Abstract
Creative culture industry refers to industries that combine the creation, distribution, production, and commercialization of creative contents in advertising, design, film & video, interactive leisure software, music, publishing, and television and radio. This chapter focuses on the museum sub-sector of the creative cultural industries. These sub-sectors have eagerly embraced digital technologies to promote cultural heritage by transforming their archaeological finds into more immersive creative and cultural contents. However, the pervasive nature of mobile technologies and the heavy reliance on consumers' locational information have caused rising privacy concerns among consumers. This chapter employed a text mining study to explore how potential privacy infringement, as one of the most observable social impacts of mobile-based and location-sensitive AR and VR technologies, is discussed in major media outlets around the world. Discussions and implications conclude the chapter.
TopIntroduction
Defining Creative Cultural Industry
The concept of cultural industry is historically rooted in the Frankfurtian school (Abruzzese & Borrelli, 2000) that criticizes the manipulation of the mass in an ideological production of cultural contents (Colombo, 2018). This term, (creative) cultural industries, has later gained global prominence and popularity after the aggressive promotion by the government of UK. The term often refers to a list of seemingly un-related industries “which combine the creation, production and commercialization of creative contents which are intangible and cultural in nature” (Mariani, 2018, n.p.). According to the classification proposed by U.K. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (henceforth, DCMS), cultural industry commonly refers to thirteen sub-categories of industries of creative contents, such as “(1) advertising, (2) architecture, (3) art & antiques market, (4) crafts, (5) design, (6) designer fashion, (7) film & video, (8) interactive leisure software, (9) music, (10) performing arts, (11) publishing, (12) software and computer services, and (13) television and radio” (Yoshimoto, 2003, p. 1). Gross value added (or GVA) of U.K.’s creative industries has grown from £66.3 billion in 2010, to about £74.4 billion in 2012, to £84.4 billion in 2014, and to £101.5 billion in 2017 (Kinesta, 2018). Government’s statistics has estimated that the overall creative industries has accounted for 14.2% of UK’s GVA (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2017). Globally, most visited museums in 2017 include Louvre in Paris (8.1 million), National Museum of China in Beijing (8.06 million), Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (7 million), Vatican Museum in Vatican City (6.43 million) (Statista, 2018a). Similarly, popular art exhibitions also attract a large number of visitors. For example, in 2017, the Icons of Modern Art: the Shchukin Collection exhibition (in Paris) had about 1.2 million visitors, while Painters' Painters exhibit (in London) also attracted 833,490 visitors (Statista, 2018). While the sub-sectors of galleries, libraries, and museums only account for 1% of the annual GVA in the U.K., the eager integration of digital reality technologies into the creation, presentation, and dissemination of their contents have made them a suitable study to explore their potential impacts on privacy (Bruno et al., 2010; Chang et al., 2014; Chatzidimitris et al., 2013; GearBrain, 2018).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Engagement: A term which is used to describe the technique or result to encourage a company’s customers to interact and share their experiences with the communication contents, cultural artefacts, the advertised brand, or the company (i.e., advertiser).
Privacy: Privacy is a term that describe people’s right to be let alone, or their freedom from outside interference or intrusion without their prior consent.
Augmented Reality: Often abbreviated as AR, the term refers to a simulated, but improved, reality that combines both computer-generated virtual and real-world data to let users to initiate real-time interactions with computer-generated graphics, imagery, and objects, in a smooth manner and with an illusion of these layers of information coexisting in the same circumstance.
Head/Helmet-Mounted Display: Also known as HMD, this term commonly refers to the display device worn by reality-technology users when they use digital reality applications to experience the virtual worlds through a small display in front of each eye. There are two types of HDM: monocular and binocular HDM, depending on if one or two displays are available to users.
Ecosystem: A biological term that has been extended to study different operators/players in a specific industry to describe the composition of major and minor players. For example, the AR and VR ecosystem is made up for different industry sectors such as software development, 360 degree video developers, arcade, agency, education, network, university, accelerator, platform, corporate lab, tech vendor, among others.
Immersion: As a loosely defined psychological term, the concept has been used to define a unique experience when using a media or technology platform. Often affiliated with digital reality technologies, and other “immersive” technologies, this concept refers to users’ perceptions to feel a sense of presence in a non-physical world. This term often refers to a fully surrounded experiences when using HMD in a simulated space.
Information privacy: This term describes people’s right to control, own, and determine how and whether their personal location information is collected and used.
Museum: Refers to an institution that preserves, reinstates, and displays a collection of artistic, cultural, historical, scientific artefacts that are of importance and of great value to human experiences.
(Creative) Cultural Industry: A British term that refers to a set of knowledge-based and –generating economic segments and industries, ranging from advertising, broadcasting, crafts, film, graphic design, music, publishing, tourism, etc. This concept is often used along with “creative”. This concept often covers a wide variety of businesses, such as architecture, craft, film and television production, music, publication, etc.
Cultural Object: The term refers to human-made articles for a spiritual and/or practical purpose or activity that may have functional and/or artistic relevance to the general public.
Digital Reality Technology: An all-inclusive term to encompass a set of reality-creating technologies such as augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality, 360 degree video, and other emerging immersive technologies that can create a totally artificial virtual environment through computer-generated contents.
Virtual Reality: Commonly abbreviated as VR is the most recognized digital reality technologies and was studied as early as in the 1980s. VR is able to produce an interactive and computer-generated experience by captivating users within an artificial environment where interacting with the virtual articles are accomplished through auditory, visual, and haptic inputs.
Mixed Reality: Commonly abbreviated as MR. This term frequently refers to another similar term, hybrid reality. MR refers to the merger of both actual and virtual worlds to generate an immersive virtual space where digital reality meets and coexists with physical objects to let users to interact with reality-creating objects in real time.