Inhabiting the tangled hedgerow

It's been a while since I posted on here. Sometimes I feel like I have so much to say that I don't know where to begin without it becoming an incoherent mess and I get slightly paralyzed and end up saying nothing. But today I read something that really clarified for me the answer to an issue that I've been thinking about a lot.

I read an executive summary of a report commissioned by HSBC, The future of business: The changing face of business in 21st Century Britain. It's not the sort of thing I normally read, though maybe I should, but I read it because the report names Brighton as one of the five supercities of the future and hey, I live and work in Brighton so it's relevant to me, and once I got past the hilarious and frankly slightly desperate jargon, I learned something.

The issue I've been thinking about is this- How do arts organisations inhabit this new world? This crossover world, the overlapping space between an organisation and the online world, the tangled hedgerow to steal my own analogy. I was at an event called Shift Happens a while back and one of the speakers was Bill Thompson, he's a commentator on The Digital Planet a BBC world service programme about digital stuff and describes himself on Twitter as a hack and a pundit. One of the things that Bill talked about was what he believes is the challenge for arts organisations in the future, which was to pitch camp in that online world, to make it their own. This was the last talk of the event and I chatted with Bill afterwards very briefly and said yes, that's exactly right, I felt fired up by the idea, I may have even have embarrassed myself slightly. Then I left and got on a train and during the long journey home that excitement didn't leave me but the question kept coming up in my mind, but how? How do we do that, how do we pitch camp in that world?

I want to quote a little from the HSBC report-

'How many of us for instance, see social networking sites as a tool for personal rather than professional, gain? Yet for many entrepreneurial groups, social networks are now regarded as one of the best ways to develop and maintain new business contacts, test and market new products, organise and manage new business initiatives.'

Now I'm not in any way anti-business but this depressed me slightly. There's plenty more in the same vein and it made me more determined than ever to work out how to make sure that arts organisations are part of this new world, that it's not inhabited solely by businesses who are only looking to make money. Then it occurred to me what we have to do. We have to do what we do. There's no magic bullet, no blinding idea that'll make it happen. We just have to make sure that our work, our organisations are there, online, engaging with people and enabling them to engage with us, to share what we do, what we're about. This is exactly what business is doing right now, and we have to make sure that we don't lose out, that we build a future in which our online presence is as important as HSBC's in the same way that our presence in the real world is as important as theirs. And now, right now is the time to be doing that because otherwise we risk getting left behind and that world may become a commercialized one not open to us or one we no longer want to be a part of.