Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural relations

by Charles Leadbeater

  The next most likely stage of the web’s technical development – cloud computing – will act as a giant accelerator for cultural cloud formation. It will be like a giant machine for making clouds of culture. So before going any further let us explore in a little more detail some of the technological developments that will give rise to the cloud.

 

  3. From the Web to the Cloud

  When the New York Times wanted to make available on the web 11 million articles dating from the newspaper’s founding in 1851 through to 1989, the paper scanned in the stories, converted them to TIFF files, and uploaded them to Amazon’s cloud service S3, taking up four terabytes of space on Amazon’s remote servers. The New York Times did not co-ordinate the job beforehand with Amazon: someone in the IT department signed up for the service on the web using a credit card. Then, using Amazon’s EC2 computing platform, the New York Times ran a PDF conversion application that turned the TIFF files in PDF files. The conversion process took about 24 hours. At the end the New York Times had an archive of 11 million articles to be made available to the world. It had created the archive and made it available by using cloud computing.8

  The net is still evolving and so too are the metaphors we deploy to make sense of it. One thing is clear: as the net develops it will connect more people, devices, data and programs more densely and intensively. The scale and diversity of these connections will drive us towards a qualitatively different kind of internet.

  The net we have grown up with was based around data and software stored quite close to where it is used on personal and mainframe computers. That gave people a sense of ownership and control, exploiting cheap local storage because the bandwidth to download data from remote sources was too expensive and unreliable. The net was a way for us easily to link these disparate and disconnected machines, with their separate data and software.

  In the world of cloud computing our data – emails, documents, pictures, songs – would be stored remotely in a digital cloud hanging above us, always there for us to access from any device we like: computer, television, games console, handheld or mobile, embedded in our kitchen table, bathroom mirror or car dashboard. We should be able to access our data from anywhere, thanks to always-on broadband and draw down as much or as little as and when we need. Instead of installing software on our computer we would pay for it only when we needed it.

  The most familiar early version of a cloud-based service is webmail – Googlemail and Hotmail – in which email messages are stored on remote servers which can be accessed from anywhere. Google also provides ways for people to store and then share documents and spreadsheets, so that many people can access the same document. Facebook and Twitter are like droplets of personal information held in a vast cloud. Wikipedia is a cloud of self-managed, user-generated information. Open source software platforms like Drupal are software clouds, which coders can draw down from and add to.

  Sharing our programs, storage and even data makes a lot of sense, at least in theory. Pooling storage and software with others should lower the cost. Cloud computing would turn computing power into just another utility that we would access much as we turn on a tap for water. The reservoirs will be vast energy-efficient data centres – 7,000 of them in the US to date. Google has two million servers running around the world. Yahoo! is busy building server farms and Microsoft is adding up to 35,000 servers a month in places like its data centre outside Chicago, which covers 500,000 square feet at a cost of $500 million and will hold 400,000 servers. Sitting on top of these will be more pooled applications, like the apps used on the iPhone. The software company Salesforce.com has a cloud of 300 free software programs and 500 that can be bought per unit of usage.9

  The potential benefits are already becoming evident to some leading global companies. Bechtel, the Swiss engineering firm, for example, estimates data storage costs could fall from $3.75 per gigabyte per month under its proprietary system to $0.15 per month with an external provider such as Amazon. Bechtel estimates its computing costs should fall by more than 30 per cent just in the first limited phase of its shift towards cloud computing. Bechtel’s head of IT Geir Ramleth put his aim this way: ‘We want anybody to be able to have access to the right resources at any place at any time with any device, in a cost effective and secure environment.’ 10 Cloud computing should also bring benefits for many millions of smaller organisations. A small business should be able to draw down from the cloud basic programs for customer relationship management, online marketing, payroll, e-commerce, inventory management.

  When computing becomes merely a utility we plug into, the focus for innovation will shift to the demand side. Imagine for a moment that electricity was used only to power one kind of machine known as an electricity machine. That is what computer power is like now: it mainly powers devices that sit on our desks with qwerty keyboards attached. As computing becomes a utility it will power many more devices, many of them with no user interface, more of them mobile and handheld. The cloud should also encourage collaboration. Different people, using different devices should be able to access the same documents and resources more easily. Work on shared projects will become easier, especially as collaboration software and web video conferencing becomes easier to use. This should allow far more of what Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, calls ‘combinatorial innovation’,11 as developers mashup data from different sources, as many people are doing already with Google maps. It is more sensible not to think of the cloud but clouds taking different shapes and forms.

