A need to know of now

UK thinktank Demos has just published a new report on collaborative culture, "Logging on: culture, participation and the web".

Here are some of the key points made:

• Digitisation has changed everything. It has created public expectations for on-demand, constantly available, individualised access to products. It has also challenged the assumptions of cultural sector professionals that their role is to oversee public access to culture in the sense that they act as gatekeepers to what is produced, what is shown and how it is interpreted. In the analogue world, the public was able to engage with culture on terms set by experts and professionals: content, pricing, format and timing were all decided by the producer. In a world of infinitely replicable and manipulable digital content, this no longer applies. The full implications of this for the cultural sector are not yet clear. Big business is worried and confused and is seeking to hang on to as many 'rights' as it can. Meanwhile private, public and third sector innovations from Amazon to the BBC to Wikipedia march inexorably on, and internet phenomena like Second Life and MySpace revolutionise the landscape in the space of months.
• No more than one in four UK households had internet access at the start of 2000. And, even if available, the web was accessed via painfully slow dial-up or ISDN connections and the nature and extent of online content was reflected in this. Websites were typically text-based, with little in the way of moving image or sound, and the early adopters of more complex web presences were penalised: people just could not access sites with flashy graphics. The internet was generally perceived as a passive resource for searching and retrieving information; few websites provided opportunities for interaction.
  
• Today, practically anyone in the UK who wishes to access the internet can do so [claims the report]. A crucial development has been the introduction and rapid widespread take-up of broadband, set off by BT's launch of its DSL (digital subscriber line) products in late 2000. The proportion of broadband subscribers then increased annually, and reached 72.6 percent by June 2006. Funded by the National Lottery via the People's Network programme, 80 percent of public libraries now have an broadband internet connection.
  
• Recent surveys have shown that people in the UK now spend more time on the web than watching TV. In particular new technologies, from SMS to gaming to web usage, have been rapidly adopted by young people. This move -- from watching TV, to gaming and the web -- is significant because it involves not just a change of media, but a shift from passivity to interactivity. Schoolchildren today are as attuned to IT as past generations were to blackboards, timetables and spelling tests. How, our children complete their education with skills and expectations based almost entirely on the digital age - a radical generational shift. By the age of 17, the average schoolchild in the UK will have spent more time in front of a screen that in school.
• There has also -- and perhaps most crucially -- been a distinct change in the past couple of of years towards more interactive and collaborative online content - often dubbed 'Web 2.0'. Since 2001, a mass of services facilitating user-generated content, information-sharing and social networking have been launched and have gained phenomenal popularity. For example, Wikipedia, a free content online encyclopaedia, was set up in January 2001 and currently has over five million entries in several languages. The peer-to-peer filesharing service Kazaa was set up in March 2001, the video sharing site YouTube in February 2005. Blogging has spread like wildfire -- in April 2007 Technorati was tracking over 75 million blogs. The social networking site MySpace, launched in July 2003, surpassed the milestone of 100 million accounts in August 2006.
  
• (Google) is often called ubiquitous, but there is more to it than reach. It is not so much that Google is everywhere we look ... it's more that it is the means by which we look, and that, so often when we do look, we look online. Google does something new. Just as it does with all that it covers, it opens the arts and culture to a whole new audience. As well as reaching new eyes, it also presents culture in a totally different and more participatory way. Through the self-ordering preferences of its users it manifests the power of public engagement and displays a barometer of public will. This is an important point. New web tools enable users collectively to express their preferences through their actions, without having to be asked.
  
• Social tagging ... allows the user to apply keywords to any item of online content. Then the content can be viewed from the perspective of the users, not just the creators of that content. The results can be syndicated as feeds or viewed for navigation purposes as 'tag clouds' where the most commonly used words appear larger than other words. These tag clouds are sometimes called 'folksonomies' (the opposite of rigid taxonomies) because they represent the diverse perspectives from which people view a piece of content.
• What we are seeing now are tools that build on and extend 'Web 2.0' trends:
• mashups: linking of feeds of feeds so that content continues to be combined and 'mashed up' in new ways
  
• small social networking sites: alongside or instead of large, global social networks, some may find it useful to keep social networks small. See Vox.
  
• linking the online and offline in new ways: linking physical products with online services is just one way that online and offline networks are joining up. It becomes possible to unleash the power of social networking among people who share a product or geographical location. An iPod is much more useful when coupled with the music searching and sharing activities of MySpace. An advocacy website like avaaz.org will send targeted messages to people based on their postcodes as well as their interests.

• New tools are emerging that encourage interactivity, connectedness and creativity. Rival conceptions of intellectual ownership are being used ad hoc by people to negotiate their own paths into the world of culture and creativity. Lawrence Lessig has recently described the battle between read-only and read-write on the web in his book, Free Culture. The first is where professionals and corporations own the copyright of culture and the public are allowed access to it at a price. Amazon and iTunes are examples of this way of working. Amazon will not list a publication unless it has a price tag; iTunes does not sell music, it rents it out in order to keep reaping continual rewards. Read-write is a freer and more open concept where people build their own culture. Examples here include MySpace, where people can post their own music files, and YouTube, which performs a similar role for the moving image. Both the commercial and open source models have been phenomenally successful and popular.

Another 'way in' to all this stuff is to watch this short film.