Excessive intellectual property controls could be all the more damaging to emerging fields of knowledge, such as synthetic biology, if researchers find that the basic building blocks of the field are legally tied up and beyond their reach. This could prevent the development of entirely new fields of knowledge and culture by preventing the kind of borrowing and blending that is at the heart of creativity.
If content in the cloud becomes so entangled in copyright and other forms of intellectual property then it will become increasingly difficult to mingle, match and collaborate. The creative potential of the web to create new mixes will be vastly reduced. To promote more open cultural relations on the web the following are important points of focus:
Collaborative solutions need to be found to the problem of orphaned works, perhaps by allocating them to forms of collective ownership, which would make it far simpler for people seeking to enjoy or adapt the content to negotiate rights. The collective owners would own the rights and hold money for the original rights holders
Governments should resist attempts to extend copyright terms
The copyright regime should increasingly put the onus on rights holders to justify their need for copyright and to pay for extensions. Any work not re-copyrighted after the expiry of its original term would automatically fall into public ownership rather than being orphaned
The presumption should be that all cultural products are in the public domain after a basic period of copyright or intellectual protection has expired
New forms of creative licensing are required, modelled on open access and creative commons, which are designed to allow sharing but also to clearly apportion credit to original work and authors
Most media industries will need new business models, which are tailored to allow more interaction with content and more peer-to-peer distribution. Countries that experiment successfully with these models will lead the next wave of cultural and creative industries
Ways need to be found to create more Pro-Am cultural exchanges which will bring together the best of professional and amateur content.
Cloud Capitalists
Just as traditional media companies are trying to resist the emergence of open cloud culture, so a new generation of media companies, most created in the last decade, are trying to profit from its explosive growth. These are the cloud capitalists – Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Twitter – that seek to make money by creating and managing clouds for us.
These cloud capitalists are the new powers behind global cultural relations. Their rise has sparked an increasingly vicious civil war with the media old guard. In the autumn of 2009 Rupert Murdoch, the archetypal global media baron, unveiled plans to charge readers for his newspapers’ content online. It was virtually an admission that traditional newspapers would not remain commercially viable for much longer. It was also a broadside against Google. Murdoch accused Google of giving people access to his newspapers’ content for free but refusing to share the advertising revenues that Google garners from its information search business.
This battle between old and new media powers, however, has distracted attention from the question of how these new global cultural platforms will seek to organise cloud culture. Elements of their businesses resemble traditional public service culture, for example Google’s work with a consortium of libraries around the world to digitise books that are out of copyright. However, these companies are also businesses: they will want to organise the cloud to make money. Cloud culture will develop only if we trust remote, third-party providers of digital services to store our stuff for us and provide us with platforms – like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – on which we interact. There are ample reasons why people should not automatically trust the clouds these corporations are creating.
One is reliability: outages of Google servers have left millions of Gmail users without a service and Twitter can often be overwhelmed by traffic. Another is security: having your data, on your computer, in your office, at least gives the impression that it is under your control, rather than floating in the ether. Privacy is another issue: cloud service providers will need to persuade people they can be trusted not to give away or lose sensitive data. There will be disputes over who owns data: witness the recent furore over whether Facebook owns pictures posted by its users and members. Commercial providers of cloud services will have strong incentives to manage their users to maximise revenues and so to discourage them from roaming from one service to another. We could find that we are so enmeshed in Amazon’s cloud of services that transferring all our data and history to the Facebook cloud would be too costly and troubling. Equally, we might find the cloud providers pushing services at us, compromising the neutrality we have come to associate with the net. Providers of cloud services are bound to have preferred suppliers of software and other services. Pretty soon we could find them managing most of our lives for us. Once again the offer of a more open collaborative culture may ironically pave the way for more of the most intimate aspects of our lives to be stored and controlled in vast data centres in the US Midwest, delivering us into dependence on Google, Amazon and Facebook. To counter the threat of corporate control of the cloud public policy should focus on:
maintaining a diversity of funding for the development of web platforms, so that some will be social and public to complement the corporate platforms. Wikipedia is a prime example of a cloud funded by voluntary and social contributions. Open access science is promoting publicly funded clouds of scientific information. Public funding for open, shared cultural clouds, like the World Digital Library, will be vital as a counterpoint to more commercial services
ensuring people have a diversity of potential suppliers of cloud-based services; anti-monopoly legislation covering social media and web platforms will be central. At some point Facebook will become an incumbent social networking platform that stalls innovation from new entrants
keeping open spaces for experimentation on the web, rather than allowing incumbent media companies to occupy emerging spaces
defending net neutrality rather than a system in which those that pay more – large companies – automatically get a much better service
ensuring people have freedom to move between suppliers of net services and content, to avoid being locked in to cloud services provided by one supplier.
Traditional media companies are trying to stall and resist the emergence of cloud culture. New media companies are engaged in a battle with one another over who will control which bits of the cloud. What is likely to get lost in all this are the interests of citizens and consumers.
Unequal Access to the Cloud
Cloud culture could become a new shared, common cultural space, enabling people with diverse interests and values to come together. But it could also provide a way for elites to reassert themselves. In reality, despite cheaper, more powerful technologies, access to the cultural commons is deeply unequal.
