But because, as the programme pointed out, new media is always analysed through the lens of old media, this leads to much wailing and gnashing of teeth:

• because people don’t pore over the same source for several hours, as they do with a book, the Web cannot allow the same degree of reflection and depth of thought.
• because there is no training, code of professional ethics and industry guidelines, a blog cannot be as reliable as a newspaper.
• because the production was done with zero investment over a very short period of time, this online video cannot have the same quality as a feature film.
• if your doctor spent their research time skimming abstracts rather than reading a learned journal, you’d probably feel quite anxious.

These are straw men proposals, though, based on choices and comparisons that aren’t necessary. When you start forgetting about biased comparisons and look at the value of knowledge creation and discovery on the Web on its own terms, then it starts to look a lot better. For example, it fosters the spirit of enquiry; it gives people access to creative and publication tools for free; it creates communities of learning; it teaches people to question sources; it allows easy access to contrasting opinions; fosters new and non-partisan links between diverse people; and collaborative problem-solving is built-in.

I’m fine with all that. It’s great.

I also agree that our valuation of culture needs to re-calculated to understand what is added by collaboration. The Great British Sandwich and One and Other are online and offline works co-ordinated through the Web and created by thousands, but the lack of auteur confuses establishment reactions to the oeuvre *cough*.

But. The problem comes for people who work as creatives in some respect: artists, writers, photographers and musicians. (It’s also of concern if you think books, music albums and newspapers etc. have intrinsic value and ought to have a place in the world). If modern audiences only pay attention to content for seconds in the context of a continual flow, then your chances of those people stopping to pay is zero. If you try to insist, then you’re likely to simply be removed from those readers’ river of information: your content ends up in its own isolated oxbow lake as the river seeks only the most efficient route to flow freely and follow its gravity.

So perhaps the ultimate answer is to give up on the idea of the creative making a living from the sweat of their brain. To instead embrace the exciting and new opportunities of the creative cloud where every work is ultimately collaborative in some respect. William Owen wrote an interesting blog post last week in which he suggested that the advent of cloud collaboration spells the death of the author:

We no longer generate individual work or own discrete cultural artifacts – this blog post might even attract a comment or two that isn’t mine (go on). For people with an old media sensibility its hard to let go of auteur theory and practice: our sense of self is wrapped up in what we make ourselves and attach our name to, and in the myth of individual genius that we learn at our mother’s knee. What we lose in individual recognition, though, we gain in a connected sense of self and a realistic understanding of the process of making as public and collaborative, not private.  This is how Leadbetter’s and Eshun’s ideas come together as a new set of relationships between individuals and cultural artifacts and the society of makers (made by many).

Owen’s thoughtful post does seem indicative of the sort of change that’s taking place and the sort of mental change that – over the next couple of generations – may well take hold. I do worry, though, about the idea of ‘responsibility’ in this arena, though. I wonder whether culture can possibly be created without responsibility. Others have talked about the necessity of curation to creating something that actually has any value – whether it be the editor of LOLCATS or Comment is Free. They’re another group of people that need to get paid, but whose value won’t necessarily be recognised by feeders from the stream.

Going back to Cultural Studies, the idea of the creative as a special sort of person producing a special category of goods has a very short and specific history that arguably began with Wordsworth and began to end with Warhol. As Raymond Williams observes in Keywords (1976), ‘Art’ referred to any kind of skill, from carpentry to angling, between the C13th and the C16th, when it started to acquire the distinct types of specialisation it has had since, with those becoming mainstream by the C19th. He suggests that division between ability in the creative arts and other kinds of skill is a consequence of their devaluation in the industrial revolution. It was:

…related both to changes in the practical division of labour and to fundamental changes in practical definitions of the purposes of the exercise of skill. It can be primarily related to the changes inherent in capitalist commodity production, with its specialisation and reduction of use to exchange values. There was a consequent defensive specialisation of certain skills and purposes to the Arts or the humanities where forms of general use and intention which were not determined by immediate exchange could be at least conceptually abstracted.

In other words, the idea of creativity as a livelihood has required a form of special pleading for 200 years. With cloud culture, as further changes in production and distribution dramatically make the exchange value of many of these forms of specialised and practised skill even lower, these divisions cease to carry much weight.

