Do a good job in the ＂integration problem＂ of culture and technology
The beauty of culture permeates people’s hearts; The light of science and technology illuminates the future. In the long history of mankind, every integration of culture and technology has become a powerful engine to promote social progress and promote the development and progress of human society. In March this year, General Secretary of the Supreme Leader stressed during his inspection tour in Hunan that we should explore an effective mechanism for the integration of culture and science and technology, accelerate the development of new cultural formats, and form more new cultural industry growth points. At present, the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation are accelerating, and the deep integration of culture and technology characterized by digitalization, networking and intelligence is the general trend. Doing a good job of "integration" of the two will not only promote the transformation and upgrading of traditional cultural industries, but also open up a new track for cultural industries, effectively improve people’s quality of life and stimulate the innovation and creativity of Chinese excellent traditional cultures.
Empower the cultural industry to develop with high quality.
The General Secretary of the Supreme Leader pointed out that it is necessary to conform to the development trend of digital industrialization and industrial digitalization, accelerate the development of new cultural formats, transform and upgrade traditional cultural formats, and improve quality and efficiency and core competitiveness. In recent years, the driving effect of scientific and technological progress on cultural innovation has become increasingly significant. Taking artificial intelligence and metauniverse as examples, the scale of global artificial intelligence industry increased from 37.5 billion US dollars in 2019 to 707.8 billion US dollars in 2023, an increase of nearly 18 times; The scale of meta-cosmic industry has increased from $159.1 billion in 2021 to $478.8 billion in 2023, with an average annual growth rate of over 70%. In the process of integration of culture and science and technology, the two go to each other and promote each other, which promotes the high-quality development of the cultural industry.
Culture provides value guidance, innovative resources and aesthetic experience for science and technology. Science and technology is a double-edged sword. If its instrumental rationality is emphasized to the extreme, it may lead to the prevalence of "technology worship" and even lead to ecological crisis and economic crisis. Culture is the key to guide science and technology to be good, emphasizing people’s value, emotion and experience, prompting science and technology to pay more attention to people’s needs and feelings while pursuing efficiency, injecting humanistic care and social responsibility into science and technology, and preventing the development of science and technology from deviating from the course of civilization and progress of human society. Culture contains scientific way of thinking, profound wisdom and rich knowledge system, which can provide guidance in the sense of world outlook and methodology, continuous inspiration and creativity for scientific and technological innovation, thus improving the usability, adaptability and ease of use of science and technology, and making science and technology better understand and meet human needs. Culture provides aesthetic perception for science and technology, and breeds beautiful social fashion in the world dominated by science and technology. The physical space without perception constructed by data and technology can become a complete, interesting and lively life world through the touch of culture. China’s original 3A game "Black Myth: Wukong", which was popular all over the world in 2024, gave players the ultimate aesthetic experience with the help of the charm of traditional architecture.
Science and technology promote the formation of new forms of expression, communication and industrial forms of culture. The deep application of digital technology can transform traditional cultural content into digital cultural products. With the help of virtual reality and augmented reality technology, people can enjoy historical scenes, works of art and cultural heritage in an immersive way, and the interactivity and autonomy of cultural experience have been greatly improved. Virtual reality technology can enhance the expressive force of culture, big data promotes the atlas and visualization of cultural content, the Internet of Things makes cultural scenes more perceptive, and digital cultural equipment such as intelligent terminals, somatosensory devices and high-definition display screens are constantly derived, making people’s cultural experience more vivid, rich, three-dimensional and acceptable, and realizing close-range and instant. Driven by science and technology, the use of digital technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence and virtual reality to empower cultural development can break the boundaries of time and space, make cultural venues "move", "heat up" and "live" cultural relics. Digital intelligence technology is reshaping the space of cultural communication with unprecedented power, and constantly unlocking new scenes of cultural communication such as multi-agent resonance, human-computer interaction and symbiosis, and virtual and reality integration. New modes of communication such as digital publishing, digital broadcasting, digital performing arts and digital printing are constantly emerging. "Technology empowers and culture goes out of the circle", technology can greatly innovate the service medium and form of cultural products, relying on digital technology and the Internet.New cultural products and services such as digital images, digital entertainment, digital design, animation games, online literature, online music, digital collections, digital virtual people, digital cultural creation and so on emerge in an endless stream, and cultural products such as interactive short videos and interactive novels are very popular.
Open up a new track for future industrial development
In recent years, the rapid development of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and cloud computing is accelerating the all-round and systematic innovation of human production and life, and has become a key force in reorganizing global factor resources, reshaping the global economic structure and reconstructing the global competition pattern. In particular, the cross-integration of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, ultra-high-definition video, emerging automotive electronics, etc., has bred cutting-edge technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, meta-universe and digital, which is triggering a new industrial transformation and opening up a new track for future industrial development.
The new track of cultural and technological integration is embodied in five aspects: new facilities, new technologies, new equipment, new scenes and new formats. The new facilities, namely intelligent comprehensive digital information infrastructure, involve data computing capacity, transmission capacity and storage capacity, mainly including national cultural private network, cultural computing network facilities and cultural innovation platform. New technology is an important driver of the integration of culture and technology, which has the characteristics of high speed, high precision and powerful functions, mainly including big data, cloud computing, blockchain, artificial intelligence, next-generation Internet, human-computer interaction and other technologies. An organism formed by the combination of advanced digital technology is similar to an intelligent body with human body structure. New equipment mainly refers to the new equipment created by the integration of culture and technology in user terminals. For example, body smart equipment, wearable smart equipment, car audio and video equipment, high-end travel equipment, 3D printers, etc. In the era of digital intelligence, in addition to the front-end infrastructure, the manufacturing of user terminal equipment has increasingly become an important yardstick to measure the effectiveness of cultural and technological integration. The new scene, the most representative of which is the metacosmic scene, covers many fields such as cultural tourism, education and medical care. The biggest feature of these new scenes is to use virtual technology to build an interactive space, so that people can get an immersive experience between virtual and reality. New business forms, that is, new industries and new models spawned by the integration of culture and technology. As far as new industries are concerned, including audio and video, digital publishing, animation games, online literature and other industries have developed rapidly.
