Culture, place, and innovation in the use and appropriation processes of information and communication technologies in the metropolitan region of Salvador

Abstract

This article seeks to relate culture, place, innovation, and the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by cultural institutions in the municipalities of Salvador, Camaçari, and Lauro de Freitas, located in the Metropolitan Region of Salvador (RMS), Bahia, Brazil, based on the assumption that the cultural field has the potential for innovation using ICT on a broader scale than the individual or household. The research, carried out between 2022 and 2024, was based on systematizing secondary and primary data, focusing on the incorporation of the analyzed institutions in the virtual universe, as well as on what their representatives’ understanding of innovation and their use of ICT. The secondary data were systematized at the national and municipal/metropolitan scale to provide for the sampling of cultural institutions in the three municipalities where questionnaires were applied, and qualitative interviews were conducted with managers/coordinators. The collected interviews reveal that the pandemic forced changes in the technical/technological structure of communication, initially temporary, and have been incorporated into the daily lives of institutions. Currently, ICT is seen as a possible way to interact with the staff, the public, and the places where they are embedded, including expanding their reach to other spatial scales. Finally, the study elucidated the difficulty of defining which and what are innovative practices, since, in the cultural field, innovation can take on as many meanings as the objects studied. The interviewees in this research hold different and sometimes contradictory notions of what innovation means, being easily attributed to the use of technology and the automation of human work. However, the incorporation of innovative practices goes beyond this, as shown by the results presented in this article.