Symbolization as a tool for mobilization

Faced with an abundance of digital cultural practices, cultural venues struggle to mobilize “audiences.” I argue here that this difficulty does not stem from a lack of attention, but from insufficient differentiation in what is offered. Collective symbolization and its digital inscription constitute powerful levers for building lasting engagement.

Cultural offerings facing competition from digital access

The question of audience mobilization, particularly young people, constantly comes up in concerns about cultural mediation, whether we work in libraries, theaters, youth centers, schools or elsewhere. We have the impression that young people are less mobilized than before, less attentive, less regular in their responses to our proposals, less engaged. I think there is a simple explanation for this, which in no way lies with young people, who would have lost their capacity for attention because of digital technology...

Cultural offerings are now plethoric, accessible everywhere, whenever we want, wherever we want, thanks to digital media. They correspond very precisely to our personal tastes, due to algorithms that personalize our experiences. All you need to do is go to YouTube to find content that fascinates us, to TikTok to make discoveries, to Netflix to watch films, not to mention all the other audiovisual sharing spaces, legal or not, that provide access to extremely diverse works. Platforms offer content, which can be “passive” or “participatory,” absolutely captivating and seemingly limitless. This situation is unprecedented and new, I believe we have not fully grasped its magnitude, yet the Covid period clearly demonstrated it. Before the digital era, access to cultural content went mainly through television channels, movie theaters, theaters, museums, cultural venues in general. Such personalized, qualified access to such diverse content, sometimes of extreme quality, simply did not exist. It would be naive to believe that this does not have a major impact on the new anthropological function of past cultural venues.

Subsidized cultural venues thus find themselves in competition with the accessibility offered by digital media. The problem is not one of attention or lesser engagement by young people (or older ones). They simply find far more mobilizing cultural offerings outside the field of institutional proposals. As Yves Citton points out in The Ecology of Attention (2014), we have entered an attention economy where « what is rare is not information, but the attention we can give it ». We must therefore think about differentiating our proposals from those our audiences receive elsewhere, and take into account the new uses and new capabilities that people have developed thanks to digital tools.

The embodied collective as a distinctive value

What can make a difference is first the collective and its physical presence. We must absolutely identify this collective dimension, make it work for example by putting people in small groups, having them cooperate, enrich each other, then sharing their productions, even partial ones, in a large group. This embodied collective experience barely exists, at least not in such physical forms, in digital spaces.

Collectively valuing a result, even partial, anchors it in the reality of others, in the gaze of others, and this legitimizes it. What we have created alone (casting a gaze on something can already be seen as creation) often remains in a status of illegitimacy until it has been recognized. This collective legitimation goes through empathy: we see what others have done, we can put ourselves in their place, and thus receive in a very powerful way the journey they have accomplished, and mutually recognize it. They themselves receive our own journey. There is no need to make it explicit since we are together having lived a common experience in small groups, then shared in a large group. Jean Caune, in Cultural Mediation: Constructing the Social Bond (1999), clearly shows how « mediation is not reduced to simple transmission, it constructs a relational space where subjects mutually constitute each other ».

This recognition goes through emotion, the non-verbal, with a force due to embodiment, which is unmatched in digital networks. This does not mean that important things do not happen on social networks, they are simply completely different experiences. The function of symbolization that we dare to accomplish together, carried by the group, by the facilitator, by the artist, makes us surpass ourselves in proportions that are almost impossible to reach alone.

Symbolization as a condition of engagement

To build in participants the desire, even the necessity to return, and to enable them to receive more of our proposals, we must end each work session with a presentation, even partial, a concretization, a symbolization of the stage accomplished, and its sharing in a directly accessible digital space. This is what gives meaning to the activity in which we have just participated, by inscribing it in digital reality, which legitimizes it, particularly because we can share it, for ourselves and around us, after the activity.

