Mapping E-culture ISBN EDITOR

Transcriptie

1 Mapping E-culture

2 Mapping E-culture Virtueel Platform Damrak LM Amsterdam The Netherlands + 31 (0) info@virtueelplatform.nl ISBN VIRTUEEL PLATFORM CATHY BRICKWOOD, EDITOR

3 Contents INTRODUCTION Floor van Spaendonck 10 MAPPING ECulture, ecultuur, E-Cultuur, or e-culture Richard Rogers in converation with Annet Dekker 16 E-CULTURE IN A TRANSFORMING MEDIA LANDSCAPE: TOWARDS A FUNCTIONAL APPROACH TO NEW MEDIA CULTURE Eric Kluitenberg 30 BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH: ON THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON CULTURE AND THE ARTS Caroline Nevejan 44 TEN YEARS OF NEW MEDIA EDUCATION IN THE NETHERLANDS Emilie Randoe 57 5X E-CULTURE AND COMMERCE Antoinette Hoes 65 DUTCH TRANSLATIONS NEDERLANDSE VERTALINGEN Eric Kluitenberg, Caroline Nevejan, Emilie Randoe, Antoinette Hoes 97 PRACTICE-BASED RESEARCH IN THE ARTS Henk Borgdorff, based on an interview with Anne Helmond 104 PATCHING ZONE: COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE AND PRACTICE-BASED RESEARCH Anne Nigten, by Anne Helmond 111 EMBODYING RESEARCH Dick Rijken, Kristina Andersen 116 OPEN CULTURAL ECONOMY? Klaas Kuitenbrouwer 126 THE CHINESE DREAM Alex Adriaansens, based on an interview with Anne Helmond BEYOND THE MEDIA MYSTIQUE: ADRESSING MEDIA AND E-CULTURE IN EGYPT, LEBANON AND PALESTINE Nat Muller 145 TRACING THE TRACE Bronac Ferran 153 DUTCH SUMMARIES / NEDERLANDSE SAMENVATTINGEN CREDITS 158 Introduction: In 2008 the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science officially designated a sector for e-culture and selected and institution to take on the role of supporting this sector. The task fell to Virtueel Platform. In the meantime Virtueel Platform is laying the basis for the sector institute and this publication can be seen as part of this process. The articles are a first attempt to contextualise a number of developments in the field and make them more visible. Assumptions and questions relating to e-culture were the trigger for publishing a book about the state of the art. These questions include: what is e-culture? Can we talk of a new, stand-alone arts discipline that touches upon all the other disciplines? Or is the implementation of new media culture, digital and electronic arts a temporary phenomenon and will we understand it in ten years time? Is e-culture the driving force behind technological innovation in the broader arts sector and does e-culture serve social innovation? What does e- culture include? Games? What about science, industry, the health sector? In short, there is clearly a need to examine the importance of e-culture, who is taking part in it and what the state of play is. We asked four hands-on experts to write about some of these issues. E-culture spans several arts disciplines, overlaps with various social sectors and also has its own sector. To map the current situation we chose four areas to focus upon: education, culture, industry and media culture. E-culture in relation to cultural policy and funding has long been a focus of Virtueel Platform. Eric Kluitenberg, a media theorist with a long track record of programming projects, festivals and debates about media culture in De Balie, writes about media labs in the changing media landscape and makes a plea for more production funding. Emilie Randoe, an expert on higher education in the new media sector, and until recently director of the Institute for Informatics, the Institute for Interactive Media and the Media Lab at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, University of Applied Sciences, maps the education field. What role does education see itself playing and to what extent is a Communication and Multimedia Design training related to e-culture? There is a clear need for the education system to meet the needs of the professional media sector and recently the dialogue between the two has taken on 4 MAPPING E-CULTURE CONTENTS INTRODUCTION FLOOR VAN SPAENDONCK 5

4 a more structured, official form. Steps and developments that contribute to the professionalisation of the sector. Other developments that indicate professionalisation are to be found in the game industry. This industry is now recognised as a new industry on its own terms. As well as game companies, studies, consultative bodies, the first steps have been taken to organise the profession, with the Dutch Games Association (DGA). The DGA was set up in 2008 to represent the interests of the industry at large. Games and e-culture overlap and developments in the game industry contribute towards the development of e-culture, both on a technical level and in terms of professionalisation. Antoinette Hoes, an expert on online media and communication, and founder of Leylines bv, is in a good position to observe these links and analyse their potential. In a broader perspective is the link between e-culture and the creative industry as a whole. This link offers many opportunities for developing innovation in the broader cultural sector. The non-profit mentality of artists and arts institututions is often at odds with the commercial approach of industry but in terms of content there are many commonalities. Experiments, content and research from the arts field is extremely valuable for industry, while industry offers large numbers of high standard applications which reach a wide audience, and this is also very valuable. What of the term e-culture itself? Is e-culture merely a fashionable term for policy makers to bandy about? Is it used in practice and what does it mean? Govcom was given the task of researching the extent to which this term is used, and by whom. This book opens with the results. The broad context of e-culture is at the same time a challenge: the number of issues to cover is too vast to do justice to the theme. In selecting a number of issues to examine we came up with two areas that are currently developing in the Netherlands: practicebased research and new business models. In themselves these are broad issues. Practice-based research in relation to the cultural sector is another way of raising the issue of what research is and where it can be carried out. The new media sector is constantly researching new tools, services, formats, rights issues, social contexts, and so on. In some fields the recognition of this work is growing, and the relationship between research carried out in the cultural or media sector with academic research is growing gradually closer: social sciences, computer studies, communication and media, are but a few of the fields in which research links can be made. The recognition of new media as a key economic sector has grown over the past years, but rhetoric about creative industries often fails to look at how different actors in the sector are actually working in practice. In the section on new business models Klaas Kuitenbrouwer examines issues of open content and e-culture. There is still a lack of quantitative and qualitative data about the Dutch e-culture sector. Whilst Virtueel Platform is at the beginning of mapping activities in the Netherlands, it has also been involved in a number of recent mapping projects of other countries. Countries that have been singled out by the government as key centres for cooperation in the future, including China, Brazil and the Middle East. This book closes with stories of how these countries are developing their own e-culture and in some cases the ways in which Dutch cultural organisations can work with or learn from them. V2_ has worked in China with the academic sector on a grand scale and in a very centralised way, very much in contrast to the practical, open and decentralised Dutch approach, which is based on small-scale projects and flexibility. Nat Muller s tour of the Middle East, where she works as an independent curator, emphasizes the value of media culture on a political and social level, mentioning for example the way in which new media circumvent problems of mobility. Bronac Ferran was commissioned by SICA in 2008 to map the digital media sector there. Ferran s overview of this mapping project explains a great deal about the country, its needs and the way it is developing. Her analysis will be instrumental in bringing about further cooperation. One of the people she writes about is renowned singer and former Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil. He sees the country as a laboratory for the future. An attractive prospect for cooperation. The foreign surveys that have been carried out, and are referred to in this section, are useful to various 6 MAPPING E-CULTURE INTRODUCTION FLOOR VAN SPAENDONCK 7

