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.
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