  From the Cloud to Clouds

  The clouds in our skies take many different forms by mixing the same basic ingredients. They are often huge but fleeting, rarely retain their shape for more than a few minutes and often migrate from one form to another in the course of a day. Clouds range from the giant cumulonimbus to the shreds of stratus fractus, the fair weather cloud cumulus fractus to the beautiful wisps of cirrus uncinus. Clouds can be produced en masse by the advance of a depression or as a single form by a local convective eddy. Clouds live at ground level in the form of fog and at very high altitudes, the famous Cloud 9. If we are moving to a future of cloud computing and cloud culture then we should hope for a similar variety in the forms it takes.

  The basic classification of clouds into cirrus (fibres), stratus (layers) and cumulus (heaps) was developed by Luke Howard, an amateur meteorologist working in London’s East End.12 Howard’s classification, first published in 1803, allows for constant mutation as one form of cloud becomes another: thus cirrus clouds that are becoming stratus clouds are cirrostratus. The first international inventory of clouds published in 1896 distinguished clouds by their altitude as well as their shape, with refinements to Howard’s schema added by German and French meteorologists. That has since become a ten-point basic classification from 0 for cirrus to 9 for cumulonimbus, the highest climbing cloud. Within this scheme there are 52 main varieties of clouds, from low cumulus clouds – Cumulus humilis through to high-altitude Cirrocumulus floccus.

  We may well need something as flexible and expansive to distinguish the many varieties of digital clouds that will emerge in the decades to come.

  Digital clouds will be either commercial, social or public. Commercial clouds are either enabled or managed and supported by a commercial provider, which might also mine data from the cloud and provide tools for people to contribute to the cloud. Flickr’s clouds of photographs would probably fit into the commercial cloud sector. Google and Amazon are offering commercial cloud services. The World Digital Library, on the other hand, which is being created by government-funded libraries around the world, is a prime example of a public cloud. Wikipedia is a social cloud: it has mainly been created through voluntary effort.

  Clouds will be either open or closed. Bechtel’s cloud is a private, closed and commercial cloud for the use of its employees. Twitter is nominally a commercial cloud but it is open for anyone to join. Wikipedia is both social and open. The cloud of online
activity around the Muslim Brotherhood is social but closed. Governments are creating both open and closed clouds. The Open Data movement is forcing governments to be more open with data and to allow social entrepreneurs and citizens to reuse it. Meanwhile governments are also creating large closed clouds of data for intelligence and security purposes.

  Some clouds will be fairly permanent while others are more transitory and emergent. Science, for example, is providing models for what might happen to the rest of cloud culture. Some clouds of scientific data and global collaboration are quite institutionalised and permanent, for example, around the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Other clouds are more fleeting and passing. Viral marketing campaigns succeed only if they allow people to spread content very easily and openly and when successful create huge balloons of media activity. Clouds will also differ in their reach. Some might be ultra local, others global.

  The web has already had many incarnations. Once it was thought of as the digital superhighway. Others have likened it to a frictionless market. In the last decade the social and networked features of the web have come to the fore. In the decade to come it is likely that the cloud will be the most persuasive and powerful metaphor, to link both technical developments in how computers and the internet work but also to understand its cultural impact and significance. What will the rise of cloud computing mean for culture?

 

  4. Culture and the Cloud

  Culture is our ever-evolving store of images, texts and ideas through which we make sense and add meaning to our world. Our culture, in the broadest sense, helps us to frame and shape our identity, to say who we are, where we are and which generation we are a part of. 13 Culture is not something we choose but find ourselves belonging to; it shapes what matters to us, and how we see the world. Culture is customary and collective, to some extent intuitive and unreflective; it is just there from the style of food that we regard as ours, to the stories we had read to us as children, the songs of our teens, the television characters we identify with, the music we play at weddings, the poems we read at funerals, the way we design our houses, what we wear, how we distinguish ourselves. Culture is what we assemble our identities from and so it also provides powerful points of coming together, often in uplifting shared experiences, especially perhaps in societies where ritual, religion and politics no longer provide that focus as once they did. Most of our culture is not kept in special cultural houses – museums, galleries, concert halls and cinemas. It is all around us like the air, grass, rain and language.

  As so much of our culture is not owned by anyone, much of it is open to constant adaptation, evolution and reinterpretation, to be remade and remixed. A culture that is alive is never entirely closed. As culture is vital to what matters to us and explaining who we are, so giving other people access to what we count as our culture is a vital way for us to understand one another, what we share and what makes us different. Culture comes from specific and distinctive ways of life. In a less ideological but more incessantly connected world, the most powerful way to distinguish what matters to us as individuals, communities and nations is through culture. As a result culture can be a point of disagreement as much as a point of union.

  If culture provides much of our sense of identity, then creativity helps to give us our sense of agency: who we want to be, what mark we want to leave. Culture gives us roots, creativity a sense of growth. Creativity gives us a way to add to and remake our cultural stock: it allows us to escape being entirely defined by our traditions.