We thus institute participants in a social place and in a social role vis-à-vis others, mutually. We create a democratic and political space that constructs us in the collective while constructing each person individually, the two being in constructive dialectic thanks to the symbolization I just described. This notion joins what Patrice Meyer-Bisch calls as early as 1993 in Cultural Rights, an Underdeveloped Category of Human Rights the « capacity to be an actor of one’s own culture », that is, to recognize oneself as a creative subject and not a simple passive consumer.

Symbolization, in the shared moment, then through deposit in a digital space, allows the experience to be fixed in a shareable form, to make it exist beyond the lived instant. It transforms doing into work, process into production, activity into creation. Without this step of symbolization, the experience remains fleeting, fragile, susceptible to being minimized or forgotten in the face of daily solicitations, which immediately return.

Digital traces in service of self-recognition

The partial results thus produced as well as traces of the process, photographs for example of what happened, with people’s consent of course, must be shared immediately in digital spaces that participants will access right away via a QR code that we provide them. For the next workshop session, they will have this “instrumented memory” dear to Bernard Stiegler (Technics and Time, 1994), accessible both to partial results and to traces of the process they experienced.

They can, if they wish, share these traces with other people, but especially for themselves. This anchors the reality and existing dimension of what they have done, with all the emotions and varied situations that accompanied it. Even if we have lived a very strong, very enriching collective experience, when we return to our daily life with all its troubles and joys, we can be caught up and forget, or in any case no longer feel connected to that moment so different, so constructive.

Through lack of self-esteem, we can minimize the importance of what we have experienced, even purposely try to forget it so as not to acknowledge to ourselves the value of what we have lived and done. This may seem simple to say, but recognizing the value of our own elaborations represents an immense journey for most people. We do not realize it from the outside: we see what people have done, we find it very good, we encourage them, but they themselves do not recognize this value, this capacity that was theirs.

This is one of the angles of cultural rights: to accompany people in recognizing, in acknowledging to themselves the value of who they are and their creative capacity and their patrimonial legitimacy. I designate the value of what they have created, whether this heritage is material, their painting, their music, their video, or immaterial, the methods they have acquired, the experiences they have lived, the constructions that are theirs, the singular and collective journeys. As Alain Kerlan writes in Art for Education? (2004), « artistic experience contributes to the construction of the subject as a subject capable of recognizing themselves as creator of meaning and forms ».

The responsibility of mediation in constructing engagement

Thanks to these accessible digital traces and thanks to the recognition they allow people to anchor in their own eyes, future mobilization can patiently build in them. It seems to me that it is part of our role to give tools to people who lack them to recognize themselves. Digital technology is very powerful for this, but accessible spaces are needed, simply via a QR code, where we disseminate consensual content that will not put anyone in difficulty. Spaces with complicated and non-permanent codes that raise other issues can create closure, whereas what matters here is openness, access.

It is about allowing the existence of oneself in a real social space that is digital space, but which also symbolizes one’s place in physical social space. We must think of digital not as an end in itself, but as a tool for extending and anchoring the lived collective experience. This articulation between embodied experience and its digital trace constitutes one of the major issues of contemporary cultural mediation.

If a person does not return to the next session, we should not consider that they have an engagement problem, but rather consider either that we have not known how, in our mediation, to accompany the construction of their future engagement, or that it is not a problem, because they can extend their experience from their previous visit, and they will be able to access what was done in their absence, and perhaps return later, or not. There is no need to judge, everyone receives what they can and what they want.

An embodied collective symbolization process, then extended into the digital, constitutes a major factor of engagement. It goes through accompanying people to self-recognition as creative and social actors. This approach shifts the question from “cultural democratization,” making audiences access a legitimate culture, toward that of “cultural democracy,” recognizing everyone’s creative and patrimonial capacity. It makes cultural mediation no longer a simple transmission, but an emancipation process where everyone can recognize themselves as a subject of culture and actor of their own symbolic construction.