Access to digital culture as a driver of social and cultural openness: European evidence

Digital technologies provide people with an excellent opportunity to access cultural expressions from all over the world. Research has shown that while cultural participation is linked to wellbeing and various societal values, it is stratified. Despite evidence of unequal access, digital technology use, and cultural participation, and of a relationship between cultural openness and social openness, no research has addressed the sequential relationship among these factors and their degree of stratification. We explore the social mechanism governing the relationship between access to digital cultural, cultural openness, and social openness in Europeans, using new survey data from a nine-country European research project and multivariate modeling. In investigating whether this social mechanism is unique or differs according to social inequality indicators such as gender, age, education, and country of residence, we found the following: (1) access to digital culture positively influences both cultural and social openness; (2) cultural openness functions as a bridge between access to digital culture and social openness; and (3) the underlying social mechanism is not unique but varies according to age, education, and country of residence. We conclude by describing the implications of our findings for inclusive cultural policies.