In short, according to the optimists, web culture should be a rare and delicate mix: more decentralised, plural and collaborative; less hierarchical, proprietary and money-driven; the boundaries between amateur and professional, consumer and producer, grassroots and mainstream are breached, if not erased.
Where might we turn for signs of what that might mean for international cultural relations? One guide might be the way science is being remade by global collaboration over the web.
6. Signals from the Future: Science and Software
The most innovative science of the twentieth century was done in big laboratories. The most innovative science of the twenty-first century will be done in a cloud of international, interdisciplinary collaboration.
Science in the twentieth century was driven by state-funded basic research, mainly in the physical sciences: so-called Big Science. Between 1923 and 2005 US government funding of research and development increased from less than $15 million to more than $132 billion a year. By the end of the century R & D spending averaged 2.2 per cent of GDP of countries in the OECD. World R & D spending reached $729 billion in the year 2000. Total public spending on all aspects of science and technology development was worth about $1 trillion.35
The latter decades of the twentieth century sowed the seeds of a shift away from national science systems towards international and interdisciplinary collaborative research. This will be the most potent way to do science in the century to come. The more elite the scientist, the more likely he or she is to be a node of international collaboration. The best science and the most cited articles are the product of international collaboration.
Take seismology as an example. In 1990 about nine per cent of articles in internationally recognised science journals were internationally co-authored. By 2000 the figure was 16 per cent. Between 1980 and 1998 international co-authored papers in seismology rose by 45 per cent while nationally co-authored articles rose by 26 per cent. Internationally co-authored articles were more likely to be cited by other scientists, suggesting they were of higher quality. The networks supporting this collaboration became much denser: the ties between seismology researchers tripled in the last decade of the twentieth century. Seismology was not alone. Sciences as different as astrophysics, which requires heavy capital investment, and mathematical logic (which requires very little), exhibited large increases in international collaboration. In astrophysics the proportion of internationally co-authored articles rose from 29 per cent in 1990 to 47 per cent in the year 2000; from 21 per cent to 38 per cent in mathematical logic; from 11 per cent to 33 per cent in soil science and from 14 per cent to 24 per cent in virology.36
Scientists are being driven to share knowledge because they are tackling such complex fields that no one has the complete picture or answer. They want to match themselves with collaborators with complementary skills and assets, to pool data and resources, to develop their reputation by attaching themselves to internationally renowned research projects. The web is not the sole driving force behind international collaboration in science. But it is making it a lot easier. All research is becoming more interconnected, collaborative and networked.
In part that is because science is increasingly driven by the analysis of large overlapping clouds of data. Carol Goble, a professor of computer science at Manchester University, estimates that in just one subfield – nucleic acids – researchers now routinely start work by scanning 1,070 connected databases. The Large Hadron Collider will generate the equivalent of 400,000 PC’s worth of data a year. PubMed lists more than 17 million articles. According to Goble, scientific data will be held in large, overlapping clouds that will require ‘mixed stewardship’; the scientific method will depend on new kinds of international, virtual collaboration, and scientific research will be published in forms that allow the data, software and results to be easily recombined to be used in other research and publications.37
Caroline Wagner describes this process in The New Invisible College, her account of the rise of virtual collaboration in science:
Self-organizing networks that span the globe are the most notable feature of science today. These networks constitute a new invisible college of researchers who collaborate not because they are told to but because they want to, who work together not because they share a laboratory or even a discipline but because they can offer each other complementary insight, knowledge or skills.38
Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural relations Page 5