5 audiences. The context, specific information and indexes of certain regions will offer the e-culture sector a better overview as well as link up activities. In addition they are useful to policy makers in search of arguments to support future activities, as well as finding links between plans and examining the added value of financial support. For foreign partners the surveys offer an opportunity to put on paper and collate their experiences, rendering their activities more visible and defining the issues they would like to deal with. The importance of working at an international level, exchange and cooperation forms the basis of this section and would appear self-evident. The international surveys do not so much provide a legitimation of such exchange but rather seek depth, continuity and sustainability in relation to these activities. Their value is clear and they will be continued. Floor van Spaendonck is director of Virtueel Platform, the Dutch sectoral institute for media, arts and digital culture. Virtueel Platform stimulates innovation and supports knowledge exchange in the field of e-culture in the Netherlands and abroad. Floor studied history. Her professional expertise lies in the field of digital culture and media art, arts administration and funding. Her focus in the field of arts is on shaping conditions and creating a platform for crossovers, research, experiment and debate in the field of arts. Previously she worked as staff member for the Amsterdam Arts Foundation and was programme manager at media lab Waag Society. Mapping E-culture Floor van Spaendonck Virtueel Platform 8 MAPPING E-CULTURE MAPPING E-CULTURE

6 Mapping ECulture, ecultuur, E-cultuur, or e-culture What is e-culture - what was e-culture? 1996: e-culture is the end of the divide between high culture and low culture 1999: e-culture is the opposite of e-commerce 2002: e-culture comes after visual culture and print culture 2003: e-culture is not digitisation, e-culture is online culture 2007: e-culture is an engine of innovation 2008: e-culture is a fully accepted e-word, like Google shows: e-cultuur results ecultuur results Richard Rogers in conversation with Annet Dekker ANNET DEKKER In order to get to grips with the term e-culture Virtueel Platform asked Govcom.org to map the term. The result is now mapped and clouded. How did you go about it and what did you find? Richard rogers Recently, we defined clouding as a particular analytical technique. This doesn t mean merely visualising the results of analysis in a cloud, but that you start your analysis by thinking that you re going to cloud it. This in turn means that you do the analysis in a particular way because you re clouding. In the clouding we tried to characterise what e-culture is about. In all, the analysis had three components; What is e-culture about, who does it, and, who recognises the term? We started with a set of organisations, in our case about 250 organisations that were selected and coded by Virtueel Platform. That is to say, we made up a coding scheme, coded in For more information on the Mapping project see the fold-out sheet enclosed with this book. Richard Rogers holds the Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is also Director of the Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and Director of the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking method for Internet research. He is author of Information Politics on the Web, awarded the best 2005 book by the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Current research interests include Internet censorship, googlization & Google art, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the Web as well as the technicity of content. 1 The interactor module is built into the issue crawler, and extends the uses of the network location software. The issue crawler now has three crawling options: co-link analysis, snowball and interactor. 2 In co-link analysis, the issue crawler crawls the seed URLs, captures their outlinks and retains those that have received at least two links from the seeds. In the snowball approach, the issue crawler captures all out-links from the seeds as well as the out-links out-links, retaining every page found. In the interactor module, the issue crawler crawls and maps the links between the seed URLs. a social science way, that consisted of keywords in terms of activities as well as type of organisation. With this data we started counting to get an overall characterisation of the field and to see if a particular organisation type dominates the field. We also queried each organisation website for the term e-culture. We found that funders, for example, were the ones that used that word e-culture very often, which then gives this sense that e-culture is more or less accepted in funding circles. Whereas the actual organisations use the word far less frequently. Instead they use other terms. For the mapping we built the interactor module 1. This software finds links between entered urls. Within our source set we watched over a longer period of time to see a general composition of actors surfacing in a field; this gives a sense of who s receiving a lot of attention and whether that attention is rising or falling according to in-link counts. We also used a different mapping approach that looked for links in between organisations, so-called co-link analysis 2. This brings in other organisations that are not on the initial list. The analysis showed for example that according to the links from the Dutch e-culture sites YouTube is seen as an extremely important e-culture actor, or platform. This mapping analysis shows the significance of some of the things e-culture has, in this case the many dependencies of e-culture on other organisations or platforms outside of the Netherlands. AD You just said that you consider clouding an official method of analysis. Could you describe the differences between regular methods and the advantage of clouding? RR Traditionally there are two ways of thinking of information visualisation. The first one is that you have an analytical output, and then you visualise it. In some sense visualisation becomes the finished product. That is a traditional way of thinking about it. And there are also specific ways of visualising that have to do with a particular analytical method. IBM s Many Eyes project lists visualisation types depending on data outputs. For example, a line graph is good for things that rise and fall 10 MAPPING E-CULTURE INTERVIEW MAPPING ECulture, ecultuur, RICHARD ROGERS 11 E-cultuur, or e-culture

7 over time like stock prices. But what we are putting forward is that the visualisation is at the beginning of the analysis. This happens in two ways; first of all you start by thinking in visual terms in such a way that the analysis fits the visualisation. And secondly the clouding drives your questions. Given all the issues on the global human rights agendas, which issues are the ones that have the most campaigns? You look at things that are cloud-able. This form of analysis tries to stay close to its origins: digital online data. The tag cloud is a natively digital format that doesn t have a precedent; in some sense it stems from the new kind of information culture and therefore could be considered a new way of thinking about data online, and also made into an approach and method of analysis. AD What is Govcom.org, and who are you? RR The name relates to several projects we did (myself, Noortje Marres and some students at the University of Amsterdam in the department of Science Dynamics, and the Royal College of Art in London) in 1998 and The first project started because I was asked by the International Herald Tribune to write a newspaper article on climate change. This was I, like many people do, went to a search engine, typed in climate change and hit return. I was going through the various returns, surfing if you will, and I noticed that a lot of the organisations that I came across made hyperlinks to other organisations, but not all organisations linked to all other organisations. The hyperlinking was in some sense selective. What I ultimately noticed is that some organisations received more links than other organisations. We started manually, with a chalk board and coloured chalk, drawing little circles signifying the sites of the organisations involved in climate change and lines between them signifying hyperlinks. What we noticed was that there was something that we eventually called the politics of association on display. That is, some organisations linked to others for particular reasons. We thought that hyperlinks at the time, if you take a large sample of them, might signify the reputation of an organisation. The organisations that get the most links from other organisations working in the same area, one would imagine could have more authority or a higher reputation than the other organisations. In fact the hyperlinks, we thought, displayed some kind of reputation distribution. First of all they showed a politics of association, and on the other hand a sort of reputation distribution. Where the politics of association is concerned, we made a film in 1999 that was our next larger project whilst we were research fellows of the Jan van Eyck media and design fellowship. I was the research fellow and I brought with me a number of colleagues both from Amsterdam (including Noortje Marres) and some people from the Royal College of Art largely students. We sat at the Jan van Eyck Academy for about five months. We made a video as well as some other things, and one of the things we were looking to find out was why organisations link to one another. So we interviewed the webmasters of Shell, Greenpeace as well as RTMark which is the famous organisation which pioneered rogue websites or fake sites. The three of them were all in the same issue-space with regard to climate change, and when we interviewed them we found out that they all are, in some ways, competing for attention in the same space. What we noticed when we were mapping was that when you map an issue, the types of organisations that are on the map most prominently are.govs,.coms and.orgs. So, that is where the name comes from: Govcom.org. AD What are you known for? RR We are known for issue analysis, or issue mapping. This came out of the Jan van Eyck period where we made a piece of software called the NetLocator, and later the Issue Crawler, which is web network location and visualisation software. That was one of the first major achievements on our part in terms of software making, and we have been working on it since about 2000/2001. The designed version came online in 2004 and it is doing quite well. I mean, it has a mind of its own and breaks a lot and we never know exactly why. It maps issues networks. AD What is your interest in these subjects? RR Well, it goes back to a particular tradition in the academic area that I studied, that I got my PhD in, which is Science and Technology Studies. One of the areas is Science and Technology Controversy Studies, and it was our contribution to that field to look into particular social issues. I think all of the projects we have done are conceptual, but the conceptual is always backed up by the analytical. We are constantly doing analysis, because we like to think that we can make claims. Once we think we are able to make claims, then from there we try to figure out the best form in which to make them. But there are a number of ways of answering this question. One of the things, for me personally, is to put on display that issues are everyday concerns. If you read the news or watch the TV news, you ll see that some issues have more attention than other issues. So a project that we did after the Issue Crawler was to look at the difference between news attention cycles for issues, versus civil society, or NGO, attention cycles to issues. We made a piece called infoid.org, which is an issue tracker, and it shows issue attention according to civil society s campaigning behaviours. We found the good news is that civil societies have a much longer attention span to social issues than the news. We used the web in order to find this out AD How do you see your work yourself? In what context would it be most beneficial? RR The work is something that can be presented in a variety of discourses. It has the scientific to it. It has the design to it. We are always very conscious about the narrative. What is the story? What are we telling here? In that sense the presentation is always important. We feel the things we do can be presented, shown and talked about in any of the discourses that we have people from on our team. We are at a point where people can cross over quite well. I am very comfortable working with designers, artists and programmers. I can speak their languages. 12 MAPPING E-CULTURE INTERVIEW MAPPING ECulture, ecultuur, RICHARD ROGERS 13 E-cultuur, or e-culture

