.
The paper also sought to conceptualize our understanding of cultural rights in a digital world and what should be considered to provide adequate guarantees to protect the cultural rights of individuals and societies in this new world.
In conclusion, cultural rights have a profoundly important collective aspect; unlike most human rights, they fundamentally pertain to communities and their futures. In an increasingly unified world, with the gradual fading of traditional boundaries between its peoples, a shared human cultural identity is emerging over time.
The nature of this collective identity will determine how humanity can advance in its efforts to achieve a better life for its members in the face of significant challenges that may threaten its very existence. As our world and cultural life become digitized, cultural rights in their digital form should be the cornerstone for envisioning our common future.