Cloud Culture: The Promise and the Threat ( Edge.org article by Charles Leadbeater)
yarapavan
consultant, representing the European view. He was commissioned by
Counterpoint, the think tank of the British Council to write a
position paper entitled "Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural
relations" (publication by the British Council on February 8th). The
Edge.org essay is adapted from that document.
And this essay contains one of the lucid explanations on what clouds
could do. Some excerpts:
<quote>
As computing becomes a utility it will power many more devices, many
of them with no user interface, more of them mobile and handheld. The
cloud should also encourage collaboration. Different people, using
different devices should be able to access the same documents and
resources more easily. Work on shared projects will become easier,
especially as collaboration software and web video conferencing
becomes easier to use. This should allow far more of what Hal Varian,
Google's chief economist calls “combinatorial innovation” as
developers mash-up data from different sources, as many people are
doing already with Google maps. It is more sensible not to think of
the cloud but clouds taking different shapes and forms.
</quote>
On the clouds of possible:
<quote>
Clouds will be either open or closed. Bechtel's cloud is a private,
closed and commercial cloud for the use of its employees. Twitter is
nominally a commercial cloud but it is very open to join. Wikipedia is
both social and open. The cloud of online activity around the Muslim
Brotherhood is social but closed. Governments are creating both open
and closed clouds. The open data movement is forcing governments to be
more open with data and to allow social entrepreneurs and citizens to
reuse it. Meanwhile governments are also creating large closed clouds
of data for intelligence and security purposes.
</quote>
On the impact of clouds on culture:
<quote>
The growth of the digital cloud will change culture, creativity and
the relationship between them. Digital stores of data in the cloud,
ubiquitous broadband, new search technologies, access through multiple
devices — should make more culture, more available than ever before to
more people. We are also living through a massive proliferation of
expressive capacity to add to and remix culture with cheaper, more
powerful tools for making music and films, taking and showing images,
drawing up designs and games. That is why we are in the midst of a
series of cultural eruptions that are throwing up vast clouds of new
Pro-Am culture. For some these clouds are beautiful and inspiring.
Others believe cloud culture will drop the equivalent of acid rain.
Sometimes there will be mushroom clouds, huge explosions of activity,
around crises like Iran and Haiti.
</quote>
On the Cloud Culture Equation
More cultural heritage stored in digital form + More accessible to
more people +
People better equipped with more tools to add creatively to the
collection
=
Exponential growth in mass cultural expression
=
Cloud Culture.
...A third threat comes from the new media moguls, the cloud
capitalists: Facebook, Apple, Google, Salesforce, Twitter, who will
seek to make money by creating and managing clouds for us.
</quote>
Alejandro Espinoza
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