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等待您来回答HTTP/1.1 服务器太忙Digital Technology and Cultural Heritage Sites in the City of Tshwane (PDF Download Available)
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2.91Segarona Culture InstituteAbstractThis article examines the feasibility and sustainability of digital technology to promote cultural heritage sites in the City of Tshwane (CoT), South Africa. Post-Apartheid development imperatives compel the CoT to construct new cultural sites. Over time, the number of visitors to the places declined. The CoT introduced digital technology to collect and repackage information on some of the cultural edifices to add value to them. However, the absence of heritage/digital technology impact analysis and cultural policy in the CoT could compromise the program. The article recommends further introduction of important facilities and services in the sites to increase public interest.Discover the world's research14+ million members100+ million publications700k+ research projects
Digital Technology andCultural PolicyKieran Healy1University of ArizonaAugust 15, 20011Department of Sociology, Social Sciences Building 404, University of Arizona,Tucson AZ, 85721. Email at kjhealy@email.arizona.edu. A version of this paperwas presented at the Fifth Annual Summer Cultural Policy Meeting, Little Switzer-land, NC. Thanks to Paul DiMaggio and Steven Tepper for their comments. Pleasedo not cite or quote without permission.
AbstractThis paper reviews how digital technology, and the devices and broadbandnetworks associated with it (the Internet, for short), can be expected toaffect the ways in which books, music, the visual arts, libraries and archivedcultural heritage (cultural goods, for short) are produced, distributed andconsumed. The paper has four parts. First, I place the growth of the In-ternet in historical and comparative perspective. I argue that the UnitedStates is presently engaged in a regulatory effort similar in intent to thoseimposed on earlier communications revolutions. In this context, I outlinethe ways that the Internet can be expected to change how people produceand consume cultural goods. I distinguish between practices the technologymakes possible and practices likely to become established as typical for themajority of people. Second, I discuss some of the new arenas for culturalpolicy thrown up by the Internet. I argue that, just as it has bound manykinds of cultural content into a single medium, the Internet has tied togethera variety of regulatory issues and brought cultural policy into contact withareas of policy-making not normally associated with culture. Third, I fo-cus on the relationship between creativity, consumption and copyright law.Fourth, I describe a number of key conflicts over the Internet’s architectureand content. How these are resolved through policy choices will have im-portant consequences for how we consume and experience cultural goods ofall kinds in the future.
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 1introductionMy desktop computer has more processing power, memory and storage spacethan machines that ran the accounting and payroll departments of entirecorporations twenty years ago. This is an instance of Moore’s Law, thewell-known rule which says that, for a fixed amount of money, the amountof computer processing power you can buy doubles every 18 months or so.Moore’s law was formulated in 1965 and has held true since the early 1970s.It was one of the reasons that the futurists of thirty years ago were convincedthat digital technology would be a driving force for social change as the 21stcentury approached.Although the difference in processing power between a new pc and acomparably priced one from 1981 is enormous, this is not what really distin-guishes them. The key difference is that the older computer sat in a room by the new one can be connected around the clock to a global informationnetwork. Whereas any well-informed computer user in the early 1980s couldhave predicted how powerful computers were likely to be in 2001 in terms ofsheer speed, the rise of the Internet in the late 1990s took many people (notto mention companies and governments) by surprise. In the early 1990s,just before the sudden growth of the Web, the future of home computingwas supposed to be multimedia cd-roms. But beginning in 1995, from itsmodest, non-commercial origins in academic and state institutions, the In-ternet mushroomed into an open, heterogenous network of enormous scopeand variety. Technical advances in computing speed continued as expectedover the period, but the explosive growth rate of the Internet changed whatcomputing meant. For most users today, a computer without a connectionto the Internet seems hardly worth owning, no matter how powerful it is.As it expanded, the Web took on an economic, social and cultural lifeof its own. For a time, the economics of the Internet seemed to be break-ing most of the established rules of business growth and development. Thevolume of investment and speculation that surrounded Internet hardware,software and service companies was simply remarkable. The “Great ipoRush of 1998” saw dozens of start-ups sprout out of the ground with no
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 2products, no profits and huge net worth. Well-established Internet compa-nies — meaning ones that were more than two years old — found themselvesvalued as highly as some of the largest corporations in the world. A definingmoment of the boom came early in January of 1999, when Amazon’s totalstock market value rose to more than $30 billion, making it worth more onpaper than Texaco.1This investment boom happened, in part, because people were convincedthat the Internet was about to change how people did everything from com-parison shopping to concert going. Social commentary on the Internet par-alleled what was happening in the stock market. Predictions of revolution-ary change abounded, along with extravagant extrapolations of uncertaintrends, from utopian fantasies to Orwellian nightmares. Now that the dot-com boom has ended after four frenzied years, it should be easier to graspthe social and cultural changes brought about by digital communicationsand information technology.2In this paper, I examine the implications of the Internet for the produc-tion, distribution and consumption of cultural and expressive goods, broadlydefined. By this I mean literature, music, visual and performance arts, li-braries, archives, and the like. The rise of the Internet has affected manyareas of life. It has allowed the growth of new ways to associate with others,new ways to work and do business, new ways to be politically active, andso on.3So why focus on cultural goods? It turns out that one of the mainattractions of the Internet to ordinary users is its ability to deliver contentover the network quickly and at zero cost. Besides news stories, weatherreports and sports scores, cultural are much in demand. Music (in the form1Doreen Carvajal, “Amazon Surge May Reflect The New Math Of the Internet”,The New York Times January 11 (1999); Economist, “When the bubble bursts”, TheEconomist January 28th (1999).2For the rest of the paper when I refer to “the Internet” or “the Web” it should betaken to refer not only to the network itself but also to the panoply of digital technologiesand gadgets centered around it, like wireless networking, mp3players, pdas, eBooks andso on. These things are interesting (and challenging in the context of cultural policy)mainly because they can tie themselves to or take advantage of services provided throughthe wider network.3For a wide-ranging review of the Internet’s social impact, see Paul DiMaggio et al.,“Social Implications of the Internet”, Annual Review of Sociology (Forthcoming).