A case in point is the African state of Mali, one of the poorest in the world. Mali, a democracy with few restrictions on freedom of the press, has more than 40 newspapers in several languages; more than 150 community and private radio stations; cable and public service television stations; a privatised telecommunications utility and one of Africa’s oldest internet service providers, as well as a wealth of ancient culture in Timbuktu. Yet Mali’s poverty means that its population of just over 12 million has just over one million mobile phones, 835,000 landlines, 570,000 radios, 160,000 televisions and perhaps only 30,000 regular web users. In principle Mali should be well placed to join the cloud but in practice it’s a long way off.53
Nor is it alone. The World Bank estimated in 2005 that there were still ten times as many mobile phone subscribers in rich countries as in low-income countries.54 In Burundi, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone less than three per cent of the population had a mobile phone in 2007. That year in the most developed countries there were 152 telephone subscriptions per 100 people, compared with 31 per 100 in the poorest cou
ntries. Mobile phone users in the rich world are much more likely to get the smartphones designed for creativity and web access.55
There are similar discrepancies in the way people access and use the web. In 2006 fewer than five per cent of Africans used the web compared with more than 50 per cent in the G8 countries. Even within rich regions such as Europe there are huge disparities. In 2007 only a fifth of Bulgarians and Romanians were connected to the web, compared with more than 75 per cent in the Nordic countries. Access to the net is growing fast in some middle-income developing countries, such as South Korea and Brazil. But it is rising only very slowly in low-income countries: 0.06 per cent of the population in low-income countries had access to the web in 1997, rising to six per cent ten years later. Underlying this story of unequal access to the cloud are other, equally important factors. Electricity is one. You do not need a plug to read a newspaper but you do to run most computers. In Ethiopia less than one per cent of the rural population has access to electricity and only 13 per cent of households have regular electricity supply. More important still, only half the population can read.56
When people from the poorest countries arrive in the digital world, they will find people in the rich countries a long way ahead. Most of the protocols, software and platforms will have been created by organisations from the rich world, especially the US. For cloud culture to genuinely promote global cultural relations, rather than more intense interactions among highly connected people in the developed world, we should focus on:
developing open source tools that will allow local solutions to emerge and develop capabilities outside the dominant regions
creating more initiatives like Wikipedia, a model with many different applications in different cultures and languages. Wikipedia is public, shared and diverse
promoting more global exchanges such as Kiva, which allows resources and skills in one place to be matched with need in another. Kiva was established in October 2005 and in its first four years it enabled more than 517,000 lenders to provide loans worth more than £79 million to more than 100 field partners in 46 countries who have invested the money in thousands of entrepreneurs.57 There is huge potential to create more of these social exchanges, not just to allow people to invest in entrepreneurs, but to exchange cultural resources as well. This could create new ways to fund grassroots cultural development just as Kiva is funding grass roots entrepreneurial development.
Cloud culture will enable mass, real-time, self-communication and collaboration, at low cost. This has huge potential for promoting a vast array of cultural exchanges, many of them fleeting and small scale. But the potential for a more cosmopolitan, open, cloud culture will be realised only if we tackle the four major threats to it: increasingly intrusive government censorship; controls over content by traditional copyright holders; the power of the new global media companies to shape the cloud to their own ends; and the vastly unequal opportunities open to people in the poorest parts of the world to influence cloud culture.
8. A Future of Many Clouds
We are living at a time of huge cultural possibility. We have access to untold stores of culture in digital form. We have more tools to allow us to search, modify and amend the ingredients of these stores and to create our own cultural products. We are more able than ever to find outlets for our cultural creativity and to connect with people who share our interests, our culture.
The web is changing culture more quickly and profoundly than it is changing politics and even business. It is changing how we express ourselves, how we communicate, how we share and find what is important to us. Culture and media in the decade just gone was dominated by the rise of Web 2.0 and social media. The decade to come will be made by the rise of cloud culture, a culture based on even more intensive collaboration and connection. That will fundamentally change how we relate to one another through culture.
In the twentieth century cultural experience was mainly associated with watching, listening and reading. The dominant mass culture – television – is engaging without being too demanding. It offers stimulation while people are at rest. As a result it is often wonderful but oddly hollow. The traditional alternative to this mass culture of enjoyable watching was the more demanding and educative high culture of intellectual inspiration and challenge. But now another alternative is emerging, a mass culture which is more participative and collaborative, which is about searching, doing, sharing, making, modifying. It is stimulating because people become active participants, makers of culture not simply receivers.
The optimists see in this shift great possibility, a global platform for cultural expression and exchange, which will be more open and connected, more diverse and plural. The optimists see vast new clouds of cultural expression mushrooming across the landscape, in a variety of wonderful shapes and sizes. The sceptics warn that these clouds are more likely to produce the cultural equivalent of acid rain or worse, heavy storms. They worry that we are heading for a culture of constant interference, noise and distraction, in which the more music and writing, photos and films there are, the more cultural chaos and social disorder there will be. It will be harder and harder, they warn, to cull any lasting sense of meaning from the vast fog of meaningless cultural mediocrity about to engulf us.
