(Towards a) West Midlands Digital Strategy

Understanding the role of technology

Key in understanding the kind of opportunities that exist in digital technologies is identifying the role of the technology itself as a catalyst for change. Technology itself doesn’t create opportunities but it can accelerate and scale up the opportunities very swiftly. So the desire to share media content, to share knowledge, to network with each other all pre-exist the development of digital technologies but Flickr, Youtube, Wordpress, Twitter and others, scale up the opportunities to do so.

Likewise, technologies themselves don’t create institutions. The development of celluloid film in 1888 didn’t create cinema exhibition as we now know it but it did meet a growing demand for entertainment that had only been partly met by other means. Investment in film technology (both in production and distribution technologies) then helped support the development of networks of cinemas but that outcome wasn’t inevitable from the initial invention of cinema alone.

The division between technology and creative companies in cinema (for example, Kodak as a producer of celluloid film and United Artists as producers of content) existed for much of the life of the medium and is only just merging now with those studios who produce animation also innovating around the production (3d animation software) and exhibition (3d projection) technologies.

Like cinema, digital technologies have the potential to create totally new kinds of patterns of work and leisure. However, at this point in time we don’t fully understand what those will be, in the same way we can only see with hindsight the impact that transport technologies had on shaping physical spaces in cities.

What is emerging is that there is little division between technology and creative firms in the digital sector. Design agencies employ designers who are already familiar with how digital technologies work. This merging of the creative and technology sector is happening much more rapidly than in other mediums and needs to be more fully recognised at a regional level. The business cluster programme at Advantage West Midlands still has separate groups for ICT and for ‘Screen, Image, Sound’. Content is seemingly separated out from the technologies that underpin it.