8 AD What is the role of the public for you? Do they have a say in the thing? Is there an open forum? Can they only be listeners, lurkers or also participants? RR What we have found is that there is much to critique in various projects (especially web ones) that have great assumptions about the empowerment of publics. The secret of publicity is that there is no public (see Publicity s Secret by Jodi Dean). Noortje Marres, says in her dissertation: no issues no publics. Often times the question a lot of people work on is: how do publics form? Are there freefloating ones, or do they form around something? Noortje s answer is that they form around issues, and that they are not just there. When we do issue mappings, what we notice is that you basically have quite powerful professional organisations at work. There is no man on the street involved, nor being recognised by these actors. When you study issue power, you find that public participation is something that is more of an ideal than a reality. On the basis of those sorts of perspectives, based on some findings, I think the short answer to the question about public participation is that they participate when they do, and when they form. We do not engage in work that forms everyday publics. AD Can you see that changing in the future, with the arrival and popularity of the Web2.0? RR Every once in a while we do a piece of work that has some kind of public dimension in mind. For example, one of the proposals that accompanied the Issue Tracker (a piece of software which monitors whether social issues are rising or falling) was to have it as an augmented space project. Initially it was inspired by the protests in the streets of Genoa during the G8 meeting in There was a red zone, and green zone: where the protestors were on one side, and conference on the other. We thought an issue ticker would make a nice interface between those two zones. It has a public dimension to it, but it is more of a showing, a form of presentation of our findings. AD Can you tell me a little bit about the software you are using? RR We make open source software, but we do not make SourceForge projects because that is a whole world which requires constant attention. We share code a lot. But, when one says open source software there is often the impression that everything we do is put into the open source community, when in fact it is not. With the Issue Crawler, in particular, we have extensive documentation. But we do not have the actual code bundle online. That is not to say that we have a problem sharing. We make it in the spirit of open source, we use open source licenses but as of yet we haven t done the SourceForge project for it. The consequence is that with the Issue Crawler we do not have the community of programmers, which is something that occasionally hurts us because the Issue Crawler is user supported. Every year or so we realise we do not have any money, so I write to my institutional supporters, which are quite important universities. There is a list of about 15 or 20. We suffer, in some sense, from not having taken the time or made the extra effort to create a SourceForge project. AD Would you say that with your projects you make political statements, or are you more interested in showing what is happening with different issues? RR We have made a lot of different statements, and some are summarised in the different terms we use. We are concerned about issue abandonment. We are concerned about issue drift. We are concerned about the life that issues lead and are continually, in some sense, making statements about issues through those sorts of terms. For example, in issue drift one notices that international NGOs and inter-governmental organisations go from summit to summit, and conference to conference. At each of these different venues, there are different agendas and if you look at it over time you ll notice how particular issues rise and fall in these agendas. We always ask ourselves the question of whether or not these organisations remember what is happening on the ground. Whether or not, depending on participation in these summits, they abandon certain issues in favour of other ones. We are always, in some sense, making statements generally about attention to social issues. Whether or not you should watch the news at all, but also other ideas such as whether organisations leave certain issues unexpectedly because their issues aren t in the news, for example. Also another term that we use is issue hybridisation. That is the coupling of two or more issues together. One of the things we have been asking critical questions about is what happens to an issue when the organisations doing the issue suddenly enter the human rights discourse, thereby framing issues in terms of rights, coupling the issues with rights. We have noticed on a couple of occasions that when the rights language comes into a certain issue space, the sub-issues that were in that space previously begin to go into decline. For example on a study we did on the Narmada Dams controversy in India, much of the local concern was about people being displaced because of the construction of the dam. They have to move and they would like compensation. When large organisations, or NGOs, started getting involved, they changed the discourse from compensation, displacement and land loss to rights. Human rights, which has its own dynamics. In that sense we are making statements by the kinds of analysis we do. Part of this interview is based on an earlier interview with Govcom. org, The politics of association on display. Interview with Govcom.org (Richard Rogers), by Annet Dekker for Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam, March MAPPING E-CULTURE INTERVIEW MAPPING ECulture, ecultuur, RICHARD ROGERS 15 E-cultuur, or e-culture

9 E-Culture in a Transforming Media Landscape: Towards a Functional Approach to New Media Culture Eric Kluitenberg The arts have been at the forefront of a productive discourse with the latest technological developments since the first decades of the twentieth century. In the pre-war period, the technological beast was the prey of various European avantgarde groups. Such movements were always highly diverse, varying from the animated nihilism of Dada, the ecstatic adoration of the Futurists to the more pragmatic utopian approach of Bauhaus and the Constructivists. After the war, the gauntlet passed to the American Art and Technology movement, which centred on artists like Robert Rauschenberg and scientists like Billy Klüver, who refigured thinking on art and technology. In hindsight, we realise that the real explosion of activity accompanied the miniaturisation of computer technology (and corresponding declining costs) and the tide that came into its own in the 1980s. The market democratised technology on a previously unseen scale. The instruments of scientists and IT specialists suddenly became that of the bookkeeper, grocer, chemist, hobbyist, designer and artist. Where the machines of the 1980s were cumbersome, by the early 1990s they had become fully-fledged multi-media tools able to connect image, sound, text, data and interaction in an Eric Kluitenberg is a theorist, writer, and organiser on culture and technology. He is currently based at De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam, and teaches a course on Culture and New Media at the University of Amsterdam. He taught media theory for the post-graduate education programmes in art & design and new media at Media-GN and Academy Minerva in Groningen, the Netherlands, and worked on the scientific staff of the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne. Since 1988 he has been involved as an organiser in numerous important media culture events. entirely new way (the era of the CD-ROM). For artists, this was the dawning of the age of new, limitlessly flexible synthetic art forms. A symphony of image, sound and movement of which Scriabin could only dream, was now within reach of almost every artist. The interaction between the various fields (in random order: science, art, commerce, technology and everyday life) sparked off something that can be called a new media culture. The hybrid character of its origins is its signature. New media culture is not limited to any one of these areas but covers or cross-cuts all of them, making it a phenomenon that is difficult for relative outsiders to comprehend and use. The new media culture underwent a definitive breakthrough in the mid 1990s with the advent of Internet. This initially began as a primarily text-communication oriented medium with strong roots in the scientific laboratory culture from which it emerged. But Internet became a comprehensive and almost all-encompassing multi-media network at a pace that astonished even those involved. All other media forms and modalities were increasingly swallowed up by this multi-media network (radio, television, telephone, photography, audio-visual archives, s, newsgroups and interactive media forms that, fifteen years ago, were only conceivable on CD-ROM). This process is generally referred to as media convergence. In a nutshell, it refers to the fact that almost all media channels, driven by technical and economic advantages, have since gone digital: audio and video production, radio and television, news and press photography, the layout and printing of print productions, and telecommunications connections. This has enormous implications for the position of art and culture in the new media landscape and for the public functions of media in general. The development also has its downsides. Convergence of the media has exponentially boosted the consolidation trend in the media market. The increased international dimension of electronic media had been ongoing for some time, referred to by economists as horizontal integration in the media industry : media companies merged or were taken over by their own branch, creating media conglomerates that increasingly neutralise competition. (Economists are unanimous in seeing the perils this holds for the market). The trend for digitising all media channels and forms has also caused an explosive proliferation of vertical integration in the media and telecommunications industry: the confluence of distribution, content production (programmes, editorial content, media formats, services) and the provision of access for final users, even into the very homes of individual consumers. (Which economists deem utterly disastrous). 16 MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY E-CULTURE IN A TRANSFORMING MEDIA LANDSCAPE: ERIC KLUITENBERG 17 Towards a Functional Approach to New Media Culture