This essay has sought to map out a position that is both hopeful but realistic. The web has huge and still unfolding potential to allow for more cultural self-expression and connection. However, we are still a long way off this being a truly global and cosmopolitan space. Access to the global cultural commons is still tilted in favour of the richest. Our interests as citizens and consumers will be best served by there being a rich variety of cultural clouds: public and private, social and voluntary, global and very local, cosmopolitan and nationalist. We should seek the maximum possible diversity of clouds rather than thinking simply of the cloud. It is inevitable that some of cloud culture will not be benign and may well be predatory and even vicious. However, there is still untold potential for us to enrich our own cultures, understand one another’s cultures more fully and enjoy greater freedom of cultural expression. That possibility, a new kind of global cultural commons, will be kept open only if we resist the threats to it from governments and companies, new and old, seeking to control cloud culture for their own ends. The new kinds of cultural relations the web seems to offer will come about only through thousands of struggles around the world as citizens try to prevent governments and corporations wresting complete control over the web.
The cloud culture the web is creating is already enabling new forms of international cultural relations, for people to connect, collaborate and converse. Drawing on five waves of surveys between 1981 and 2007 of nationally representative samples in more than 90 countries, home to 80 per cent of the world’s population, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart found clear evidence that communications were becoming more cosmopolitan and open.58 Greater engagement with news, including through the web, was associated with greater trust in people from other cultures and greater tolerance of other faiths, while simultaneously strengthening not weakening national identities. People who were more engaged in news and communications were more likely to believe in Western-style forms of individualism, to have more liberal and open attitudes towards sexual and moral values and to be more critical of corruption and nepotism. Engagement with modern media was strongly associated with higher levels of civic and political engagement. On all these measures internet users were more cosmopolitan and open in their values and beliefs than any other group. Lead adopters of the web everywhere, by and large, buy into shared values that would support an open cloud culture of self-expression, debate and collaboration. International cultural policies could play a vital role in supporting the growth of this open cloud culture, but they too will need to be reframed.
International cultural relations policies have generally been framed in terms of free trade and protectionism. Those advocating free and open trade in ideas and cu
lture stress that greater connectedness is conducive to economic and social development. An open press should be good for democratic debate to enable citizens to hold government to account. Transnational social movements can link campaigners in the rich and poorer parts of the world. For all these reasons maximising access to information and communications in poor and developing societies has been seen as a key goal of international development, in part by lifting barriers to communication and trade in cultural goods and services, encouraging investment in digital technologies, growing capacity to use the web and shrinking disparities in access to the internet.
Opposition to this approach has brought together cultural conservatives and radicals. Their argument is that a free trade in culture will reward dominant Western companies, particularly from the US. Critics charge this process with opening the rest of the world to a flood of mindless American entertainment, encouraging people in traditional cultures to emulate Western values and habits, to the detriment of local cultures and their own sense of identity. Critics of cultural globalisation argue for measures to protect local producers from international competition and to support local languages threatened by the spread of forms of English. Thus, Sarkozy’s move to protect French culture by creating a national digital store house.
Both approaches see global culture through the lens of trade, in which cultural goods and services pass from one place to another, much as containers do on ships. The spread of the web, however, is creating a platform for mass self-expression and collaboration, as well as delivering content to people in new ways. It is not just a market place for exchange but also a space in which people can share and collaborate. Our aim should not be just to calibrate trade but to expand connections and allow for greater collaboration. The best metaphor for that activity is open source: projects in which the goal is to maximise useful contributions to projects of shared value, which are supported by a community of developers. Open source cultural relations would focus on who can contribute, to what and how, rather than simply seeing people as either producers of content or recipients of it. The aim is not to balance trade but to equalise opportunities to participate, to open up new cultural conversations.
Such an open source approach to cultural relations, building communities of collaboration around shared interests and ideas, would require very different kinds of leadership and organisation as well. Leading international cultural relations in the era of ubiquitous participation, connection and collaboration will require different skills and resources. It will require open leadership, the ability to address interesting challenges, to provide a starting point for a collaborative effort, platforms for people to share ideas and tools to create content. Cultural relations will be less about delivering culture to and for people and more about doing it with and by them. In this world you will be defined not just by what you own but by what you are prepared to share and how much effort you put into making it easy for others to share with you. It is not just what you do but how you link with others that counts. Cultural relations in the era of the pervasive web and ubiquitous participation will mean thinking, working, creating with other people. Welcome to the world of with.
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Darnton, ‘Google and the new digital future’
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Ibid
Steven Webber, The Success of Open Source, Harvard University Press, 2004
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Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Allen Lane, 2008; Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider, Portfolio, 2006; Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell, Harvard Business Press, 2008
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Ali Fisher, ‘Music for the jilted generation: open source public diplomacy’, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 3, 2008
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Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur, Nicholas Brealey, 2008; Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch, Norton, 2008
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Ibid
See www.kiva.org (accessed 20 January 2010)
Norris and Inglehart, Cosmopolitan Communications
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