Cloud Culture
When the Bedouin have Mobiles
In the next ten years cloud computing will give rise to something new again, cloud culture and even cloud capitalism. Features of cloud computing and cloud culture may seem far-fetched and unlikely. Yet real-time, social media of the kind that is now commonplace was unthinkable just ten years ago. Just as much change is likely in the ten years to come as in the ten that have just passed. Where might it lead us? The future of the web is still uncertain: how far and fast it will spread; how significant it will be for politics and democracy; who will control it and make money from it. We are perhaps 15 years into a process of mass, social and cultural innovation, involving hundreds of millions of people around the world experimenting with a technology platform that is still evolving, the ownership of which is far from settled. Yet this much seems clear. Cheap and powerful digital technologies are allowing us to create vast new stores of digital cultural artefacts of which Google’s book plan is just one example. These stores are in huge public archives like the World Digital Library, which is being created by a group of the world’s leading cultural institutions; in new collaborative stores like Wikipedia; semi-public stores like Flickr and in the libraries each of us now keeps on our own computers and on our iPods. Each of us, in our way, has become a part-time digital librarian, storing, sorting, retrieving digital content we have created or own and sometimes sharing that with others. These new stores of digital cultural artefacts will become more accessible in more ways to more people than ever, through Wi-Fi and broadband, multiple mobile devices as well as familiar computers. More people will be able to explore these digital stores to find things of value to them. That could set in train something akin to the process of collaborative
creativity that drives open source software. The open source software movement’s rallying cry is: ‘many eyes make bugs shallow’. The more people that test out a program, in different settings, the quicker the bugs will be found and fixed. The cultural equivalent is that the more eyes that see a collection of content, from more vantage points, the more likely they are to find value in it, probably value that a small team of professional curators may have missed. As more people explore these digital stores they will make connections and see significance where it has not been spotted, provide more context to add meaning. Thanks to better search tools, collaborative filtering and recommendations by word of mouth through social networks, we should be more able than ever to search for and find content that is particularly interesting to us. We will also be equipped with more tools to allow us to make our own contribution, to post our photograph or composition. We will be able to mashup, remix, amend and adapt existing content, even if only in small ways. As we collaborate with others who are also interested in the same issues so this will throw up clouds of cultural activity as people debate, compare and refine what they share. These clouds will often have at their core high-quality professionally produced content. But that will also attract to it skilled and dedicated amateurs as well as general users. We will have more access than ever to more cultural heritage – stored digitally – and more tools to allow us to do more, together, to add to this content creatively. That equation will produce in the decade to come a vast cultural eruption – a mushroom cloud of culture.
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