These five aspects are not separated, but have internal logic. Among them, the new facilities belong to the basic base layer, which is the basic support for the development of new technologies, new equipment, new scenarios and new formats of software and hardware. New technology belongs to the level of technology research and development, and it is the source of power to promote the integration of culture and technology. New equipment belongs to the product tool layer and is a tool carrier to promote the integration of culture and technology. The new scene belongs to the application layer of the industry and is a system integration of new facilities, new technologies, new equipment and new formats. The new format belongs to the form expression layer and is an important expression form of new quality productivity in the cultural field.
It can be seen that whenever scientific and technological innovation makes a new major breakthrough and is applied to the cultural field, it will drive the innovation and development of culture. The integration of the two will give birth to a new cultural format, extend the cultural industrial chain, cultivate and form new quality productivity, and thus further promote economic development, social progress and civilization renewal.
Meet the diverse spiritual and cultural needs of the people
In the new era, people have more demands and higher standards for spiritual and cultural life, and expect a higher level, higher quality and more diversified spiritual and cultural life. Promoting the integration of culture and science and technology will give traditional culture and art new creative content, new forms of expression, new experiences and feelings, and provide support for meeting the diverse spiritual and cultural needs of the people.
On the one hand, it is conducive to bridging the "digital divide" in basic public cultural services. At present, in the field of cultural consumption in China, there is a certain "digital gap" between urban and rural areas, regions and generations. The integration of culture and science and technology will help to reverse this situation and improve people’s quality of life. Promoting the deep integration of culture and technology can effectively promote the digital construction of public cultural services, including national cultural big data system and public cultural cloud, expand the coverage of high-quality public cultural products, expand new scenes of digital cultural consumption, develop new formats such as online audio-visual, online broadcast and digital art exhibition, effectively increase the supply of public cultural services, and provide people with richer spiritual and cultural products. Promoting the deep integration of culture and science and technology will effectively improve the digital level of public cultural services, open up the "last mile" of cultural services, enhance the arrival rate and timeliness of public cultural services, promote the equalization and accurate supply of basic public cultural services, and better meet the people’s growing spiritual and cultural needs. Making full use of next-generation information technologies, such as big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things, and 5G, will help to accurately grasp the changes in people’s spiritual and cultural needs, promote the transformation of public cultural services to order-based services and interactive services, and enable people to obtain public cultural services more accurately and effectively, with more sense of gain and happiness, and enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of public cultural services.
On the other hand, it is conducive to promoting the upgrading of cultural consumption. At present, people’s spiritual and cultural consumption presents new trends, such as diversified demand, creative content, immersion in experience, intelligent media and virtualization of time and space. It is urgent to enrich the total amount of cultural consumption, optimize the structure of cultural consumption and improve the quality of cultural consumption through the integration of culture and technology. Promoting the integration of culture and science and technology will help to promote digital technology to fully empower the cultural industry, promote the wide penetration of high and new technologies into the production, dissemination, consumption, experience and other aspects of the cultural industry, cultivate new cultural formats and endow traditional culture with new contents and new forms, which will better meet the people’s demand for quality cultural consumption. For example, through the application of naked-eye 3D, VR, AR interactive experience and other technologies, it provides people with an immersive experience that is knowable, tangible, touchable and tasteable. Promoting the development and application of modern high-tech, especially the all-round popularization of information technology, will greatly broaden the channels of cultural transmission. The increasingly rich film and television production based on digital and network technology can not only expand the cultural consumption mode of the broad masses of the people, but also stimulate the cultural consumption vitality of the whole people. Traditional cultural products and homogeneous products and services can no longer meet the consumption needs of Generation Z. Promoting the integration of culture and technology will create more experiential, immersive and interactive new scenes, new formats and new models, provide more personalized and intelligent new cultural products and services, and continuously meet the new cultural consumption needs of young people.
On the whole, the integration of culture and science and technology is not only to insert the wings of science and technology into the development of culture, but also to inject cultural elements into the development of science and technology. The integration of the two is not a simple "physical reaction", but a profound "chemical integration". Once culture, as a spiritual productivity, fully releases its energy, it will have a powerful driving effect on material productivity. At a new starting point, to take the road of deep integration of culture and science and technology, we should not only give full play to the supporting role of science and technology in cultural construction, but also give play to the leading role of culture in scientific and technological innovation, and further deepen reform. We must unswervingly implement the innovation-driven development strategy, focus on the bottleneck problems that restrict the integration of culture and science and technology, focus on improving the original innovation ability and breaking through key technologies, strengthen the research on subversive technologies and cutting-edge technologies, and comprehensively enhance the supporting role of science and technology in culture. We must persist in innovation, strengthen top-level design and overall planning, and use innovative measures such as the transformation of intellectual property achievements and the merger and reorganization of industrial organizations to explore an effective mechanism for the integration of culture and science and technology, so that science and technology can empower culture and culture can cast souls for science and technology, and ensure that the integration and development of culture and science and technology move in the right direction.
[This article Source: Economic Daily Author: Zhong Jun Author is Party Secretary and Dean (Director) of Hunan Academy of Social Sciences (Development Research Center of Hunan Provincial People’s Government)]