  The growth of the digital cloud will change both culture and creativity. Digital stores of data in the cloud, ubiquitous broadband, new search technologies, access through multiple devices – these should make more culture, more available than ever before to more people. We are also living through a massive proliferation of expressive capacity to add to and remix culture with cheaper, more powerful tools for making music and films, taking and showing images, drawing up designs and games. That is why we are in the midst of a series of cultural eruptions that are throwing up vast clouds of new Pro-Am culture.14 For some these clouds are beautiful and inspiring. Others believe cloud culture will drop the equivalent of acid rain. The most telling contemporary example of this tension is music.

  We can create and reorder our own vast collections of musical content and play them wherever we want thanks to our iPods. We can draw from a variety of music clouds, from the legal and commercial iTunes and Spotify, to sites which have led to illegal file sharing, such as Kazaa and LimeWire. We have console games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Our computers carry software such as Logic and GarageBand, which allow us to create and score music. Entirely new musical genres could emerge from this mixing, as James Boyle argues in his book The Public Domain.15 Soul was created in the early 1950s when the singer Ray Charles decided he needed to leave the shadow of Nat King Cole and establish his own style. His first successful attempt to do so – ‘I Got a Woman’ – was a blend of gospel and blues, the nightclub and the church, the sacred and the profane. Charles’s formula was generative: it made possible many more different kinds of soul music. As Matt Mason points out in The Pirate’s Dilemma,16 most new cultural forms, and so most new markets for culture, are opened up by people who initially are regarded as pirates and renegades: much the same was true for Hollywood films, commercial radio and hip hop. More people are listening to, making and playing more music than ever before. All that makes for faster evolution, with more rapid mutation and adaptation.

  Yet the heart of this modern culture of music recording depends on a reasonably ordered and controlled process for recording, marketing and distributing music. Cloud culture threatens to disrupt every aspect of the industry’s value chain. The music industry is in a state of disarray, even while musical expression explodes. There has never been more music played, shared, created and listened to by so many people, in so many places. Yet this explosion of music culture has been accompanied by deep angst over how to sustain music as an industry, from the training of classical musicians, to the future of minority genres and the prospects for the mainstream pop recording industry. The same tension – exploding possibility combined with morbid anxiety – afflicts most other areas of cultural production.

  Culture is increasingly important for nations, regions and ethnic groups to distinguish and explain themselves. We relate to one another increasingly through shared cultures rather than shared religious or political belief. Yet the rise of the cloud will disrupt how culture is expressed and organised. As a result it is bound to have an impact on cultural relations: how people in different societies relate through culture. It follows that cultural relations will increasingly depend on the future of the cloud.

 

  5. The Cloud and Cultural Relations

  Cloud culture could allow disparate and particular interests to be brought together and connected in new ways. This will not be a new common global culture but at least common reference points and shared platforms for diverse cultural expression. This could provide a new story for how we relate to one another through culture.

  The dominant story of modern cultural relations is that ideas have spread around the world from Europe and the US, especially through industrial era media, which requires heavy capital investment for production and distribution. Whether in film, architecture or literature, the modern international style was largely an extension of the Western style, sometimes imposing itself on and often inserting itself into foreign contexts. Western ideas were carried through trade and business, in the search for markets and profit, but also by missionaries and social reformers, armed with a civilising sense of purpose. Industrial era media – film is a classic case – is still dominated by small centres of production in the West such as Hollywood. The lion’s share of the $1 trillion a year world trade in cultural products comes from the US and UK, although China and India’s share is rising fast. In half of the 185 countries in the United Nations a feature-length film has never been m
ade.17 In the last decades of the twentieth century the most potent forces shaping cultural relations seemed to be the aspirations for Western products and lifestyles spread by major brands, a process which Naomi Klein critiqued in her 1999 bestseller No Logo.18

  This has led many critics to allege that Western culture carried by Western media is eradicating distinctive national and local cultures and languages. Jeremy Tunstall’s The Media are American19 captured this mood along with descriptions of the process as Dallasification, Coca colonisation and McDisneyfication. Seven of the world’s top ten media companies are American, among them Walt Disney, Viacom, News Corporation and Time Warner. There are other important sources of film and television: Bollywood makes more films than Hollywood, the Latin American telenovela has a global following. Yet the US and some parts of Europe dominate traditional, industrial era media. As deregulation and digitalisation have opened up yet more television channels and fragmented audiences still further, smaller national broadcasters have found it increasingly difficult to fund their own productions and so have increasingly relied on imported US products: more than 70 per cent of the content of some European television channels come from the US.