10 The combination of massive horizontal and vertical integration in the media and telecommunications industry has led to a catastrophic decimation of the range of public information and communication on offer. This seems paradoxical in a situation in which almost everyone has access to online publication which is indeed the only lifebuoy for public culture currently at hand. But when professionally produced media products and services are primarily considered, the landscape that unfolds is one in which, apart from public broadcasting companies, the lion s share of the available media and access to information channels is provided and therefore controlled by a swiftly shrinking number of globally active media conglomerates. This is not only extremely adverse from an economic perspective, resulting as it does in the worldwide failure of markets on an unheard-of scale, but also from a cultural one, where the law of numbers reigns supreme. From a political vantage point, the phenomenon is also dreaded because it seriously hampers the diversity of opinion forming consider the bravura in the headline of British tabloid The Sun after the first election of New Labour leader Tony Blair: It s The Sun that s won it!. 1 In the light of the convergence of media and the concentration in international media markets it should be clear that the wisdom of the crowds, the DIY media culture and the various public media are mutually complementary and badly need of each other to effectively counterbalance 2 the consolidating market forces in the media landscape. Only safeguards of public access combined with pronounced public functions in media production and supply can guarantee the diversity and quality of the public range of information and communication in the long term. This is also the context within which the new media culture functions and within which clear functions and accountabilities can be identified. New media culture In the field of e-culture, both aspects (the creative, producing functions and the joint co-creation of content) play a crucial role. In a stricter sense, the public sector (cultural institutions, the role of the government, public media providers) primarily play a part in creative e-culture or new media culture. Since the mid 1990s, this new media culture has, in a rather more confined sense, been the subject of active international debate in which the Netherlands and the Dutch culture sector were clearly pioneers. One of the first policy documents drafted by the sector in a European context was the so-called Amsterdam Agenda, presented on 1 November 1997 during the Practice to Policy Conference in Amsterdam. The paper identified three elements of apparently crucial importance for Europe s rapidly developing new media culture: innovation, education and social quality. 3 1 The suggestion was that, in switching political allegiance from the Conservatives to New Labour, Rupert Murdoch s tabloid had managed to secure the election outcome. After the Conservative victory in 1992, The Sun had run the headline: It s The Sun that s won it!. 2 Counterveiling power. 3 The Amsterdam Agenda: Fostering emergent practices in Europe s media culture, 1 November Conference Towards a New Media Culture in Europe: From Practice to Policy, organised by the Virtueel Platform, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, under the auspices of the Council of Europe, 29 October 1 November 1997, in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. At the time, innovation was spoken of with specific reference to the frequent collaborations between artists and cultural producers, and technology developers and academic researchers concerning both the application of new instruments and the development of new methods and formulation of problems. Secondly, with the development of new areas of application for new media technologies, a productive relationship was perceived between culture and industry. Artists in particular were pushing the boundaries of new media into new areas, while industry made the instruments available to ever-increasing groups of producers and customers. In the education area, partnerships with schools and educational institutions with the objective of developing educational projects and new (multi-medial) teaching methods, was also considered. The educational effect of new media culture was also underlined, in which the public is tempted to play with new media forms and effortlessly becomes familiar with technology and how it works; informal learning or learning by doing. Front and back cover of New Media Culture in Europe Additionally, art and culture were allocated a critical position a priori as regards the social consequences and implications of new technology. And, through precisely this critically inquiring mentality, it was deemed capable of making an important contribution to a socially sound integration of new media and new technology. New media cultures were also expected to go a long way towards strengthening the social quality of the new media applications. This was because many cultural projects were developed as joint initiatives (in a real, tangible context where new media is used by a far more diverse group of users than in a technical laboratory). 18 MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY E-CULTURE IN A TRANSFORMING MEDIA LANDSCAPE: ERIC KLUITENBERG 19 Towards a Functional Approach to New Media Culture

11 Cultural competence In the book New Media Culture in Europe (Virtueel Platform 1999) Portuguese policymaker Luis Soares wrote, At ground level, things happen at a speed which is often incompatible with the speed of Europe s public and political institutions. However, in subsequent years, thinking and policy frameworks containing new media culture developments happened in rapid succession. At the end of the 1990s, there was a pronounced shift in emphasis to increasing cultural competence in public and technological policy frameworks. The assumption was that the developments were not visible at grassroots level and were not sufficiently understood by the people and institutions that took the decisions in the public and technological sector. The groundbreaking nature of artistic and cultural experiments made it particularly difficult for policymakers to determine their value, and a clearer grasp of such experiments was required. The highly interdisciplinary nature of the new media culture made this even more complex. Public domain 2.0 Around the millennium, a different dialogue emerged, one that primarily pondered ways that new media can contribute towards revitalising the public domain. This could partially be promoted by offering DIY new media initiatives greater scope. Joint projects in particular, in which groups of people used new media tools for the benefit of a shared interest, for opinion-sharing and organisational purposes, offered ideal opportunities for this. In the Netherlands, De Digitale Stad (Digital City, DDS), a network community founded in 1994 which boomed in the late 1990s, was pivotal in all this. Although DDS also won immense international admiration, it never enjoyed more than incidental support from Dutch public funding bodies, not even after political institutions used the network to circulate information to the in the meantime huge list of users. DDS was ultimately the victim of its own success; without a more commercially-honed revenue-generating model which, in those days, was not available, the facilitating structure had become unfeasible. E-culture Hard on the heels of the e-commerce boom and the popularity of e-trading, the new media culture was re-christened e-culture. After the notorious dotcom crash of spring 2000, however, this association became tarnished and vanished into the background. The e mainly referred to the electronic media that were the carriers of the new cultural forms that evolved around the new media. In policy circles, e-culture has remained a popular nomenclature but is rarely recognised or used as such in practice. Creative Industry The association of new media culture and the fast-developing market for new media applications in general has proved extremely fruitful. This far broader context opened up fertile ground, predominantly for designers and cultural producers of a range of media for a broader demographic (entertainment, edutainment, infotainment and related areas). The United Kingdom led the way by spotting the potential, at an early stage, of these creative industries as an engine for innovation and new and highly diversified markets. Designers had always worked on the interface of culture and industry but the new digital instruments and distribution channels meant that they occupied a decisive niche, designing a completely new industry where information, communication, encounter and entertainment seamlessly converge. The result is a thriving sector that is also fully embraced by policymakers. Culture 2.0 Because new media culture has always encompassed the cultural producers and, less rigidly, the production of cultural expression by individuals and non-professional communities, investigating opportunities for interconnecting and cross-pollinating the two appeared an obvious step. This was suggested by the development of the Internet into a broad multimedial medium, and by the emergence of a new generation of electronic consumer products from digital photo and video cameras, imaging software programmes for home computers to DIY Web design programmes. New Web services from photo galleries to video sites (YouTube and others) and the explosion of blogging (online diary entries with sound and image) have entirely changed the playing field for cultural participation. This phenomenon is generally referred to as Web 2.0. The active aspect (talking with, and talking back to, the media) is deemed the most innovative. Internet veterans may mumble that talking back is the Internet s core principle, so should be categorised under Web 0.1. As a concept, Culture 2.0 was suggested as means of investigating how the professional cultural sector could encourage the active participation of a wider public, also in professional cultural production and cultural heritage. The latter is given considerable stimulation by the rapid digitalisation of cultural heritage and its increasing accessibility on the Internet. This involves issues such as a more interactive exploration of the culture available, the co-creation of works by artists with individual culture consumers or communities, and the joint critique of expressions of culture, discussions about this (in groups and on the Internet, among others) and the creative reuse of existing works and materials. The latter is especially complicated. The creative reuse of 20 MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY E-CULTURE IN A TRANSFORMING MEDIA LANDSCAPE: ERIC KLUITENBERG 21 Towards a Functional Approach to New Media Culture

