Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural relations Read online

The Right Honourable David Miliband MP, 2010

  Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary

 

  1. In Judge Chin’s Court

  An obscure courtroom in the Southern District of New York presided over by Judge Denny Chin has been the unlikely setting for a battle of epic proportions to shape our emerging, global, digital culture. This battle, over who will control the future of books, is just one of several tussles that will determine who will control vast tracts of the digital landscape that only now are coming into view over the horizon as the next stage of the internet revolution unfolds.1

  The issue before Judge Chin’s court is Google’s ambitious book search project, which aims to digitise millions of books held in research libraries around the world. Google estimates it has already digitised about ten million books. The question is: On what terms will it make these available to readers and recompense their authors and publishers? Many of these books are still under copyright and commercially available. Access to them in digital form will have to be paid for. Many others – perhaps seven million – are so-called orphaned works: they are under copyright but no longer commercially available. Working out who should be paid for access to these orphaned works is a lot trickier. The arguments played out in Judge Chin’s court will likely shape not just the future of books but much of the rest of our culture in the decades to come.

  Google is offering to create a digital library that could grow to be larger even than the Library of Congress, which has 21 million books. Books that are trapped in deep and dusty stacks in obscure libraries will become available to anyone with an internet connection. That should spread knowledge and ideas. Other libraries that have experimented with making rarely read documents available online have found they attract a much larger, global audience. More people than ever should be able to make more of the stock of our culture held in books. That should be good for all of us.

  However, this shared cultural resource will come at a price which is difficult to calculate. Google is offering to rescue millions of neglected, orphaned works in exchange for acquiring considerable power over the future of publishing and books. Under the deal proposed by Google, the company would have exclusive rights to commercialise orphaned works. If one turned into an overnight hit Google would make most of the money. Once it was established, Google would be able to head off potential competition from other, different, databases of digital books. We would find ourselves locked into Google’s service. As we visited Google’s database to search for books it would acquire yet more information about our habits and interests, which it would aggregate and disaggregate in its vast servers, to sell advertising to us in yet more insidious ways. Google would retain the right to determine what books were made available. A profit-hungry corporation run by self-confessed software nerds with tunnel vision would not be most people’s first choice to act as the custodian of our culture.

  Google’s plans and its attempts to strike a deal with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have provoked a mass of protests, many from outside the US. The French and German governments invoked Molière and Descartes, Goethe and Schiller and their winners of the Nobel prize for literature – 28 between them – to warn that Google’s plans would create an ‘uncontrolled, autocratic concentration of power in a single corporate entity’,2 which would threaten a fundamental human right: the free flow of ideas through literature. Google’s plans have already provoked accusations of cultural betrayal and protectionist countermeasures. In December French president Nicolas Sarkozy earmarked €750 million to digitise French books, films and museum artefacts as an alternative to Google’s plan. Sarkozy implied French national identity would be in question if its culture were ‘allowed to leave’, as if Google were about to take it away from France by making it available to many more people.3 Earlier in 2009, the National Library of France provoked a storm of controversy by suggesting it would work with Google because the state-funded alternative, Gallica, was not up to scratch.4

  The US Government Department of Justice was more concerned that Google would lock up the market and make it all but impossible for new competitors to enter. As well as opposition from old media publishers, Google’s peers are also opposed. The Open Book Alliance, made up of Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo!, which wants to create its own cloud of digitised books, accused Google of cooking up a scheme which would usurp Congress and give the company de facto control over copyright policy.

  Sadly Judge Chin’s court will not be the place to come up with ingenious new solutions to the issues raised by Google’s plans. One option would be to create a genuinely public library of digital works. Yet that would require primary legislation in Congress, and a national US solution dreamed up in Washington would not impress much of the rest of the world whose culture was about to be digitised. A state-run digital archive might have as many downsides as one provided by Google. An alternative would be to create a global not-for-profit organisation to look after orphaned works and books already in the public domain. This organisation would then apportion its income among authors and publishers. At the very least, governments will have to regulate access to the digital cultural stores Google is helping to create, to make sure the public interest is not abused.

  We have the potential to make available more culture and ideas in more forms to more people than ever: a digitally enabled, cultural cornucopia. More people than ever will be able to connect through culture, sharing experiences and ideas. More people than ever will be able to contribute to this unfolding shared culture, through easy-to-use digital tools. Yet this possibility, a vastly enhanced global space for cultural expression, is threatened by intransigent vested interests, hungry new monopolists and governments intent on reasserting control over the unruly web. Judge Chin’s court is a microcosm for the arguments that will rage over the control of culture globally in the decades to come. This essay is about that battle. Let us start with how we got here.

