Anyone who uses social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok or Facebook encounters memes, mash-ups and other forms of user-generated content that reference musical works, photos or artworks by third parties on a daily basis. Whether it's text, images, audio or video content – the formats are as varied as the cultural and political intentions behind them.
To gain a better understanding of this form of digital culture, Mario Dunkel, Professor of Music Education at the University of Oldenburg, and musicologist and lawyer Dr Dr Frédéric Döhl, strategy consultant at the German National Library, have teamed up to research user-generated content in the context of music in youth cultures. The timeline for the project, titled "Digital Cultural Heritage of Our Time" (DiCHOT), is five years, and it will receive around 1.2 million euros in funding from the Volkswagen Foundation.
The researchers will analyse texts, videos and audio content produced by young people as acts of political participation through the context of music culture and published on various social media platforms. The project was prompted by a reform of the German Copyright Act in 2021 with which the legislators made clear that in their view user-generated content can be considered contemporary digital cultural heritage, and that the underlying adaptations should therefore be just as free of permission as the subsequent publication on social media. In line with this view, a new copyright exception known as "pastiche" was introduced into the German copyright law.
As part of the DiCHOT project, the researchers will investigate what consequences beyond copyright law follow from such a recognition of user-generated content as digital cultural heritage. Their objective here is to develop digital learning units for secondary schools to raise awareness among youths of this new perception of internet culture and, more generally, of what constitutes cultural heritage, and how that concept is changing. In addition, Dunkel and Döhl aim to build up a network that includes schools and other educational institutions as well as the German National Library and other memory institutions that are committed to web archiving and the preservation of digital cultural heritage. The aim is to employ "user-generated content as youth culture" as a case study to work out how the constantly changing digital practices on social media can be adequately preserved.
