Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural relations

by Charles Leadbeater

Kinds of Clouds

  We associate science with laboratories. But increasingly it will also be conducted in the cloud, through virtual collaboration. We associate culture with books and films, cinemas and libraries. But, like science, culture increasingly will be conducted in the cloud as well. Cloud culture is likely to take a huge diversity of forms:

  Permanent clouds of global cultural resources for people to draw on will be created by public, private and voluntary contributions. An example of global public cloud culture is the World Digital Library. Wikipedia is the prime example of a global cultural resource created by volunteer contributions. Google is providing private funding to digitise a vast collection of out of copyright books. iStockphoto is a quasi-commercial collection of photographs mainly taken by amateurs. Flickr allows the creation of a vast collection of user-generated photographs

  Emergent clouds will respond to crises. A prime example is Ushahidi – a mashup of Google Maps for people to report where attacks were taking place in the violence following Kenya’s disputed elections in late 2007.47 Ushahidi is in embryo a mass, social human rights cloud – an emergent response to crisis – that may in time become more permanent

  Fans-based clouds of culture will form around global media properties. Star Trek fans, for example, have created hundreds of feature-length films in homage to the series

  Communities will form around particular pieces of shared and common culture. An example is the self-organising community of young guitar players on YouTube dedicated to mastering Pachelbel’s Canon in D

  Clouds will form around particular tools and platforms for creativity. A global community of lead users has formed around Sibelius, the score-writing software

  Clouds will morph from one form to another, just as they do in the sky. Susan Boyle became famous because a video of her doing an audition for Britain’s Got Talent became an overnight sensation on YouTube, garnering 93.5 million views in just 11 days, more than five times the number of views of the video of Barack Obama’s inauguration address. Boyle’s success online then played back into traditional media: her first album was a global hit. The successor to the hit television show American Idol is due to start online to build up a loyal following before transferring to television

  Clouds will connect previously dispersed cultures. An example is the way that part of the international Jewish community has taken up social networking to make and remake connection. As globalisation creates more diaspora communities, so the web will also create ways for these communities to remain culturally connected

  Cloud culture is likely to be as nationalistic as it is cosmopolitan. Much of the Arab blogosphere, which now amounts to more than 4,000 blogs, is nationally oriented: they are commentaries on national politics. Russian nationalists have used mashups of Google Maps to show where ethnic minorities live in Russian cities to co-ordinate their harassment. There is no reason to imagine cloud culture will be purely civic. It could also be predatory and vicious.

  The question of which culture you belong to and how you identify yourself will be bound up with which clouds you belong to.

 

  7. Storm Clouds

  Technology is creating the possibility of a different kind of global cultural relations, simultaneously more diverse, plural, participative, open and collaborative. Yet for all its promise that is no more than a possibility. Indeed, the emergence of this new kind of communication-based power, vested in forms of mass collaboration in civil society, is already provoking a fierce struggle as governments and companies try to wrest back control. The web may prove to be such a pervasive and unsettling force, both for governments and corporations, that it will provoke a counter-revolution, which will bring with it more pervasive surveillance and tighter controls. As the web reaches deeper into the detail of our lives so too will the apparatus designed by governments and corporations to keep it under control. Having promised to be a zone of free, lateral association and collaboration the web could soon become densely policed by official censorship, copyright restrictions and corporate policies. These are just some of the threats to the web’s potential for creating a new global cultural commons. These threats will need to be met for the potential of cloud culture to be realised.

  Censorship and the Power of Government

  Cyberspace is providing a new space in which civil society organisations in authoritarian societies can organise. The costs of producing a samizdat that can reach thousands of people has fallen dramatically and will fall further with the advent of cloud computing. New collaborative tools should help civil society organisations and campaigns. Yet as fast as this space is opening up, authoritarian governments are becoming increasingly adept and sophisticated in closing it down. The idea that authoritarian governments will always be so top heavy that they will be outwitted by the fast-moving throng on the web is mistaken. As Evgeny Morozov, a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, shows, many regimes are eschewing direct confrontation in favour of more subtle, pernicious and pervasive forms of cloud management.48

  The Thai authorities, for example, have used crowdsourcing to uncover the addresses of websites making comments critical of the Royal family, which are gathered in a site called ProtectTheKing.net. The Saudi government has taken a similar approach to videos on YouTube that are critical of the country. In Georgia the authorities have helped to mobilise ‘denial of service’ attacks on blogging platforms to force them to evict bloggers critical of the government. The most critical bloggers have been turned into refugees unable to find a home in cyberspace. In China up to 50,000 people are members of the so-called 50 Cent Party: the sum they are paid for noting a critical comment on a web site or making a favourable comment in support of the government. Google’s controversial provision of a filtered search service in China, in line with vast government censorship, points to the complex role of corporate power in the cloud. The history of Google’s problematic relationship with China has included hacks into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The Nigerian government is recruiting a force of bloggers paid to support the government online and to monitor web activity. The Russian regime has been most adept at using the web to consolidate its power, according to a recent report by the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, using the web as the basis for ‘authoritarian deliberation’ – online discussion to legitimise state policies. A think tank closely linked to former President Putin has led the way in creating a social network site to act as a gathering point for young professionals.49

  Even when cloud culture does seem to threaten authoritarian rule it is easy to overestimate its power. A classic example is the role played by Twitter, the micro-blogging site, in the protests in Iran in June 2009 following the country’s disputed elections. Twitter became one of the ways that web users in Iran distributed news of protests and crackdowns, as supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi took to the streets to protest against the victory awarded to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

