The Post-Millennial Cultural Landscape

Culture: everything we create, share, leave behind and express.

Throughout all of human history up to the 20th Century, culture was local, live and shared. Want music? Play it yourself or find someone to play it for you. Drama? Let’s check out the vaudeville. Stories were mostly told, poems were memorized and recited, and art had to be viewed on the wall. Culture was what you shared with your community.

Then came the 20th Century technologies of broadcasting and recording. Now, culture could be packaged, distributed, bought and sold. Culture became a commodity, something we possessed and collected, rather than something that average people created. Instead of being mostly locally produced and experienced by amateurs, it was professionally produced, institutionalized, and consumed. We shopped for our cultural experiences and we built shelves to hold our albums, cassettes and books. We subscribed to our magazines and newspapers, we taped our posters to the wall, and we wore the icons of our cultural identity on t-shirts. Collectively, we kept regular appointments with our radios and television sets to consume hours and hours of culture produced by "the mass media". Culture was centralized in movie studios, television networks and publishing houses, and it was promoted by professional critics who suggested the best way for us to spend our cultural dollars. Culture was big business and profitable empires arose based on the limited supply of professionally produced content: the record industry, the film industry, broadcasting networks and publishing houses.

And the direction of that culture was naturally one way. Producers produced and consumers consumed. I enjoy the quiet anticipation when the lights dim in a cinema, but perhaps it's a fitting symbol of our relationship to culture in the twentieth century: an audience of anonymous strangers in a dark auditorium passively experiencing the same cultural product simultaneously in silence. Or maybe an isolated viewer watching The Price is Right in her basement, a shopper perusing the rack of “New York Times Best-sellers” in a drugstore, or an excited crowd waiting in line for a Rolling Stones concert – all of these represent the same one-way direction of culture in the 20th Century.

With digital culture, recording and broadcasting have become virtually free to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. "Professional amateurs" -- average citizens following their personal interest in anything from music, film, and literature to astronomy, knitting, and (of course) kittens -- can research their passion in depth, produce professional quality material, distribute their work globally, receive immediate feedback, and form relevant subcultures. The idea of culture that informed my generation, culture as a scarce commodity produced and sold by professionals, has been completely revolutionized in the short span of a decade.

We all understand that those who made money from brokering information – real estate agents, stock brokers, newspaper classifieds, travel agents or postal workers – have seen their business models irrevocably shattered. Culture is information too, and anyone who earned a living from producing, distributing and selling it is facing a similar crisis: instead of a scarcity of culture that can be profitably packaged and sold, there is a surplus of culture exchanged for free. Be you a writer, a musician, a newspaper editor, a cinema owner, a bookstore employee, a music company executive, a photographer or a stand-up comic, making money through culture has become a whole lot more challenging.

In some ways, we’re returning to the pre-20th Century model of shared culture, of audiences producing culture for audiences. Whether it’s through Wikipedia, File-sharing, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or personal blogs, culture now moves laterally between the participants rather than from a minority of centrally produced paid producers to the masses. Instead of mass media, we have “new media.”

Whether we call the phenomenon Web 2.0, the Internet Revolution, or the democratization of culture, it is forcing us to rethink the way we look at everything from literacy, economics, education, and art. It's causing us to reexamine our identities and our relationships, our assumptions of knowledge and our notions of government. In fact, it's difficult to think of an aspect of our lives that remains unaffected by the culture shock of the new communication tools that have materialized so far this century.

This is a over-simplification, naturally, and others have elaborated on this in far more detail. If interested, Lawrence Lessig’s writings and his highly watchable TED talk on copyright law and creativity are a good place to start. As well, this essay by Bill Ivey and Steven J. Tepper, is an accessible work that I point my students to as an introduction.

5 Things

First blog post, such an awkward little postcard to the world. The disconnect of writing to myself and simultaneously to the firmament of connected lights that is the Internet. On one hand, it's an intimate, private space - just me, my keyboard, and I - on another, it's a potentially public space, a postmodern cross between singing in the shower and delivering a speech from the Pope's gallery. So in an effort to bring some order to my thoughts and launch this thing, I’m falling back on a simple “5 Things...” post. Five Things I’m thinking about in digital culture are...

1. The future of professional content. The information age, as it was coined in the 90s, suggested the fallacy that to make money, one had to broker and sell information. The opposite has come true, and a generation has grown up with the expectation that media is free. Content creators, professional ones at least, have found themselves unable to profit from the traditional means of selling media. Whether you’re a music company, a newspaper, a film producer, a novelist or a textbook publisher, making a buck out of selling information has become a whole lot harder if not impossible, and entire industries have found themselves kicking through the rubble of their collapsed business models in a stupefied daze.

2. Net Neutrality. When we log on to the Internet we can access almost any information we want at the fastest available speed. With few exceptions, we can use any service we want any time we want. The Internet service provider may not speed up the connection for one class of user as opposed to another; there is no discrimination based on the sender or the receiver. Framing the debate as one in which illegal file-sharers are hogging up too much bandwidth and slowing things down for everyone else, ISPs are asking for the right to privilege certain web activities over others with more bandwidth and faster speeds. The fear is that this will open the door to legislating the net, imposing limits and allowing providers to sell access in packages as they do with their other businesses, such as cable or telephone services. As a consequence, we would have a fast lane and a slow lane on the Internet which would interfere with the explosion of innovation and artistic freedom and expression that the web affords us.

3. The death of the Web. A common misperception is that the Internet and the Web are the same thing. The World Wide Web is the part of the Internet we are most familiar with, the pages upon which Wikipedia, blogs like this, university research sites, and the New York Times magically appear in our browsers. Email, streaming, downloads, Skype, chat and a host of other services and functions about which most users are unaware are also part of the Internet. The Web is a wild and wooly place with its uninvited porn, spyware, phishing scams, obscene comment strings and viruses. More and more of us are migrating to our mobile devices like the iPad and taking advantage of the services and platforms we enjoy through convenient apps. These apps effectively keep us off our browsers, and the fear is that we’ll regret this move. The ease and safety of apps will push us further from the freeform innovation and inventiveness of the more open and unpredictable Web.

4. The Internet is bad for our brains. Another concern of the moment is whether the constant distractions and multitasking of being online is in fact changing the way we think. Are we losing our ability to understand longer texts and complex arguments as we ignorantly drown in a happy sea of tweets, status updates and indignant blog posts? The argument claims we are instant superficial specialists, skimming knowledge and making quick, uninformed decisions without the ability to ruminate and develop larger ideas. This idea is the basis of Nicolas Carr’s The Shallows. The other side of this argument, most famously put forward in Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, is the idea that time spent online creating even the most mundane things, such as tweeting a status update or commenting on a YouTube video, is superior to passively consuming television and therefore ultimately better for us in the long run.

5. Copyright vs. Copyfight. Copyright laws are vastly outdated for the current media landscape. Originally created to balance creativity and preserve the importance of the public domain, they speak to another era when reproducing media was impossibly expensive for the average citizen. Now that copying is free, faultless, easy and social -- it could be argued that copying files is in fact the main function of computers -- average citizens find themselves the targets of lawsuits, and media producers find themselves in the position of suing their fans and customers.

So. Five things that are on my radar.