Scholars exchange views on the integrated innovation of culture and technology at a forum in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. Photo: SICI

SHENZHEN—The Cultural and Technological Innovation Symposium was recently held in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province.

More than 200 attendees from the government, businesses, universities, and research institutes in the fields of culture, science and technology, and art, conducted in-depth discussions on the innovation of the digital culture industry.

The fission-style development of digital information technology is reconstructing the ecosphere of traditional industries in a comprehensive way, triggering development of combined online and offline services. The integration of culture and technology remains the main driving force for cultural innovation. Technological innovation has promoted the creation, dissemination, and consumption transformation of culture and art, reshaping the culture and art industry’s ecology. Especially in the “cloud era,” digital technology has reconstructed time and space, and the intelligent revolution has exerted a revolutionary impact on the content, forms, and modes of cultural production.

Affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the first quarter of 2020 saw a relatively significant decline in the consumption of offline cultural services, but an explosive increase in internet-related cultural industries, said Li Fengliang, director of the Institute for Cultural Industries at Shenzhen University. This phenomenon shows that the development of Shenzhen’s “internet + technology + culture” as a new cultural business is in line with the direction of cultural industries and cultural consumption trends.

Zhang Shuwu, head of the Digital Content Technology and Media Service Research Center of the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, divided the process of China’s cultural and technological development into four stages which include exploration, innovation, substantial growth, and prosperity, while highlighting the achievements made in the innovation stage. When discussing future network economic reforms, he proposed establishing a transparent service network, and realizing the triple return to economic dominance, value, and order. The core element of China’s modern cultural innovation is the integration of new cultures, new technology, and the new economy. The highly integrated development of culture and economy will give birth to a new form of Chinese modern culture that organically combines Chinese traditions and modernity, national characteristics and world trends.

Art consumption theories were initially introduced from the West. With the growth of domestic market economy and the increase in people’s consumption levels, domestic academic circles have gradually derived art consumption theories based on local needs, said Fu Caiwu, director of the National Institute of Cultural Development at Wuhan University.

In the digital information era, art consumption theories should not and cannot be confined to the single disciplinary frameworks of traditional economics, management science, and sociology, Fu continued. Instead, they require wellrounded observations under crossdisciplinary studies. This proposes a higher requirement for disciplinary development in the digital economy era, and also higher expectations for the new generation of scholars in the Chinese cultural industry field.

Technological innovation and cultural industry agglomerations, an important link to supply-side reforms, will have a profound impact on cultural consumption, said Gu Jiang, a professor from the Business School at Nanjing University. Technological innovation can greatly upgrade the quality of products and services, reduce production costs, and promote the rise of emerging business forms, while cultural industry clusters are essential to scale and efficient development. For Shenzhen, developing integrated culture and technology exerts a powerful driving force and has a demonstrative effect, making greater breakthroughs in frontier fields. This will create more development space for China’s cultural technology.

Xiang Yong, deputy director of the Institute for Cultural Industries at Peking University, noted the sky-rocketing growth of live video streaming during the pandemic. In his view, webcasts are not merely an effective operation platform for promoting intangible cultural heritage, but also demonstrate contemporary demand for cultural inheritance. Internet platforms should extract content from traditional Chinese cultural elements, displaying the rational beauty of Chinese culture. We need to establish a complete ecology that integrates content production, dissemination, and consumption, and make webcasting an effective tool that empowers traditional culture, through digital storytelling, cultivating traditional craft inheritors as new-type cultural internet influencers, and establishing traditional cultural gene banks.

The Blue Book of Culture and Technology: Annual Report of Culture and Technology Innovative Development (2020) was released at the forum. The book, which has been published for eight consecutive years, is an annual comprehensive analysis of the latest developments in the integrated innovation of culture and technology at home and abroad.