12 existing materials (images, music, software) actually promotes active participation in culture in the broadest sense. Copyright provisions and protecting the integrity of artistic productions explicitly discourage creative reuse, and not always without justification. An initiative like Creative Commons 4 therefore developed an alternative licensing system which makers and right-holders can use to freely give their materials for reuse (partially or wholly) for educational and non-profit purposes. However, the problem with this is that it only offers an answer for works the right-holder is aware of, and for which it is prepared to give freely for specific or all forms of reuse. With this, the bulk of the materials for this form of active cultural participation fall outside the scope of this paper. 4 See creativecommons.nl Based on concrete practical experiences with new media culture, it is clear that innovation is being fully explored in new forms of collaboration in the arts sector between science and research, and also in the intimate interlacing with the media industry in the creative industries sector. The educational dimension has found form in numerous projects and, in the meantime, has its own expertise centres and various practical projects. In a broad popular culture surrounding new media, an active kind of cultural participation and non-professional cultural production seem to have sprung up. In blogs and video, this has reached exponential heights, at least in terms of scale the number of registered blog-sites, worldwide, has now reached some 1 billion, far outstripping all expectations. E-participation E-participation is a policy framework closely related to the concept of culture 2.0 but which transcends the bounds of the cultural sector. In a strict sense, e-participation can be deemed the ways in which citizens can be more closely involved in government functioning at various levels, both local and national. More broadly, this context can be seen as the activities that can involve citizens in developing their own environment and society as a whole, naturally by using new media applications. It is in concept 5, introduced relatively recently, that the presumed productive role that new media culture might play in reinforcing the social quality of a highly technological society, will find a niche. In a sense, culture 2.0, community arts and e-participation are contiguous, and harmonisation and crosspollination are within arm s length. The gist of it From this confined panorama we can deduce that, in less than a decade, at least five successive policy contexts have evolved, setting out the new media culture. 6 In other words policy is renewed, astonishingly enough, every two years. Luis Soares would be scratching his head. One wonders whether ground level is able to keep pace with developments at policy level. Logo Economies of the Commons 5 See: eparticipatie.nl. 6 For the sake of clarity, I won t include the discussion about Public Domain 2.0 here, given that it was not the subject of a policy discussion, but was a discourse triggered at grassroots level. However, as regards professional cultural production and the professional public media offer, the opposite is happening. Where the explosive growth in the new media culture (including blogs, photo and video portals) may have been expected to have gone hand in hand with a wave of productions boasting high artistic and production values, the opposite seems to be the case; compared to the mid 1990s we are seeing a gradual decrease in innovative projects. Many of the artist-related new media productions are also occurring in an area that seems closely related to or that entirely overlap with dominant trends in the contemporary art world. With which the promise of a vital new art discipline seems, curiously enough, to have fizzled out while everything implied that, precisely because of the explosive growth in media culture across the board, this new art discipline was destined for great things. At the same time, the offer of professional public productions on the Internet is limited. This is partly restricted to incidental and sometimes large-scale but autonomous projects or is closely connected or even executed by traditional broadcasting authorities that originally stem from the public mass media landscape (broadcasting corporations and other public broadcasting companies). And the question here is, of course: why? It has certainly nothing to do with a dearth of ideas on the part of a young generation of artists, designers and media makers. And there is no question about the professionalism of standard public media producers. Nonetheless, there seems no sign of the emergence of a large-scale, innovative public new media culture, for which there seems no apparent answer. The problem may be one of economics rather than anything else. Despite five successive policy frameworks for new media culture and fast-paced developments, there is still no effective support, either in the Netherlands or abroad. In contrast to photography or film, new media culture does not have its own 22 MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY E-CULTURE IN A TRANSFORMING MEDIA LANDSCAPE: ERIC KLUITENBERG 23 Towards a Functional Approach to New Media Culture

13 production, distribution and financing structure that makes the structural development of a professional new media culture feasible. For young artists and designers graduating from the (highly diverse) training programmes, the choice is simple: a challenging journey reliant on many different sources of funding from temporary grants, project subsidies generally allocated for reasons of artistic content, national and international residencies and working in the industry to carve out a new media practice and oeuvre of their own. The alternative is a lucrative, potential-filled, high-paying career in the dynamic new media industry in a broad sense, or a safe haven in the established order of the contemporary arts. It is hardly surprising that almost none of the new generation opts for the nomadic existence of the new media culture-maker. For those wishing to undertake this daunting challenge, the lack of a clear financing structure for their own projects greatly hampers the development of a long-term personal practice. The innovative and idiosyncratic nature of their projects creates difficulties in connecting with the market and existing institutional arrangements. The subsequent frenetic activity that is part and parcel of this bricolage way of working compromises the quality of the work. Traditional broadcasting companies and media producers give new media little priority. Their work process, institutional structure and vested interests (in the form of advertising revenues for mass media distribution, which are the life blood of public broadcasting companies) remain founded in the long-established practice of the mass media (radio, television and print media). This practice will not change of its own volition but developments in the environment of the public (and commercial) media organisation compel change and shall do so increasingly in the near future. Focus on Functions In December 2004 the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) published the report Focus on Functions: Challenges for a future-proof media policy. 7 The Council expands on a future vision for the Dutch media, based on rapid technological changes in the media landscape and, in specific, the process and effects of media convergence discussed earlier. In this report, the Council concludes that the media policy s traditional focus on channels, on established media forms like radio and television, is not sufficient to formulate an adequate response to the challenges posed by rapid technological advances. In the report, the Council argues that this media policy should be based on media functions as more stable categories 8 for a future media policy. This raises the issue of the public functions of the media 7 Focus op Functies: uitdagingen voor een toekomstbestendig mediabeleid. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press/ WRR, Ibid., p. 77. E-participatie site, 9 Ibid., p Ibid., p. 77. system. For the government, the essence of the task of public broadcasting is to guarantee sufficient multiformity and quality of the range of information and communication offered to the public. The routes leading to this are many. The government does not need to set up or manage media infrastructures and production facilities itself. It can also step in to regulate and intervene in the event of market failure, as part of this task. However, as suggested earlier, the developments in the market that relate closely to the convergence process (increased horizontal and vertical integration in the media industry) are responsible for the grave disregard of this public broadcasting mandate if developments are left to the market. As a player, the government is largely absent from the arena of new media development and mostly leaves this task to the traditional broadcasting companies, which assign it low priority. The need for a shift of focus in the media policy from channels to functions is dealt with in depth by the Council in the report. Below, I quote the principal arguments they advance for this: Future-proof: as a result of convergence and competition, infrastructures and media are less instrumental in market failure and analysing market failure more on the level of the functions of media services and media producers seems logical. This does not mean that there is longer attention for the (market failure) of specific media and infrastructures. However, it does mean that, from the perspective of the desired functioning of the media landscape, important other forms and levels for the failure of media markets are a point of concern. 9 Relevance of values: a second point is that the validity of normative elements of media policy the values and public interests and objectives that spring from them are also increasingly unrelated to the type of infrastructure or medium. The normative elements and values that underpin media policy are primarily relevant to the functions the media landscape must fulfil and less to the functioning of infrastructures and media MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY E-CULTURE IN A TRANSFORMING MEDIA LANDSCAPE: ERIC KLUITENBERG 25 Towards a Functional Approach to New Media Culture

