The Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art (ICMA) at the George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași (UNAGE Iași), organised, on 17 February 2023, an online edition of the ICMA Talks series entitled Collective Creativity and the Future of Digital Culture, featuring Payal Arora, Professor and Chair in Technology, Values, and Global Media Cultures at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Payal Arora’s research over the past two decades offers a critical perspective on how digital technologies are understood and used across diverse social and cultural contexts. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in communities around the world, Arora challenges the assumption that people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds engage with digital environments solely out of necessity or for strictly utilitarian purposes, highlighting the role of creativity, play, sociability, and self-expression in shaping contemporary digital practices.

The talk explores the concept of “collective creativity”, examining how users actively contribute to the production and transformation of digital culture through everyday practices of collaboration, participation, and content creation. At the same time, it draws attention to the limitations of dominant perspectives on technological development, which often reduce the digital experiences of communities outside the world’s principal economic centres to purely functional needs, overlooking their cultural, social, and creative dimensions.

Building on these lines of enquiry, Payal Arora proposed a reflection on the future of digital culture in a context shaped by the expansion of digital platforms, artificial intelligence, and the data economy. The talk invited participants to reconsider how processes of digital innovation and participation are understood, highlighting the contribution of users to the development of collective forms of creativity and to the redefinition of the relationship between technology, culture, and society.