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 3of mp3files) has been the most visibly exchanged item so far. But videois not too far off, with literature, images of all kinds and archival materialsalso very common. In the past year or so, it has become obvious that the In-ternet’s technical capacity to move these goods around does not mesh easilywith established legal practice, government policy or commercial interests.This makes cultural goods interesting and important. Shopping onlinemay be more convenient than going to the mall, but the underlying trans-action is the same. Running a project using email and versioning softwaremay allow a manager to be more efficient, but the company need not changeits business model. But being able to search for and freely download a novel,a few hours of music, or an entire movie is both immediately appealing tomany people and completely incompatible with how many corporations andartists now make their money. So although the Internet’s effects are mani-fold, it is in the sphere of cultural goods that digital technology is puttingthe most pressure on established ways of doing things. The potential forchange is very great here, as is the resistance of entrenched parties.It is therefore time to think carefully about the relationship betweentechnical change and the social organization of cultural production. It is nolonger plausible to think that the Internet will sweep away existing institu-tions simply by virtue of its technical characteristics, or that it will escapepolitical and legal regulation because of its novelty. At the same time, stan-dard ways of making, selling and consuming books, music or art cannot goon as if the Internet did not exist. Neither can those involved in these ar-eas simply assimilate the new medium without changing themselves. Thismeans that the important issue is not whether technology will overwhelm us(or vice versa) but how the new technologies and existing institutions willinfluence one another. Rather than expecting the future to inevitably rollover us, we should think about how policy makers might help reshape thesocial organization of cultural goods.The technological changes of the last few years helped bring into focuscentral concerns in the field of cultural policy. Discussions of cultural pol-icy in the United States have sometimes been quite narrowly focused (e.g.,whether and how the government should fund the arts) or reflexive (e.g.,
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 4whether there is such a thing as cultural policy at all). The rise of theInternet has done a great deal to bring questions of cultural policy to theforefront of public discourse. How will literature, music and film be pro-duced and made available to people? How will people’s tastes change astheir choices do? How accessible will cultural goods be, and how profitable?Will a bountiful cultural heritage, presently stored in museums, libraries andarchives, be made more easily available to a much wider audience, or willit come under tight corporate control? How much of our common heritagewill be locked away under copyright restrictions, and how will that affect theproduction of culture? How much censorship will be built into the system?How will local and national cultures be changed?Questions proliferate. The general point is that cultural consumptionis already a large part of what the Internet is used for. The ways thetechnology is built and regulated will have an immediate and deep impacton how people read, listen, view and learn. The Internet binds all kinds ofcontent together in a common digital medium, which means that historicallyseparate activities and organizations now face similar policy issues aboutaudiences, access, archiving, censorship, distribution, property, and pricing.As it gets built, the digital communications network undergirding theseprocesses will have assumptions and regulations about all of them built intoits code.4The paper is divided into four parts. First, I put the growth of theInternet in historical and theoretical context. I show how its trajectory andimpact resemble the effects of previous communications revolutions in manyways, even though its potential scope is wider in the long run. The historicallessons are that new technologies are adapted to social uses in complex ways,and that the myths that grow up around new technologies in their early daysare not good guides to their long-run impact. With this historical contextin mind, I discuss some of the ways that the Internet is changing the worldof cultural goods. Second, I argue that the concerns of cultural policy haveexpanded as a consequence of the new technologies. I lay out a number ofthese new policy areas. Third, I describe how questions of authorship and4Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 5copyright raise serious issues in almost every area of cultural policy. Fourth,I pick out some specific substantive tensions in the area of cultural policythat are likely to persist and demand attention for the foreseeable future.technology and social changeIn this section I compare the growth of the Internet to previous communica-tions revolutions, with an eye to highlighting their similarities. I show howcommon patterns of development appear across cases. Typically, as a com-munications technology emerges, people find it mysterious. Those who usethe new technology find themselves objects of attention from a curious pub-lic. Later, stable conventions of use grow up in the wider population, thoughthe underlying organization of the technology may still be quite fluid. Thenserious efforts at regulation begin. Specific outcomes vary with regard topricing, business structure, typical use, network openness, and so on. In thecase of the Internet, we are quickly moving into a regulatory phase whereserious choices about the architecture of the network will be made.How big a revolution?How much has the Internet affected people’s lives in the few years sinceit began to grow beyond its original bounds? It is undeniable that it hasalready changed the way many people communicate with each other, howthey organize their lives, how they work, how they consume. In 1995 onlythree percent of Americans had ever used the Internet.5Five years later,about 83 million Americans were regularly online, 56 million of whom usedthe net to shop.6Such rapid change at the level of individual users should be placed inhistorical and social context. Histories of the Internet show that it had along incubation period before bursting on the world. The Internet grew5Pew Research Center for People & the Press, Technology in the American Household,1995 hURL: www.people-press.org/tech.htmi– visited on April 9th 2001.6IntelliQuest, IntelliQuest study shows 83 million U.S. internet users and 56 mil liononline shoppers, 1999 hURL: /press/release78.htmi– visited on April9th 2001.