14 The values of independence, accessibility and multiformity are relevant, in principal, to all functions; however, the way they shape the weighing of the various interests, will differ depending on, for instance, news or entertainment programmes are at issue. Hybridisation: Thirdly, the developments of hybridisation and virtualisation which are explored in detail in paragraph 2.5, are vital in supporting a functions-directed approach. Advancing technological potential for reproducing and modifying forms of information have sparked off all kinds of new hybrid content (such as infotainment). Developments in journalism, consumer feedback, competition among providers, technological and socio-cultural developments, have given rise to motives and opportunities for a disorderly blend of functions and related content, which is not immediately apparent to the consumer. 11 In the light of the developments it has perceived, the Council considers the current media system and corresponding media policy no longer tenable or workable in future. The place, function and form of the public media system are particularly at issue here. After all, legislation is the most effective tool in managing the private media sector. Active government intervention is required where public media functions not necessarily shaped by the market, are involved. The Council s analysis also leads to a fundamental reassessment of the form and function of public broadcasting in the Netherlands in particular. In the last chapter, the Council formulates a number of possible modalities for the future structure of public media functions. The four modalities that it highlights vary from a minimal variant in which the government takes a solely regulatory role; a production fund model in which the government provides for news provision and guarantees funding for public media functions that can be given substance by civil society organisations that are not, in principle, part of the media system; a slimmed-down version of the BBC model adapted to the Dutch context in which the government facilitates one editorially independent central public media provider able to offer a programme on all current and future media channels; and, finally, a mixed and open system where the bedrock of broadcasting corporations remains largely intact, but the system is opened up to dialogues and partnerships with civil society organisations. 12 Based on the Council s analysis of the environment, it is a strong supporter of the production fund model but ultimately selects the fourth proposal of a mixed and open system that most closely reflects the current structure of the Dutch public media system. 11 Ibid., p See: Focus op Functies, enkele denkbare modaliteiten voor de vormgeving van de toekomstige publieke omroep, pp However, the production fund model must not be written off for the future and be deemed politically infeasible a priori because of its incompatibility with established financial and political interests. The production funds model seems far and away the most future proof. Moreover, this model presents considerable potential for the further development of a vital and high calibre public new media culture. The production funds model and a public content creation regulation As I observed earlier, the Netherlands currently has no adequate financing scheme for the creation of artistically highquality productions and socially relevant initiatives in the field of new media, while it is clear that a sizeable number of these productions and initiatives are not supported or, enabled by the market. In the last few years, the Interregeling, a funding scheme linking a number of the larger cultural funds, was involved in financing artistic productions, although the scheme was set to end in 2008, and its future is uncertain at the time of writing. The Interregeling appears to have received a huge number of funding applications for relevant projects, less than 25 percent of which were granted. This percentage and the trend towards a mounting number of project proposals underline just how large social need for such a scheme is. In Spring 2008, the Virtueel Platform also commented on the disappearance of the Interregeling and lack of an appropriate provision for the creation of public content in a letter to the Council for Culture and the Minister of Education, Culture and Science. In the letter, the Virtueel Platform proposes setting up a provision that focuses on a number of vital functions for the further development of the public new media culture in the Netherlands. The specific focus of the scheme would be on projects which: Have social, technological (hardware and software) and scientific pretentions and applications (such as new interface design, developing open source software); Are inter-disciplinary and cross-medial (projects that simultaneously work with different media and channels); Integrate a wide (commercial) public function (similar to projects supported by the Netherlands Film Fund s scheme to finance Dutch feature films). Are relatively small and/or short-term and not necessarily innovative but of significance to e-culture and new media. These focal points again highlight the interdisciplinary nature of new media culture and its interfaces with broader social and societal functions. Consequently, it would appear that this issue can no longer, and exclusively, be resolved within the cultural 26 MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY E-CULTURE IN A TRANSFORMING MEDIA LANDSCAPE: ERIC KLUITENBERG 27 Towards a Functional Approach to New Media Culture

15 sector in the narrow sense (the arts arena ) and its inherently curtailed resources. The production fund model identified by the WRR presents an obvious and very apt solution to this issue. This model separates public media functions from the specific media channels that distribute them and regards their intrinsic social and cultural value. The WRR feels that this presents great opportunities for involving civil society organisations, nongovernmental organisations, citizen initiatives and art and cultural organisations in the creation of the public media in the Netherlands. This not only democratises the structure and functioning of the public media system but creates a framework for direct social and cultural participation for many broad layers in Dutch society with which it also boosts social cohesion by directly involving people in these crucial forms of public communication. develop a critical understanding of the economic principles and mechanisms operating in the new media sector in a broad sense. Such a critical perspective enables making strategic and policy choices that enable these organisations to mobilise these economic mechanisms in achieving their original objective or recognising the limitations of these economic principles and pursing a realistic policy reflecting this. This works to realise the ultimate aim of continually enhancing the capacity and sustainability of these online initiatives. The WRR s model also affords the desired and requisite scale for the fertile development of a Dutch new media culture: one that combines social relevance and social commitment with high artistic value. And which, therefore, should be implemented as soon as possible. Flickr Commons Nationaal Archief, nationaalarchief/ Economic competence for the public and cultural sector Setting up a production fund for public and creative content creation in and around new media does not, however, resolve all the issues faced by current new media culture in the Netherlands. The players in the rapidly evolving professional arena must also take responsibility for giving this innovative form. If this is to be realised effectively, the economic competence of the public and cultural sector must be strengthened. This explicitly does not mean that cultural and social organisations have to adjust their working method and product to an abstract market logic or a (corporate) economic model borrowed from the commercial sector. Quite the opposite; social and cultural organisations active in the new media sector must 28 MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY E-CULTURE IN A TRANSFORMING MEDIA LANDSCAPE: ERIC KLUITENBERG 29 Towards a Functional Approach to New Media Culture