All rather bleak for me! But thinking of web users as (increasingly) people living their lives in a stream has also made me think that Media and the Arts are looking in the wrong places for solutions. Paywalls and micropayments cannot work for these undemanding yet voracious audiences because they work against the culture of the Internet. Advertising, by its nature is interruptive and attempts to hijack the flow of the stream: it won’t be effective. Taxes on ISPs to support struggling journalists and musicians seem incredibly unjust: the argument that they should get a proper job seems insurmountable. More opaque funding for public creative projects — from statues to concerts and local newspapers — feels better, but again smacks of special pleading and artificial markets. Maybe the real answer does lie in creatives accepting that the market value, for now, of what they would ideally like to do is zero. I have been thinking about some ways out, but this post is already too long.

[See Jaron Lanier’s interview in this morning’s Observer for some more on all this, and the consequences. I’m not especially impressed by his solutions, though.]

picture credit: rachel_thecat and unknown

Late December and early January see the seasonal appearance of a popular type of blog post: ‘My Predictions for [Next Year]’. They’re a great stock-in-trade because you can say whatever you like and nobody can prove you wrong until the end of the following year, by which time everyone’s forgotten. I’ve written a couple in the past, but refrained this year, leaving the task to wiser heads than mine.

Heads such as those at analyst firm Gartner, which has just produced its own variation on the theme:  Key Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2010 and Beyond. Since they get paid thousands of pounds by businesses to be correct about the future, Gartner doesn’t offer many 12-month predictions, with several stretching to the six-year level – even high-paying subscribers won’t remember by 2015. ;-)

Anyway, the bold bits are from the press release. The regular text is my attempt at a quip or reaction.

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.

Quite a lot of businesses own very few IT assets right now. The phone is still the key communications tool for plenty of bricks-and-mortar firms. But what Gartner is talking about is the Cloud, of course, or – more prosaically – leasing arrangements. I’m not entirely sure I buy this. I can see that there will be fewer server rooms, more leasing and more thin devices, but no IT assets is quite a stretch. As I understand it, most leased IT at present is basically the big printers that have come to replace photocopiers, which were always leased anyway.

By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization.

A safer bet here, I think – with 350mn subscribers already, Facebook could already make this claim to some extent. But Gartner is bolder than this looks – it means all web socialisation. That other social networks and websites will have to offer Facebook integration to survive. This goes against the common wisdom that the incumbent dominant social network will eventually go the way of Friendster, Six Degrees and Friends Reunited as fresher networks attract the restless young.

Nonetheless, I’m relatively happy with the suggestion that Facebook will remain a dominant force. I see more and more websites with Facebook Connect installed. I even installed a module allowing users to log into this site to make comments using their Facebook account. Albeit an open-standards model that will work with other OpenID providers.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out internationally, though. While Facebook dominates in English-speaking countries, there’s considerably more flux and variety elsewhere. Maybe Gartner meant “in the US”, though the text doesn’t say that.

Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.

Woah. That’s a big push – but remember they’ve got six years for it to happen or for us all to forget. There are a couple of problems with Internet marketing regulation: (1) it already is regulated. Companies have to operate to the same standards they do in offline dealings. (2) But it’s regulated by local laws.Suing a dodgy dealer in Timbuktu in a UK court is all very well, but you still won’t get that herbal vi-gr– you ordered. (3) Increasing local regulation tends to be unpopular because it puts local businesses at a disadvantage compared to those in Timbuktu.

By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology.

I can buy this. If anything, I think it will happen quicker. There are already 4bn mobile phones in use. The next iPhone is tipped to incorporate near-field communications. People change their phones at least every 18 months – so now everyone’s got at least a cameraphone with bluetooth. Chip-readers should surely become standard within two generations.

By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.

Pretty vague, but context here means the use of location, time, the accelerometer, near-field communications etc. So if I am walking into Tesco at six-o’clock, the phone loads an appropriate shopping portal that I can wave at the things I want to buy and reminds me to get washing powder, that sort of thing. And why not? Tesco has already got this sort of thing for desktops and dedicated appliances. If my mobile is four-generations better, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t have it there.

By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

As I’ve mentioned above, there are already 4bn mobile phones in circulation, versus about 1.5bn PCs. If those phones are two generations better, then they can probably do an OK job of rendering the web, maybe through micro-projectors and gesture recognition.

I’ll finish, though, with this video of mobile guru Tomi Ahonen about the next 4bn mobile users. One key point he makes is that the next 4bn are probably in developing nations and that they’ll still be using SMS and WAP for some time to come (he’s not very sanguine about the mobile web, full stop) – thus the biggest revenue opportunities for businesses aren’t the mobile web at all, but in far more down-to-earth, but universally usable applications.

photo credit: Panoramas