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 6up as a fortuitous and unexpected consequence of government-sponsoredresearch, where the researchers were left more or less to themselves for cru-cial periods.7The seeds of its growth were planted in universities and theDefense Department in the 1950’s, and by the late 1970’s nearly all of thecore technical ideas were in place. Looking back even further, the rise ofthe Internet can be place in the context of ongoing trends in American soci-ety. Economic historians have traced the growth of distributed informationand communications networks in the U.S. back to the founding of the PostOffice.8On this view, the U.S. has been an information society for a verylong time, and processes that might seem unique to the Internet have beenat work in other communications networks (such as those constituted bythe postal service, railroads, telegraph and radio) over the past 150 yearsor so. Research like this is a good antidote to futuristic hype. It does notdismiss the Internet’s impact, but does show that the Web does not markan unprecedented rupture with the past.It took a little longer than expected for the promised economic benefits ofdigital technology to register in standard measures. Economists pointed outthat the rise of computers in the workplace did not seem to have any impacton productivity statistics.9For most of the 1990s, there was no measurablemacro-economic of investment in information technology on productivity,even though businesses had been spending money on computers and com-munications for some time. This non-finding was puzzling given all the talkof an information society. But recent research has found computers to beresponsible for an increasingly large percentage of productivity growth sincethe 1980s.10 Economically, it looks increasingly as though the spread of com-7Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); KatieHafner and Matthew Lyon, Where wizards stay up late: the origins of the Internet, (NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1996).8Alfred D. Chandler and James W. Cortada, eds., A Nation Transformed by Informa-tion, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).9Erik Brynjolfsson, “The Productivity Paradox of Information Technology”, Commu-nications of the ACM 36 (1993).10Stephen D. Oliner and Daniel E. Sichel, “The Resurgence of Growth in the Late1990s: Is Information Technology the Story?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 Winter(2000), no. 4.
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 7puters counts as an important structural shift in the macro-economy.11 TheInternet is the latest wave of digital “informationalization.” What effect willit have in the sphere of arts and culture? The historical continuities suggestthat comparisons with earlier communications revolutions will be useful.Early experimentationPeople experiment with new technologies to find out what they can do, andto figure out ways of integrating them into their lives. Several communica-tions technologies have been put to work in ways that, in retrospect, appearstrange, misguided or merely quaint. The telephone, for instance, was ini-tially used in some areas as a broadcast medium for music (more like aradio) rather than as a means of person-to-person communication. Otherinventions inspired even odder responses. Carolyn Marvin’s study of theearly days of electricity reproduces some photographs of New York societyladies posing in dresses lined with electric light-bulbs and wires.12 This wayof incorporating technology into everyday life was driven by fashion. Whatmattered was not the technology as such, but rather its novelty.Hobbyists experiment with technology to a different end. They wantto find out what it is capable of. In the process, they have a tendency tobuild exclusive communities for themselves, closed to those who lack thepractical knowledge to work the equipment or speak the jargon. Again with19th century technology, Marvin shows how the spread of electric lightingand the telegraph was accompanied by professional and popular efforts todistinguish between those who knew how things worked and those whoserole was merely to look on in awe. Sharp distinctions were drawn betweencompetent and incompetent users, usually reflecting and reinforcing existinggender, racial and class-based stereotypes.13 The history of radio broadcast-ing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries shows a similar pattern. Radioenthusiasts (almost all young men) built a community whose members were11J. Bradford DeLong, Do we have a “New” Macroeconomy? 2001 hURL: www.j-bradford-delong.neti– visited on April 3rd 2001.12Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies were New: Thinking about electric commu-nication in the late nineteenth century, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).13Marvin, When Old Technologies were New, ibid.
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 8were profiled in the popular press for their ability to control the mysteriousether, communicate with one another over great distances, and even listen inon other people’s conversations.14 The parallels to the early days of homecomputing and the Internet are clear.15 The home-computer enthusiastsof the 1970s, the teenage hackers of the 1980s, and the architects of OpenSource software in the 1990s have all generated their own myths, exclusivistcultures and individual heroes in much the same way.16Artists pick up on new technology in a way that positions them some-where between the hobbyists and the fashion victims. They may quicklybecome sophisticated and creative users but at thesame time art inspired by and produced during the early phases of a newtechnology is often quite ephemeral. Artists have used computers almostsince they became available to the public.17 Our cultural sensibilities aboutdigital technology are more deeply rooted than they might appear, and a“technological aesthetic” has existed in some form or other since the 19thcentury.18 The Internet has precipitated a dizzying variety of artistic ex-perimentation, much of it using the new medium to comment on the verychanges the technology is thought to be bringing about. Artists have oftenfocused on the increasingly close meshing of humans and machines, the fearof surveillance, the ubiquity of information, and anxiety about intelligentcomputers, amongst other themes.1914Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, , (Baltimore, MD: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1994).15Eszter Hargittai, “Radio’s lessons for the Internet”, Communications of the ACM 41(2000).16Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, (New York: Perseus,2001); Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, (New York: Penguin,2001); Steven Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet, (TV Books, Inc,1999).17Timothy Druckrey, ed., Ars Electronica: Facing the Future: A Survey of TwoDecades, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).18N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,Literature, and Informatics, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Robert Rut-sky, High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the PosthumanCondition, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).19Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: cyberculture at the end of the century, (New York: GrovePress, 1996).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 9I say more below about how digital technology has been used in differentforms of art. For now, however, I just want to emphasize that the artspringing up around computers and the Internet seems similar in spirit toother movements in the past. Modern art in general bears the marks of20th century technology, and has sometimes taken technologically drivensocial change explicitly as a theme, as with the Italian Futurists. As a rule,however, contemporary art movements that tie themselves to specific piecesof technology tend to date very quickly. (This was the fate of Futurism andits love of the automobile.) There is an extraordinary variety of artisticcontent on and about the Web (or both). But most of it is unlikely to haveany long-term significance. This is true both for new cultural practices aswell as cultural goods. The historical evidence suggests that the more exoticInternet communities — technopagans, cyborgs, posthumans, cyberpunksand the rest — are likely to be seen more as products of their time thanavatars of the future. There may not be that much distance between themand the society ladies who dressed in light-bulbs.This does not mean that the work of these artists is uninteresting, justthat it is probably an unreliable guide to what lies ahead. Although it shouldbe clear that artists and audiences relate to the new digital technology indifferent ways, it is surprising how often the creative and experimental workof artists in a new medium is taken as an indication of how the futurewill look for most users in short order. But the technical capabilities andexpressive possibilities of communications media are almost always widerthan the routine uses to which they are eventually put.Conventions and habitual useWhen confronted with a new technology we ask “What is this for?” and“How does it fit in to my life?” New technologies slowly become familiar novel tasks eventu innovative practices becomeconventional. This process is a complex one. The more versatile and generalthe innovation, the less obvious the process of adaptation will be, and themore options there will be to select from.