16 Between Heaven and Earth: On the Impact of Technology on Culture and the Arts Caroline Nevejan Quiet Now, Just Wait, All Will Be New (Stil maar, wacht maar, alles wordt nieuw) Heaven and Earth Quiet Now, Just Wait, All Will Be New Heaven and Earth (De hemel en de aarde, stil maar, wacht maar, alles wordt nieuw de hemel en de aarde) Huub Oosterhuis We sang this song in church in the 1960s. It was a song that always made me feel happy, gave me confidence and a sense of space. This song told me I should wait patiently, that renewal would come of its own accord. Renewal sung to that tune sounded like spring approaching, not yet visible in the cold of winter. When Virtueel Platform asked me to describe the current situation in the wider cultural sector from the perspective of e-culture, I was reminded of this song and its message of faith in the future. And I realised that developments in digital culture, global capitalism and the climate of crisis have made such lyrics almost impossible. Do children still sing this song? And how can we make it possible for children to sing such songs of faith in the future? Caroline Nevejan is a researcher and designer with a focus on the implications of technology on society. She is a member of the Dutch National Council for Culture and the Arts. Currently Nevejan pursues this research with the Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems group of the Free University in Amsterdam. She is also research fellow with PrimaVera, which is part of the Amsterdam Business School. Nevejan was the producer of numerous international conferences, member of staff of the musical venue Paradiso, co-founder of the Waag Society, director of research and development of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, research associate of Performing Arts Labs (UK). And was deeply involved with the Doors of Perception network. The heaven and earth in which culture exists and develops has changed dramatically over the last decade. Music, dance, theatre, art, libraries, the media, archives, literature, film and architecture come about and exist in an environment that is rapidly altered by digitisation. These changes influence every discipline and sector in its own way. Children come into contact with and are affected by the culture around them in ways that have radically changed. Here I will discuss a number of trends that are consequences of these developments: shifts in views of identity, changes to the roles of the amateur and the professional, shifts from management and control to guidance and inspiration, and changes to cultural participation. I will then briefly sketch out current trends in a number of arts disciplines and parts of the cultural sector. New views of identity The world s population has doubled in the years since my birth and more than half of these people live in cities. Information from around the globe can be collected on a vast scale and used by people all over the world. Millions of people travel by air, sea and land at great speed. We can see and talk to people live in other parts of the world. We can even see our planet live from outer space. Microscopes, scans and other medical technologies have given us an internal view of our bodies, we can see babies before they are born. Above all, the technologies that make this knowledge and these images of the world possible are accessible to millions of people. Old tales and new stories merge together disseminating a new imagination around the world. And this has changed us. If you have ever been in the mountains and looked down into the valley where you are staying, you will never forget that new perspective. Equally, humankind has created new views of its existence which have changed ideas of identity. How much and which history do people need? How many streams of information can a person cope with at any one time? How much time can a person mentally spend somewhere else while still continuing to function normally in his or her own environment? How much interaction is healthy? Where and how do people want to act and when should we let a machine take over? What dramatic developments are recognised by new people and what speed and rhythm are necessary for this to happen? Will a new aesthetic accompany each new phase of technological progress and what will it look like? If everyone has access to everything, will everyone become the same? How do we recognise difference and how do we deal with difference? Or am I exaggerating: Are people today the same as people used to be? They re born, grow up, fall in love, work, accumulate all kinds of material and immaterial stuff, have children, die. 30 MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH: CAROLINE NEVEJAN 31 On the Impact of Technology on Culture and the Arts

17 Digital technology changes very quickly and at the same time has a profound effect on our daily lives. Whether in terms of maintaining an archive, designing a game, or developing new journalistic formulas there is confusion about the current state of affairs because even the near future presents enormous uncertainty. What would happen, for instance, if the music industry were to be more influenced by intuitive emotions than rational arguments? And the same voices were always heard through this intuitive feeling. An almost unbridled interest in new possibilities is at odds with the profound understanding that that which exists now should be protected. We can put everything on the Internet and learn all we want to there. But, says another voice, although you can find a lot on the Internet, you cannot find wisdom. In many scientific forums the question is being asked as to whether the cognitive development of people growing up in this new media landscape is different from before. Some stress that children growing up in an urban media environment today are able to handle rapid and complex situations. But, says another voice, new children also need a context in which they can blossom through love and trust, where they can develop the resilience to experience processes and learn to read and concentrate. become a centre for knowledge production by facilitating a network of amateurs and professionals. The museum in Gouda (known as museumgouda) for instance, has an exceptional collection of Gouds Plateel (painted earthenware that looks like porcelain). Because the people of Gouda worked in the factories that produced this earthenware at the beginning of the last century, many pieces have remained in local families. The museum has started documenting a network around this collection, which has deepened the knowledge about the earthenware and has actually increased the size of the collection. Through this project the museum has become the director of a structural collaboration between a number of social institutions in Gouda, including the library. New views of identity generate great opportunities and new tensions: between generations, between different communities living in the same place. The relationship with people who live elsewhere has also changed. The confusion between how people experience each other in the real world, how this resonates with images from the media, and how this is understood when viewed from different religious and historical contexts, is in many situations both tangible and a major source of conflict. At the same time, millions of people are in everyday contact with people who are very different from them and/or who live far away. This has never before been possible. In the heaven and earth of today a new human identity is emerging. How we experience time and place has changed, the way in which people interact has changed, and their relationships with people they know and people they don t know has changed. The professional and the amateur Another great change is underway that relates to how we view our identity. A tension has arisen between the amateur and the professional because (the role of intermediaries in) the professional environment, in particular, has changed. Record companies occupy a different position, now that professional musicians and amateurs are able to sell their own work worldwide and find each other on the many Internet platforms. The museum, which was where knowledge was exhibited, can now Decorative vase with thistles. Gouda pottery ( plateel ) factory Zuid-Holland plc, circa , model no (Model from Gouda pottery factory Rozenburg plc, model 136) inv.no The word amateur is derived directly from the Latin amator lover, from the Latin amare to love. Professional comes from the Latin for profession professio(n-), which comes from the Latin profiteri ( declare publicly ). The difference between amateur and professional therefore appears historically to lie in the different domains in which people act: the amateur in the private domain and the professional in the public. With the arrival of large Internet platforms and the many Web 2.0 applications it would seem that the realms of action for both professionals and the amateurs are shifting. While amateurs now publish in public en masse, professional life is increasingly being played out within protected intranet environments. People s keenness to share information and knowledge in the public domain means the distinction between the amateur and 32 MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH: CAROLINE NEVEJAN 33 On the Impact of Technology on Culture and the Arts

18 professional contribution can no longer be made on the basis of public claims to knowledge or information. With the help of the Internet, amateurs have entered the realm of the professional in huge numbers and the distinction between the one and the other appears, in public, to be primarily determined by context. An important side-effect of this new field of tension is that the question of how something came about and how one may identify quality has become imperative. Samples of work by other people are used in digital montages of images and sound. In these montages the originals and the context in which they appear are changed. Here, too, different voices can be heard. Some argue that the montage is a new work, while others argue that the quality is in fact derived from the work of the makers of the original material. However, it appears that millions of people, including many artists, consider it normal to want to use someone else s material without feeling they are stealing from them. It feels just like learning to sing a song. Someone sings a song and if I also learn to sing it we can sing together and have a lot of fun. People grow up in an environment in which culture plays a major role and, as in nature, people have a natural sense of being allowed to use elements from this environment. The sharing economy, as Lawrence Lessig has described this phenomenon, seems to be much larger and more powerful than expected. However, the sharing economy is at odds with the current economy where property, including intellectual property, is the driving force behind economic and judicial dynamics. Yet it would also seem that copyright does not get in the way of people downloading music. It also seems that millions of authors now publish in the public domain without claiming copyright. An important aspect of this is that certain conditions of trust are met, even though such trust usually arises because a platform is used by many rather than because a legally documented copyright protects it. However, this does not detract from the fact that an author, whether amateur or professional, feels the need to provide his or her work with a signature, while at the same time freely using the work of others. After all, culture has become a major part of urban nature for more than half the world s population. People like to be able to touch and use their own environments. However, the enormous scale and scope of the Internet means the visibility and usability of the products changes at such a fast rate that we are looking for a new feeling, view and conclusion of what the rights of the author are and what right someone else has who want to use the same material, because it is in their environment. 1 The question of quality in the work of the professional and the work of the amateur is also up for discussion. This social dynamic leads to complex situations that need to be resolved on a daily basis. 1 Fair use, copyright, copyleft and creative commons aim to protect the intellectual copyright of the author and to organise transactions between authors. The question remains as to whether this is possible and/or desirable. European research is currently being carried out at the London School of Economics into transferring the burden of proof: everyone may use everything, except another person s name. So, I may quote Michael Jackson but, without his explicit permission, I may not state that it is he I am quoting. Author s rights in this example are minimised up to the point of being able to defend one s reputation. Managing and guidance Whenever the question is asked about how a person s identity develops, the question also arises about the environment the person needs. A complex question, especially when one takes into account that developments in our time have no clear intention. There is no masterplan, rather, a dynamic has arisen that is fed by what many people do and for which no one is ultimately responsible. Moreover, major commercial interests play a part in this dynamic. These interests, which focus on short-term financial profit, are far from always visible, but they do profoundly alter the social structure of global society in the long term. Consequently, the question of the essence of the quality of society becomes more imperative. How should the market for the commercial production of culture be organised to enable global diversity to survive? How can we ensure that when people share their information and knowledge it isn t abused? What culture will the people of tomorrow need in order to live together? What knowledge and creativity can people share and when is it necessary to earn money? How much culture can we effortlessly bear? How large and expensive may an artwork be? And how can the Dutch government stimulate and protect Dutch culture and its local cultures within this dynamic? Traces of our history do not necessarily need to be preserved at great cost, but if the monuments and archives cannot be visited, people cannot develop a sense of history. Libraries that are prevented from making sources and resources accessible, because they are increasingly being confronted with copyright obstacles or costly thresholds, see the ground beneath them being eroded. And then, the view that what is no longer used no longer has value conflicts with the view that an exceptional archive should be preserved because one day someone will take pleasure from it. The Dutch film sector needs to be protected because it is has value for Dutch culture, but if that sector does not make it commercially, where does the limit lie for how much public money s/he may receive? From this perspective, art and culture as an instrument is diametrically opposed to art and culture as a value in itself, even though both perspectives of art and culture are perfectly able to supplement each other and while respecting both the artist and art-lover. It should be clear by now that these questions are complex and that there are no straightforward answers. In addition to this, the technologies, which are only understood by a few, are constantly changing, dominated by frequently invisible financial interests, and even large projects frequently go belly-up. Nonetheless, the question of quality arises at all levels, including in daily management situations and policy-making environments where there is seldom time to go into things in more depth. Every sector and every industry has to con- 34 MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH: CAROLINE NEVEJAN 35 On the Impact of Technology on Culture and the Arts