  In 2002 UNESCO estimated that rich countries exported $45 billion worth of cultural goods and services, compared with $329 million from the poorest countries.20 People are increasingly buying goods and services linked to rich world brands, which are some of the most powerful cultural carriers. The UK was the world’s largest cultural exporter at $8.5 billion, compared with India at $284 million, South Africa at $56 million and Brazil at $38 million. The recorded music industry tells a similar story. Three quarters of a world industry worth $31 billion at the start of the decade was accounted for by the US and Europe. Just one per cent of recorded music came from Africa.

  The West’s cultural dominance has spawned its own response: a defence of particular, distinctive cultures, particularly those at risk, whether fast-disappearing languages being displaced by the many varieties of English, religious faiths threatened by Western individualism or local producers being run out of business by global brands. Cultural relations can become cultural conflict, as described, for example, in Thomas Friedman’s Lexus and the Olive Tree,21 Benjamin Barber’s McWorld vs Jihad22 or Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.23 As Edward Said argued in Culture and Imperialism,24 the yearning to return to distinctive cultural roots can quickly become a breeding ground for fundamentalism. Culture becomes a protective enclosure for endangered identities rather than something that unfolds and opens out. Meic Pearse’s Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the roots of global rage25 argued that the spread of Western culture, especially in the way it threatened traditional moralities and authority, would license violent reaction and resuscitate traditional cultures. In much of the world young consumers want Western brands. In some parts of the world the new cool is to reject them in favour of tradition.

  Both these accounts frame culture in the rest of the world in terms of its relationship with the West: either other cultures are dominated or they are dissenting. A third approach – associated in the West with postmodernism and multiculturalism – has been to reject grand cultural narratives in favour of celebrating difference. This set off a search for origins as the prime source of culture and identity. In the West, on the other hand, postmodernism expressed itself as an irreverent, eclectic and often lurid mix of old and new, exotic and banal, high and low culture. In this account the best that we could hope for is an acceptance of how different we are. The ideal of common cultural reference points is an illusion or, worse, a cloak for dominant Western values.

  The truth is, few people are one thing and one thing only. Our cultures are increasingly entangled by their shared histories and the reality of international travel, trade and communications. Writers like Ulrich Beck in Cosmopolitan Vision and G. Pascal Zachary in The Global Me: The new cosmopolitans 26 take this as their starting point to celebrate the rich and poor migrants of this liquid world, living in diasporas, circulating from a home in one country to work in another. Beck describes a global culture of mobility, constant and eclectic consumption, openness to others and ceaseless connections between cultures. Marwan Kraidy in Hybridity or the Cultural Logic of Globalization27 and Jan Nederveen Pieterse in Globalization and Culture: Global melange28 focus on a culture shaped by people with hyphenated identities – Black-British, Chinese-American, what economic geographer Annalee Saxenian calls the ‘new argonauts’ in her book of that title, people who shuttle from Bangalore to Silicon Valley, between Pune and Dubai.29

  These stories – Western domination; resistance to it; celebration of difference; the culture of modern nomads and hybrids – have shaped our view of the possibilities and the power embedded in international cultural relations. Cloud culture offers to create another story, one which allows for much greater diversity of cultural expression from many more sources, as technology costs fall, but which also allows for much more diffuse reciprocity and connection, based on the shared resources of the cloud. Cloud culture is a recipe for more cultural difference to be expressed, on an equal footing and for more connections to be made to find points of shared interest. The task for cultural relations in this context is to allow as many people as possible to contribute and connect, translate and blend culture.

  Pierre Levy led the way in painting an optimistic account of what cloud culture might mean in his 1997 book Collective Intelligence,30 which imagined an intricately connected, all-encompassing knowledge space for all of humanity, which would be an archive of data and a place where a community of researchers, thinkers and artists would search, explore, connect and consult, in a space at once universal, pluralistic, collaborative and evolving. A decade later in The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler 31 hailed the emergence of commons-based peer production, a new kind of productive community that would be ‘radically decentred, collaborative, non-proprietary, based on sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed and loosely connected individuals who co-operate without relying on market signals or managerial commands’.

  The World Summit on the Information Society, in Tunis (2005), pledged to create an information society where ‘everyone can create, access, utilise and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life’.32

  Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture 33 writes about the power of fans and hackers to remake culture, cycling between the do-it-yourself grassroots and the mainstream media of television and publishing. Manuel Castells in Communication Power 34 describes a culture of mass self-communication in which people increasingly communicate to and through one another, rather than through formal media organisations like broadcasters and publishers:

  It is self-generated content, self-directed in emission and self-selected in reception by many who communicate with many. This is a new communication realm, and ultimately a new media, whose backbone is made of computer networks, whose language is digital and whose contents are globally distributed and globally interactive. True, the medium, even a medium as revolutionary as this one, does not determine the content and effect of its messages. But it has the potential to make possible unlimited diversity and autonomous production of most of the communication flows that construct meaning in the public mind.