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 10Conventions are shared expectations about how someone should act orsomething should work. They include such things as what you normally saywhen you answer the phone, what you expect to hear when you switch onthe radio or turn on your computer. Conventions may be built in by design(in which case they are standards) or emerge through experimentation ortrial and error. As conventions of use become fixed, so do assumptions abouta technology and its proper uses.Claude Fischer’s social history of the telephone is an excellent example.20Fischer shows how Americans gradually integrated phone use into everydaylife, figuring out different uses for it, deciding what was and was not appro-priate, and so on. This process ranged from deciding what one said whenanswering the phone (“Ahoy!” was an early contender), to experimentingwith the phone as a way of broadcasting music, to discovering it could bemore than a business tool. The technology of the telephone network proveditself adaptable to many different kinds of conventional standards, and it isclear from the historical record that the ones that became well-establishedwere not superior to the alternatives in any obvious sense.As a technology becomes a familiar part of life, it can have knock-oneffects on other social practices. Individuals and organizations may changein response to it. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s study the rise of gas and elec-tric lighting shows the many ways this can happen. As artificial lightingbecame more widespread in cities throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,the modern idea of urban night life developed along with it. The modernshop window took shape as a well-lit display of what was available inside,though the store was closed in the evenings. The experience of going to thetheater changed, too. In the 18th century the audience was as well lit asthe the advent of electric spotlights in the 19th centuryshowed up cheap backdrops and prompted the design of more naturalisticsets. Even ideas about the city’s relationship to the countryside changed,as rural areas became a place for peple to escape the city lights (and vice20Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1994).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 11versa).21 Again, it is unhelpful to think of the technology as determiningthese changes. They developed through reciprocal cycles of innovation andsense-making.A similar process is taking place today as users graually become morefamiliar with digital technology and the Internet. A solid core of user con-vention already exists. Some of it is built into computer operating systemsand graphic some exists as rules of “netiquette” for some as search strategies for locating information. Atall these levels, users are not simply learning what the technology is for,they are deciding what it is for. Often, users will put a technology to usein an unexpected way. In many countries, for instance, the cell phone net-work is used for text messaging almost as much as for voice communication,and a specialized shorthand language has developed out of this practice. Ofcourse, users are not guaranteed to choose the most interesting, productiveor efficient use for a technology. In the corporate world, a great deal of com-puter time is taken up producing slide-based presentations. Managers andexecutives now spend a good deal of time preparing elaborate Power-Pointslide shows, perhaps to no great productive effect. Each new version of thissoftware adds new capabilities, allowing expectations to rise further. Thisnow common use of pcs would likely amaze many of those who pioneeredpersonal computing 20 years ago.Conventions are not dictated by engineering or instituted by law, andthey are thus perhaps the hardest area for policy makers to affect. But theyhave a great deal of force. The force of conventions are clearest when theyare absent or ignored. Most of us know the frustration of being unable tocarry out a simple task on a computer because the menu item is not wherewe expect it to be, or of having spammers abuse email. The disadvantagesof convention appear when we want to change or challenge an establishedroutine or practice. Conventions can calcify over time, leaving designersand users little choice but to follow an established rule, no matter howinane. Computer interface designers continuously struggle with this prob-21Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: the industrialization of light in the nine-teenth century, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 12lem.22 The kind of knock-on effects we saw in the historical examples applyhere as well. Interface design embeds assumptions about users and uses intohardware and software that may constrain as much as they enable.23All of this means we should think carefully about what users are comingto take for granted about digital technology, and how this is happening. Inthe case of cultural goods, we can ask whether arts administrators reallywant people to get used to the idea of clicking their way through onlineexhibitions instead of visiting galleries or downloading music for free. Sim-ilarly, do university deans really want online classes and distance learningcourses? In many ways, conventions and expectations can be hard to makepolicy about, because they often emerge from the ground up. But (as adver-tisers are well aware) the assumptions of some users may be easier to shapethan others. ZapMe, for example, is a company that provides computers toschools for free in return for being allowed to collect marketing data fromchildren and then “zap” them with advertisements as they use the pcs. Wecan ask if this is the sort of trade-off we would like to see become standard.Convention and habitual use are important for policy because they arethe main ways that peoples’ expectations about a technology begin to so-lidify. We expect previews at the cinema but not at the op we acceptfull-page advertisements in magazines but not in no we plan to pay forsome television shows but not others. These assumptions imply differingbusiness models and organizational structures. The Internet can be madeto look or sound like all existing media, or it can be something quite differentfrom any of them. Thus, the conventions and expectations that users settleon will have important consequences for content-providers of all kinds.Institutions and regulationBeyond practical conventions of use lies the world of infrastructural designand regulation by the state, the market and the law. Rules laid down here22Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems,(New York: Addison-Wesley, 2000).23Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way WeCreate and Communicate, (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 13will determine what is possible for the majority of new users, particularly asmore and more come on stream who have no knowledge of, or interest in, howthe underlying technology actually works. Radio is again analogous to theInternet here. By 1920, this initially anarchic, egalitarian medium had con-solidated commercially and come under government regulation. The statesliced up the broadcast spectrum and allocated it to different uses. Hamradio operators were relegated to a small part of the available bandwidth.The industry’s way of making money changed, too. Companies had startedoff selling rad they ended up selling consumers to ad-vertisers by providing entertainment to listeners.24 The “interactivity” ofradio thus declined and the character of the medium changed.Commercial and regulatory efforts run deeper than simple conventionbecause they involve choices about architecture and infrastructure. The In-ternet got off to a lucky start in this respect. The packets of informationtraveling through it are all seen by the network as being equally important(unlike the postal network), so when there is congestion it affects everyone.There is no billing mechanism built into the network (unlike the phone sys-tem), so it’s possible to use the network for free. In principle anyone canpublish their work very easily (unlike print and broadcast media) and havetheir Website be as accessible as anyone else’s. The protocols that shut-tle data back and forth across the Web are open and inter-operable. Theend-user need know nothing of the many different hardware and softwareplatforms that comprise the network. Taken as a whole, the Internet’s in-frastructure was designed to be robust and damage-tolerant (again, unlikephone or broadcast networks). And its ability to carry all kinds of datameant that it had the potential to be a kind of superset of every othercommunications medium.Because of these characteristics, the early days of the Internet’s expan-sion brought with them much social commentary telling us how the Webwas about to sweep away the old regime, both in general and with specificreference to the arts and culture industry.25 The pendulum swung back24Hargittai, Radio’s lessons for the Internet, ibid.25Esther Dyson, Release 2.0: a design for living in the digital age, 1st ed.. (New York:
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 14quickly, however, as dystopian visions emerged to compete with the utopianones.26 But it is clear by now that technology, by itself, is not going todetermine the shape of the future either way. It is not even going to deter-mine its own shape. Many of its central features could easily be regulated,legislated or competed out of existence. As we shall see below, this is trueof inter-operability, open standards, anonymity, and many other features ofthe Internet that once seemed to define the medium.The historical record should make this unsurprising, but the belief thatthe Internet is somehow immune to these social and political forces is quitepersistent. This is especially true in the hacker community, where it hastaken on a strong libertarian tinge.27 But the amount of corporate invest-ment in the Internet, together with the public interest issues that it raises,mean that hardware and software developers can no longer pretend that theylive outside of society. It is not whether there will be regulation, but whatkind.28 The Internet carries cultural content to people, in many forms. Howit is designed and regulated will have an immediate effect on the production,distribution and consumption of that content.Technology and cultural goodsHow are these processes of experimentation, habituation and regulation af-fecting how artists, composers and writers work? From a sociological per-spective, the production of art is a collective activity. Artists work in anenvironment with established standards and expectations that make it pos-sible to produce art and have an audience for it.29 Artists have alwaysBroadway Books, 1997); Michael Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the New World of In-formation Will Change Our Lives, (New York: Harper Business, 1997); V. A. Shiva, Artsand the Internet: a guide to the revolution, (New York: Allworth Press, 1996).26Simson Garfinkel, Database Nation, (Cambridge, MA: O’Reilly and Associates, 2000);Andrew L. Shapiro and Richard C. Leone, The Control Revolution: How The Internet isPutting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know, (Public Affairs, 1999).27The irony is that this libertarian culture was fostered in university computer sciencedepartments and financed by the government. This sometimes gets acknowledged in thecommunity. A recent post on slashdot.org complained that the attitude of many hackerstoward both government and investors was “Go away and give me more money.”28Lessig, Code, ibid.29Howard Becker, Artworlds, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 15experimented with new materials and techniques and will continue to doso. Howard Becker’s work makes it clear that artists who try to use newtechnologies always run into some trouble with existing material culture,organizational practices and cultural expectations. He cites the example ofan artist who made a sculpture out of heavy steel machinery which had beensalvaged from a factory. The artist was able to produce the work and have itaccepted for exhibition by a gallery. But when it was delivered, the curatorfound that it would not fit through the doorway. This was probably just aswell, because the sculpture was so heavy that it would have fallen throughthe gallery floor had it gotten inside. Becker’s point is that assumptionsabout what art is are not merely cognitive. They are literally built in tothe working environment of artworlds. So when new technologies appear,we should not think the problem is one of fusty traditionalists resisting newideas, but rather as an instance of the interplay of technology and socialpractice that I have been emphasizing.Visual artists are experimenting with the Internet and “virtual environ-ments” of different kinds.30 Recent art exhibitions (such as BitStreams atthe Whitney and 010101 at the San Francisco moma) perhaps signal theemergence of digital art as a serious medium.31 The practice of musical com-position has been changed by digital technology, too. Software applicationsfor scoring, sequencing and mixing music have altered the work environmentof composers. For many composers, the gap between writing music and hear-ing it for the first time has been compressed. Comparatively cheap digitalrecording equipment has made high-quality sound-engineering and produc-tion faster and easier. And innovations in instrument design have changedthe sonic possibilities open both to musicians and composers.32 In the case30Mary Moser and Douglas McLeod, eds., Immersed in Technology: Art in VirtualEnvironments, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).31There is a distinction between digital art and digitized art. The Whitney’s BitStreamsexhibition is an example of the former. Here, digital technology was an artistic medium.A “virtual gallery” of old masters at, say, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’sWebsite is an example of the latter. It treats digital technology as a communicationsmedium. Digitized art raises questions about the differences between seeing a paintinghanging in a gallery and seeing a reproduction of it displayed on a computer screen.32Paul Th?eberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology,
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 16of writing, word processing software diffused very quickly, and changed theway that many authors produced and revised their work. The effects ofword processors on the content of writing are less clear, but it does seemthat the experience of composing text on a word processor is quite differentfrom writing longhand.33Two specific developments in book publishing are of great interest. First,on-demand book production is now economically viable (using what are es-sentially high-quality photocopying/binding machines). The main use ofthis technology at present is keeping specialist books (like academic mono-graphs) in print, though in the long term they may have wider commericalapplications.34 In the wider market, e-books are becoming more commonthanks to the arrival of relatively cheap, high-quality viewing hardware.One potential effect of e-books on literary production is to reintroduce thenovella as a commercially viable literary format. Unlike paper books, thereis essentially no difference in production cost between a seventy page and aseven hundred page e-book.The argument that computers signal the death of books and book-reading has also resurfaced recently. Some commentators on this topic,such as Sven Birkerts, are careful about how, exactly, they see the cultureof books being changed by computers.35 But others offer little more thana nostalgia bordering on fetishism for the world of leather-bound volumesand pure cotton paper — a perfect example of how entrenched expectationsabout the experience of culture can lead to a backlash against new technolo-(Wesleyan University Press, 1999).33The research literature on this point is not large. But experiments confirm the intu-ition that using a word processor changes how texts get revised. There is some evidencethat, when revising a document written with a word processor, authors may make morefrequent but less substantial revisions than when they write longhand. See E. Joram et al.,“The effects of revising with a word-processor on written composition”, Research in theTeaching of English 26 (1992), no. 2.34For an exchange on this development, see Niko Pfund and Michael Groseth, “Frus-trated Authors: We can help you...” The Chronicle of Higher Education XLVII March29th (2001), no. 29 and Michael J. Bugeja, “...But Make Sure You Read the Fine Print”,The Chronicle of Higher Education XLVII March 29th (2001).35Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age, (NewYork: Fawcett Books, 1995).