19 stantly make decisions about what is necessary, where investment should be made, what should be legally protected, how much space amateurs and professionals get to make their own contribution, and how desirable pre-agreed compliance and action is. In our rapidly mediatising society it is difficult in some sectors to predict where developments are leading, and the relationship between policy and decision is comparable to that of a farmer sowing seeds and hoping for good weather. Daring to take responsibility in complex situations that one has no control over is difficult, but also unavoidable. The question of how personal responsibility relates to the dynamic of the collective is in many situations unclear. That the issues of the day hold sway is born out by the many news reports which put the responsibility of administrators up for discussion. True leadership, a major theme in management circles, requires a personal integrity and responsibility which is formed and develops independently of the issues of the day. This rapidly changing landscape requires new forms of governance and organisation models to guide both the market, the public domain and the arts in and towards good a relationship. Management and control create reliability and responsibility, but can also lead to fossilisation and a lack of insight into what is actually going on. Good guidance and a healthy dose of inspiration nurture healthy, enterprising cultures, but they become vulnerable and short-lived when they lack a solid judicial and financial infrastructure. In terms of management style, a huge difference has begun to arise between the old and the new styles of management. The new style balances between the dynamic sketched out above moving from control to guidance making mistakes, but also booking successes. The old style consolidates and tries primarily to rescue whatever can be rescued, is amazed by what is going on in the world, and shuts itself off. More and more people are realising that information and communication technologies not only increase profit and efficiency, but can also make a very real contribution to the quality of the daily lives of many users and non-users. It is amazing that we can be in contact with people on the other side of the world, that we can hear music from all corners of the globe without ever going there, that we can share images and compose together, that archives are available online and that we can order library books from home, that artists can publish their own work, that the public can find it with three clicks of the mouse, that we can look up information and check facts as we have never been able to before. Fundamental processes in the different value chains are now shifting from product to service design. The museum directs a network in order to be able to exhibit things. The musician publishes online in order to be able to play live. The filters of the news are dependent on the potential viewers. In this shift from product to service design, people have become the products. This is why people are counted, followed and made quantifiable. Bold direction is needed; there are major opportunities, but hard-won freedoms are at stake. Major commercial and political interests with a structural lack of transparency are currently at liberty to do almost whatever they want to. Yet few people understand the implications of current technological developments. Bold direction needs the support of a strong organisational structre supported by an adequate judicial and financial infrastructure to which technological platforms also commit themselves. Now and in the coming years, great alertness and vigour is needed because a reliable global environment could be built in the next few decades. It has become apparent over the last ten years what is possible, and perhaps impossible, with current technologies. The so-called innovation space has filled itself up. It is now time to dare to find out what is happening, with all the rationality and intuition available to us. Only then will it be possible for children in 2058 to sing together Heaven and Earth Quiet Now, Just Wait, All Will Be New Heaven and Earth (Stil maar, wacht maar, alles wordt nieuw de hemel en de aarde, stil maar, wacht maar, alles wordt nieuw de hemel en de aarde) without first having to pay royalties to Huub Oosterhuis, or perhaps being banned from visiting Indonesia because it can be digitally proven that they once sung a Christian song. (In fact I would like to finish this first section with a Peanuts cartoon that I saw in the International Herald Tribune on Monday 20 October, But, because this is going to be published, I can t for reasons of copyright. In this cartoon Charlie Brown lies in bed with Snoopy lying on his tummy. He mumbles a bit before falling asleep Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask, Can my generation look to the future with hope? In the next image he turns over, while Snoopy looks at him and says: Then, out of the dark, a voice comes to me that says: Why sure...well, I mean...that is...it sort of depends...i mean...if...when... who...we...and... ) 36 MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH: CAROLINE NEVEJAN 37 On the Impact of Technology on Culture and the Arts

20 Flyer Images for the Future, Brief Impression of E-culture Trends in Art and Culture Music: Technological changes have had a major impact on the music industry. Recording and editing equipment have become much cheaper and better quality. The entire value chain in the popmusic industry has been turned on its head: consumers download music and artists have become their own producers with the help of the Internet and, interestingly, it has been proven that more people go to live concerts in this digital age. Apparently the experience of attending a live concert is of a completely different order. On the Internet, amateurs and professional seem to mix effortlessly; both have access to the public domain. However, the record companies had their heads in the sand for a long time. Consequently they have lost a lot of ground which they are now trying to regain through initiatives like itunes. Classical and modern music would seem to be becoming increasingly vulnerable due to the ubiquitous presence of pop music. In fact, the number of visitors has stabilised over the last ten years. That this is primarily an older public may be just as much an advantage as a disadvantage. The decline in interest for music education both in regular schools and music schools is a major problem. Learning an instrument takes time. Developing talent, therefore, starts at a young age. Talent that is not spotted at a young age cannot catch up later. A good music education is vital for introducing young people to all kinds of music so that they also know what a symphony orchestra sounds like, as well as pop. Luckily there are more and more initiatives aimed at bringing young people into contact with less well-known music, such as the New Year s Concert by the Netherlands Wind Ensemble (Nederlands Blazers Ensemble), which is broadcast every year on Dutch television. Film: In film, digital technology has greatly affected the production process and distribution, as well as the filming process. In terms of filming and editing equipment, and in the areas of animation and special effects animation, digital technology has vastly expanded the possibilities available. Equipment has become extremely accessible to amateurs and films shot by amateurs at the site of major disasters often hit the world s TV news programmes. Despite the millions of home 38 MAPPING E-CULTURE ESSAY BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH: CAROLINE NEVEJAN 39 On the Impact of Technology on Culture and the Arts