  Twitter provided a direct and compelling connection with events in Iran as they unfolded. Original tweets from Iran were passed on – re-tweeted – by other Twitter users in the West, often people with large followings, amplifying their impact. The scale and intensity of the activity led some web commentators to dub it ‘the Twitter revolution’. Between 7 June and 26 June there were 2,024,166 tweets about the Iranian election. For a few days it seemed as if Iran would provide conclusive proof of the web’s power to remake the world. As the dust settled, however, the complex reality emerged more clearly. A study of 79,000 tweets about the protests by Mike Edwards, a social network researcher at the Parsons New School for Design, found that a third were re-tweets, people passing on an original posting. The majority of Mousavi supporters are young and urban, the main demographic of Twitter users. About 93 per cent of Iranian Twitter users are based in Tehran. Ahmadinejad’s supporters were older and rural. Twitter provided a partial sample of opinion in the country as a whole. Twitter is a public medium and
people can dip into it anonymously, so it was an unlikely tool for secretly organising demonstrations. Traditional methods, closed social networks and blogging may have played a more significant role. Most importantly the numbers do not add up. According to Sysomos, which analyses social media activity, there was a surge in the number of Twitter accounts in Iran from 8,654 in May 2009 to 19,235 in June 2009. Part of this surge, however, might have been due to Twitter users outside Iran registering in the country to confuse the authorities. Yet even the higher figure of 19,235 is equivalent to only 0.027 per cent of Iran’s population (70,049,262 according to the 2006 census.) A survey carried out by the The Centre for Public Opinion and the New American Foundation found a third of Iranians have internet access. That would mean Twitter users at the time of the revolution made up 0.082 per cent of internet users in Iran.50

  Twitter was an important additional source of real-time information from the protests that became especially important as traditional sources were closed down. But in retrospect it’s clear that its influence in co-ordinating a serious challenge to a powerfully entrenched regime was wildly overstated. Clouds come and go, they balloon up into the sky and then they disperse. That is why cloud culture can be both mesmerising and bewildering.

  Not only do these authoritarian regimes often use technology developed in the West to monitor and disrupt online dissent, they also use Western government policies, for example to crack down on illegal file sharing and monitor email traffic on security grounds, in support of their own censorship. Recent moves in Australia and the UK to put more onus on internet service providers to control how the web is used will have been welcomed by authoritarian regimes keen to justify their own controls.

  Keeping the cloud genuinely open for cultural exchange means we should focus on:

  providing online activists in authoritarian regimes with help to find their way around firewalls and to connect them with potential supporters outside

  defending their rights to free speech and association

  avoiding restrictions in the West in the name of security and decency that authoritarian regimes will use as an excuse for their own efforts to control the web

  empowering NGOs to monitor authoritarian regimes’ censorship of the web

  asking Western technology companies to publicly account for any sales of technology to authoritarian regimes that might be used to control or limit public access to the web, just as arms companies are expected to account for sales of sensitive equipment.

  Copyright: Old Media Seeks Protectionfrom the Storm

  From the point of view of many copyright owners the internet is not a technology of cultural freedom but of destruction: it is destroying their business models by making it easier to copy content for free. They argue this will undermine the creation of high-quality commercial cultural products – whether books, films, television. Far from opening up a cultural cornucopia, quality culture will be blighted by a mass of low-grade, user-generated content. Critics such as Andrew Keen and Nicholas Carr 51 argue that the web is already dowsing us in the cultural equivalent of acid rain: poor quality, short attention span, amateur culture will displace crafted, professional culture, which requires patience and application.

  To prevent that destruction, traditional publishers and content owners argue that they need increased control over how their content is used, reaching deep down into how people listen to, watch and share culture. As content can so easily be copied and shared, complete control over a single piece of content – like a song or a book chapter – would be impossible without control over all the links made by someone sharing it. The promise of the open, collaborative web could eventually license equally pervasive forms of control in the name of established commercial cultural industries threatened by the web. Not surprisingly, content owners are pressing for expanded protections, longer copyright terms and harsher punishments for illegal downloading. Thus as cloud culture is taking shape we also have attempts to bring it back down to earth, with the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the No Electronic Theft Act, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act among others. The UK Government, in late 2009, proposed retaining the right to make changes to copyright legislation without needing primary legislation debated in Parliament. All this could limit the spread, scale and creativity of open cloud culture.

  Cloud culture will breed creativity only if people can easily collaborate, share and create. Culture, knowledge and information products are invariably made up of fragments of other culture, knowledge and information products. If access to those fragments becomes harder, because they are wrapped up in copyright, then so will the cumulative and collaborative process of creativity. Our cultural clouds will be rendered sterile and inert. Ray Charles would never have invented soul music.

  Already much of our culture that could be in the open cloud is kept out of it by copyright. According to the British Film Institute, for example, thousands of British films are under copyright but are no longer commercially available. The copyright holders do not think they will be able to make money from them but neither are the films in the public domain, free to be used and reused. Clearing the rights to use these orphaned works is still very hard. A tragically high proportion of our culture lies in this cultural coma, including perhaps 95 per cent of commercially published books, according to James Boyle:

  We have locked up most of the twentieth century culture and done it in a particularly inefficient and senseless way, creating vast costs in order to convey proportionally tiny benefits. Worst of all, we have turned the system on its head. Copyright, intended to be the servant of creativity, a means of promoting access to information, is becoming an obstacle to both.52