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 17gies.36 Such views also carry a strong whiff of elitism. Harold Bloom usesMicrosoft’s eBook to read a potboiler by Michael Crichton. His contemptfor the novel makes it easier to dislike the technology. When he extols thevirtues of printed books, however, he thinks only of Shakespeare, Montaigneand Jane Austen.37 It turns out that announcements of the death of thebook (and of reading itself, and a fortiori of civilization in general) haveconsistently appeared with every major transformation of book production,such as that from manuscript to print, print to newsprint, and cloth bindingto mass-market paperbacks.38Digital technology does not just change how familiar cultural goods areproduced, it also provides the raw material for new genres. Computer gam-ing, for instance, is one area where significant developments are likely. Wedo not normally think of computer games as serious cultural goods. Atthe moment, the market for computer games is largely limited to particu-lar demographic groups — mainly young men. This focus has had strongimplications for software design, as a glance at the games available in yourlocal store will quickly reveal.39 But the game industry is beginning to turnout titles of increasing depth and sophistication whose appeal does not de-pend on the “gee-whiz” aspect of the technology or the preoccupations ofadolescent boys.40 We can make an analogy to computer animated films.The earliest efforts in this medium focused mainly on stretching the tech-nology to its limits, rendering complex lighting effects or difficult textureslike skin and hair. Things have now reached a stage where a film’s purelytechnical features do not dominate the experience of viewing it. This hashappened partly because the genre has matured, and film makers try toavoid its clich?es. But audiences have also become much more familiar with36Willam Gass, “In defense of the book”, Harper’s November (1999).37Harold Bloom, “On first looking into Gate’s Crichton”, The New York Times June4th (2000).38For historical context see the essays in Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of theBook, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).39Jane Fountain, “Constructing the information society: women, information technol-ogy and design”, Technology in Society 22 (2000).40A recent example is Black & White, a complex and innovative game that receivedserious attention in the mainstream media.
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 18computer animation, and so can read its conventions without thinking aboutthem. Computer games are likely to follow a similar line of development.Those who advocate ratings and censorship rules for these games alreadythink that the genre is developing along the same lines as the cinema. Othermarkers of a well-defined, legitimate cultural good (an adult audience, seri-ous critics, a market for classics, and so on) are also visible. This trend islikely to become more marked as people who grew up with game consolesin their bedrooms get older and more affluent.It is difficult to be specific about the long-term effects of new technologyon artistic production. Almost by definition, we cannot say what artistsor other cultural producers are likely to come up with, or what the long-term value of works made using new media will be.41 As with any medium,however, the chances are high that work judged to be original and importantwill be produced sooner or later.42 A historical perspective shows that thiskind of innovation happens all the time.43 We should not think that everyexperimental work involving digital technology heralds a revolution in art.But neither should we be tempted to slip into a narrative of decline simplybecause we cannot yet point to acknowledged masterpieces.new arenas for cultural policyAt the beginning of the 1990s, the policy questions posed by the Internetwere often thought of as abstract dichotomies that would be resolved by thetechnology itself. In the past few years, things have become more concrete.We now face many specific infrastructure issues, organizational problems,legal cases, and political initiatives. As we shall see, the most bitter legaland political conflicts directly concern the ownership and distribution ofcultural goods.41For further discussion see Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,1999) and Steven Holtzman, Digital Mosaics: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace, (TouchstoneBooks, 1998).42Margot Lovejoy, Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media,(New York: Pentice Hall, 1996).43Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, (Thames & Hudson, 1999).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 19I begin with the problem of attracting the attention of Internet users.(From the users’ point of view, the problem is figuring out what to payattention to.) I speculate a little about the role of arts organizations in aworld of information overload, suggesting that their old role as arbiters oftaste might reappear in a positive new way. The problem of attention-gettingand filtering leads directly on to the question of censorship. The censoringof controversial art is a common issu it takes on newdimensions when the availability of culture over the Internet is considered.Gradually broadening the focus, I sketch the issues surrounding inequalityof access to the Web, and then (in the next section) move on to a discussionof copyright and intellectual property. My main aim is to show how specificissues in cultural policy are implicated in much wider debates.F searching for contentIn 1995, Nicholas Negroponte presented an upbeat vision of the future inhis book Being Digital.44 One of the main benefits of the new informationtechnologies, in his view, was that they enabled the collection of precisedata on the habits, preferences and practices of individual users. Thinkof the parts of the Sunday New York Times that you automatically throwaway. With perfect information about your habits, the Times could insteadtailor its product to individual users — perhaps I want sports scores (but nobaseball), foreign news (but no business reports), for example. I would nothave to wade through unwanted information, and the Times would not haveto waste money providing me with content I pay no attention to. Negropontecalled this idea the “Daily Me”. He meant it to be liberating: people wouldfinally have the freedom to consume what they wanted.Readers today are more likely to be ambivalent about the idea of a “DailyMe” than Negroponte was six years ago. For one thing, the prospect of pri-vate corporations holding huge amounts of personal data on every consumeris not very attractive.45 Precisely targeted content can be accompanied (or44Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, (New York: Knopf, 1995).45Garfinkel, Database Nation, ibid.; A. M. Froomkin, “The death of privacy?” StanfordLaw Review 52 (2000)