 

  2. When the Bedouin have Mobiles

  We sit beneath the palms of a crude Bedouin shelter, in the Sinai desert, at the entrance to the deep, narrow White Gorge that leads to the oasis of Ain Kundra, a watering hole for travellers for thousands of years, while a Bedouin woman makes us tea the traditional way on an open fire of twigs protected by a few stones. To get here has taken a seven-hour drive from Cairo, a jeep ride into the desert and a trek from the camp where we slept the night under the stars. Not a soul is to be seen on the sandstone plateau blasted by the morning sun.

  Then from the palms above our heads a familiar tone rings out. It is her mobile phone.

  What is remarkable is that it should cause so little surprise that a Bedouin should be connected to the same web of communications as people in Cairo, New York and London. In the space of a decade, mobile phones, Wi-Fi, broadband internet, satellite and digital television have become commonplace, if not ubiquitous. That has brought in its wake a culture of mass self-expression on a scale never seen before, which has the potential to touch and connect us all and to change how we relate to one another through culture. We are just at the first stages of the unfolding of this new global culture, and already it is producing remarkable things at breakneck speed and on a vast scale.

  A self-made video by a Korean boy playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D on the electric guitar in his bedroom has garnered more than 65 million hits on YouTube, providing the starting point for a global community of guitar-playing boys. Without asking anyone’s permission they created a global television channel devoted to a single piece of music. A largely volunteer-created encyclopaedia – Wikipedia – edited by about 75,000 volunteers has more than 13 million articles. Habbo, the world’s fastest-growing virtual world, has more than 135 million members, 90 per cent of them aged 13–18. Avaaz, a global campaigning website which has 3.2 million members, raised more than €4 million in donations and undertook more than 11 million actions, such as email campaigns and petitions, in its first two years of o
peration. Skype, which allows people to use the internet to make free telephone calls, is in effect the second-largest telephone carrier in the world, with almost 405 million users, just ahead of Vodafone with 380 million subscribers and behind China Mobile with 450 million. It took Skype just five and a half years to acquire this user base. It took YouTube four years to attract 363 million regular users. Facebook acquired almost 236 million members in just five years.5 More video is uploaded to YouTube in two months than if the US television networks ABC, NBC and CBS had been broadcasting non-stop since 1948. The websites of these established television channels – which have been around for 60 years – get about 10 million unique visitors per month. MySpace, YouTube and Facebook get 250 million visitors per month. None were more than six years old in 2009.6 The Technorati service tracks 93.9 million blogs, an activity unheard of ten years ago. Most of the biggest websites in the world are platforms for mass participation and collaboration, self-expression and social connection: YouTube attracts almost a fifth of internet users; Blogger is the seventh most popular site in the world; Twitter got 67 million unique visitors a month in 2009; Flickr, the photosharing site, serves 68 million views a month; Facebook, the social networking site, attracts 370 million unique visitors a month.7

 

  Ideas and images were already being shared between people and countries as never before through terrestrial, cable and satellite television and radio stations; feature films and DVDs; video games and music. But in the past decade the World Wide Web, born in 1989 and brought to life only in 1994 with modern browsers, has wrought a creative and disruptive impact on culture and communications. What might the next decade hold for how we create, share and communicate culture and what might that mean for how we relate to one another, across cultures?

  The combination of mass self-expression, ubiquitous participation and constant connection is creating cloud culture, formed by our seemingly never-ending capacity to make and share culture in images, music, text and film. The rise and spread of the internet and the world wide web are first and foremost a cultural phenomenon. Their impact will be felt first in culture and only later in politics and commerce. The web allows more people than ever to create and make content; distribute and share it; to form groups and conversations around the ideas and issues that matter to them, which shape and express their identity and values. The current expression of that process – Web 2.0 – began to emerge in the late 1990s, created by social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, blogging and wikis. The next phase of that process will turn on a distinctively different kind of internet, the rise of cloud computing, which will allow much greater personalisation and mobility, constant real-time connection and easier collaboration. We could all be connected, more continuously and seamlessly, through a dense cloud of information. In the last ten years the web gave rise to social media and social networking. 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.