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 20replaced) by precisely targeted advertising. One of the few assets a bankruptdot-com has is its customer database, and since the investment bubble burstthese have often been up for sale, whatever the original privacy policy mighthave said.46 But even if we could make sure that our personal informationwould not be abused, there are still good reasons to worry about the “DailyMe”. Cass Sunstein recently made a comprehensive attack on the idea ofperfectly customized consumption.47 His argument is that the Internet hasthe capacity to make us more extreme in our views and less tolerant of otherpeople precisely because it allows individuals to specify in advance what theywant to see, hear and read. Unless we believe that each individual’s prefer-ences are fixed forever, it is surely restricting and potentially harmful to beable to block out new ideas and experiences so easily.Sunstein is mainly concerned about the effects of the Internet on democ-racy. But the point he makes is as relevant to arts participation as it is topolitics. Audience development is one of the main tasks of any arts orga-nization, and on the face of it the Internet provides new and exciting waysto attract people to the arts. One might think, for example, that build-ing a quality website would open up an arts organization to a much largeraudience. Sunstein’s arguments suggest the opposite might happen, or atleast that the effects might be minimal. It would be a nasty irony if themain result of the digital communications revolution was to make peopleless likely hear about or try out new things. Sunstein’s own remedy forthe problem of political diversity requires government regulation. He arguesthat the state should help create “Town Halls” where people can debatevarious issues, and that political websites should be required to link to sitesespousing alternative views. Beyond that, search engines and portal-sites(like Yahoo) might be required to provide links to nonprofit or political siteson their front page.It is easy to see what similar remedies in the area of arts policy mightlook like. The government might require a certain amount of cultural content46Greg Sandoval, Failed dot-coms may be selling your private information, 2000 hURL:et.com/news/0-1007-200-2176430.htmli– visited on April 30th, 2001.47Cass Sunstein, , (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 21relative to all material on a particular site, for example. Whether or not thisapproach is a good idea is another matter. Television programming aimed atchildren is required to have a minimum level of educational content, a policymost people favor. But government regulation of arts programming in thisway seems paternalistic. And the idea of “required linking” dispenses withthe idea of the Internet as an open network. The issue is a complex one.Sunstein is right to suggest that a steady diet of things you have already triedis likely to be bad for you (and bad for civil society) in the long run. Artsadministrators, trying hard to get people into performances and exhibitionsof new work, are likely to agree. But Negroponte is not entirely mistaken:there is simply too much information out there to evaluate. To make use ofthe Web properly, people must of necessity be very selective.The selection mechanism itself is very important. There are four mainvarieties. Mega-portals, like Yahoo, aim to cover the entire Web. Theyhave the greatest scope and by far the largest amount of traffic, but alsothe greatest potential for channeling content in narrow ways.48 (To be fair,portal sites can also sustain communities interested in very specific topics, asYahoo does with its Groups system.) Magazine format sites work like printmagazines, bringing specific, pre-selected items, written by freelance writers.Online magazines can easily link to external sites, and can also supportdiscussion groups. Slate () is a good example of this model. User-driven sites like Kuro5hin [sic] (kuro5hin.org) get all their content from theirusers and relying on a moderation system (which I will describe below) toorganize the material. Sites like Plastic () are trying to blendthis approach with the Slate-style format. Finally, organizations always havethe option to build their own site or network of sites, in the hope that userswill find their way to it and stay. In this case, the trick is setting up the sitein a way that allows a community of users to form around it, rather thantreating it solely as a brochure or shop.4948Eszter Hargittai, “Open Portals or Closed Gates: Channeling Content on the WorldWide Web”, Poetics 27 (2000), no. 4.49Amy Jo Kim, Community-building on the Web: Secret strategies for successful onlinecommunities, (Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press, 2000).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 22In Negroponte’s vision, the technology would be perfectly transparentand pliant to each user. Things have not turned out so smoothly. Manyusers depend on the search engine they use. If a website is not in a searchengine’s database, then it will effectively be unavailable to users (assumingthey do not know of its existence in advance). This is not the kind ofsystem that Negroponte had in mind. But as an increasing proportion ofInternet traffic is concentrated on a very small number of portals, thoseportals are in a position to shape what the Web looks like to most users.50The archetype here is America Online, which prefers its customers to use itsaol browser rather than Netscape or Internet Explorer. In this browsingenvironment, the na¨?ve user might easily think the Internet is part of a suiteof services offered by aol rather than a vast network that exists outside of it.Here the problem is not hyper-specialization, but its opposite — users whosearch exclusively through mega-portals and are all subject to the whateverselectivity, search-blindness or bias the portal might suffer from.If the choice is between “self-selection” on the part of users and “search-blindness” courtesy of the Web portals, we would probably want to choosethe former. But these might not be the only options. A number of Internetsites have community-based, user-controllable moderation systems built into them, and they work quite well. The idea is that registered users have acertain number of points (often called “karma” or something similar) whichthey use to mark articles, posts or notices as worth reading or not. Eachcontribution to the site (an article, op-ed piece or news item, say) carries ascore that is the sum total of all user moderations on it. So for example,an article may score anything from -1 to +5. Users choose the moderationlevel they want to browse at — say, +2 — and then see only contributionswith that score or higher. Users can earn karma by posting items themselvesjudged to be of good quality.This sort of moderation system has been used for some time on “geek”sites such as Slashdot (slashdot.org) and Kuro5hin. It has several advan-50J. Waxman, The old 80/20 rule takes one on the jaw: Internet trends report 1999review, (San Francisco: Alexa Research, 2000); J. Waxman, Leading the Pack... Internettrends report 1999 review, (San Francisco: Alexa Research, 2000).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 23tages. It allows users to filter content by attributed
communitystandards emerge from the aggregation users do nothave to v participation is andnothing is really censored, because you can always choose to browse at -1and see everything.51 Moderation systems are also to be found on sites suchas Plastic () which focus on arts and culture and aim to have abroad appeal.All kinds of moderation systems are possible. They vary in the degreeto which they require an active community of participants prepared to putthe time into moderating posts. They are not a panacea — they can donothing to address the problems associated with searching the Internet asa whole, for instance. Instead they work as ways to reduce the noise on asite that many users are contributing to all the time. But if many of theseusers are scanning different bits of the Web and submitting stories to thecommunity site, and the moderation system in turn sorts and ranks thosestories for users, then the community as a whole can function as a powerfuldistributed system that collects, processes and evaluates information andpromotes discussion.The needs of users are too varied for any one approach to work in everycase. The more general lesson, though, is that the combination of informa-tion glut and portal concentration is an excellent reason to look again atthe role of foundations and arts organizations as gatekeepers and filterersof cultural content. Because it is so difficult to choose what to focus on,an organization that helps you make that choice by taking on the burden ofsorting and ranking what was available is very useful. Again, details matter.Carrying out this process through a community of users, a service providedby a staff, or some special-purpose network of linked organizations wouldmake a difference to the outcome. A main function of these organizationsin the past was to exclude forms of art (and people) rather than includethem. But things are now at a point where exclusivity is necessary in orderto process the range of choices at all.51Choosing to see everything posted on a site like Slashdot will quickly convince one of(a) the reality of information glut, and (b) the need for some kind of filtering system.
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 24The interesting question is how different approaches to searching andfiltering will mesh with society-wide patterns in the stratification of tasteand information access. One possibility is that being an omnivore will sim-ply become a specialized market niche in itself, and remain the preserve ofthose with the time or money to have such tastes, and the skill to find waysto specify their preferences online. Some Websites already cater to suchpeople. In the longer term, this approach might benefit a small minorityof sophisticated users. Meanwhile, the majority (voluntarily or by default)might end up using the Internet via the mega-portals, in an essentially pas-sive and broadcast-based way. They might then be subject to a bastardizedversion of Negroponte’s “Daily Me” based on marketing data collected frombrowser cookies as they surf — a kind of “Daily Sell”. A more optimisticview is that, as users become more familiar with computers and the Internet,they will choose different searching and filtering mechanisms in a functionalway, based on the task at hand. They might be happy to use a mega-portalfor one kind of content, a magazine-style site for another, and a discussionboard for some very specific interest or hobby.Censorship and censorwareCensorship is closely related to filtering, and many of the same issues apply.The main difference is that with censorship someone else is deciding whatyou can and cannot see. You have no choice at all in the matter. In theUnited States, several attempts have already been made to regulate contenton the Internet, such as the Clipper Chip and the Communications DecencyAct, and most recently the Children’s Internet Protection Act. The problemof censorship of art and music is a familiar one, and many of same questionsof free speech carry over to the Internet.52As is usual with the Web, the technological potential for regulation andcensorship is high. The most plausible negative scenario for free-speechand privacy advocates is some combination of state-sponsored and market-driven tracking and blocking. Intel, the computer chip manufacturer, had52David Sobel, Filters and Freedom: Free Speech Perspectives on Internet Content Con-trols, (Electronic Privacy Information Center, 1999).
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 25planned to encode unique serial numbers in its new Pentium processorsthis year. The serial number could be checked by, say, e-commerce sitesto verify your identity. The controversy that followed this announcementled Intel to reverse its decision. A somewhat similar idea from Microsoft,involving compulsory online registration and authentication of its software,is presently in the works. Neither of these plans is censorship as such. Butif users can be identified, then, in principle, content can be kept away fromthem much more easily. The student computer networks run by universitiesare an interesting testing ground for these ideas. Traffic over the networkcan quite easily be traced back to specific machines. The question is whetherand to what extent universities should monitor the activities of its studentusers.53Hardware-based methods of identification and authentication are likelyto encounter the most resistance from free-speech advocates. In the mean-time, software that tries to filter content is the most popular method ofcensorship. A number of companies offer services to parents who wish tocontrol or monitor their children’s access to the Internet. Given that someof the most profitable and easily locatable sites on the internet are porno-graphic, demand for this software is strong. “Censorware” (as it has cometo be known) is prone to two errors. Either it underblocks sites, lettingobjectionable ones get through, or it overblocks, banning unobjectionableones. As might be expected, certain kinds of arts sites are prime candidatesfor overblocking.Censorware based on some kind of artificial intelligence is hard to write,precisely because a program needs to be able to discriminate between Webpages on the basis of their content (i.e., their meaning), and this is a verydifficult thing to do.54 When it comes to parsing the meaning of text,even the best software does very poorly compared to people.55 Even if the53A. Graham Peace, “Academia, Censorship, and the Internet”, Journal of InformationEthics 6 (1997), no. 2.54Censorware that relies on lists of site names or IP addresses does not face this problemhead on, but face their own problems because sites may have multiple names and (espe-cially) multiple IP addresses. Even worse, they may simply have a blacklist of keywordswhose appearance on a site will cause it to be blocked, regardless of context.55A potential solution is to provide content on the Web in a semantically rich mark-
Digital Technology and Cultural Policy 26software did a very good job, the problem in this area is not really a technicalone. Though they are much better at parsing meaning when compared tocomputers, people nevertheless disagree all the time over whether this orthat text or image is obscene or not. So even if the software was as good atdiscriminating and categorizing as a person, everything would still dependon what its standards were, and this is an inescapably political problem. Asmore and more cultural goods become available online, efforts to monitor(and censor) access to books, photographs, films and other artworks is likelyto become more common. This will be especially true for libraries and formaterial made available through sites that receive any kind of public subsidy.Archives and accessFiltering and censorship continue to be relevant when we consider the acces-sibility of archived works in digital collections. Unsurprisingly, the explosionof online content has created something of a crisis amongst data librarians,archivists and curators. They face problems on at least two sides. First,although people increasingly expect archival material to be available by dig-ital means, it is not clear how to make this material available online easilyand efficiently. Second, at least some material created solely for online con-sumption is worth keeping. It is not clear how best to select, categorize andstore it.56Knowledge of these topics is incre}