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© 2010 Andrés Leonardo Martínez Ortiz. Some rights are reserved. This document is distributed under the ”Attributions-ShareAlike 3.0” Creative Commons License available here. |
Digital communications have changed our daily life in a radical way. Now the barriers to communicate our thoughts and our interests are lower. Moreover, disseminate them is instantaneous and everybody can access our digital life from almost any place in the world. Internet has become a digital container of sets of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterize the culture of the 21st century. A digital culture of the humanity where Internet is its “social medium” with the following characteristics: it is fast (almost instantaneous) and it is free, in two senses: without cost and with freedom of speech. The consequences of these features are being discovered yet.
The cultural elements go into a new dimension thanks to digitalization. The digital production of contents and their distribution over Internet have changed totally the typology of the cultural memes and the development cycle of literature, music, video/pictures and even performing arts. Thanks to Internet all of us are creators, critics and consumers of every kind music, literature, photo and video. We live a “Cambrian explosion” of digital culture. Thousands of websites offer not just multimedia contents but even tools to share them, collaborate on their classification and evaluation, and cooperate in their production. In other words, the cultural communities take their own form in Internet.
In this scenario, the cultural communities adopt new structures helped by this new medium. Internet is the distribution agent for artistic production, so there is no intermediaries between the cultural producers and their consumers. It is a demand-driven cultural production. Even more, the distribution cost is not any more an argument to discard the work of an artist. So if anyone is able to find a spectator for her artistic work, then she becomes an artist. The model follows a power law, i.e. a niche culture; the more the costs of production/distribution are reduced, the more niches come in sight. In fact cultural success is a matter of indexing more than other factors: just harmonic tones can be heard within the white noise. In addition, collaborative production modifies the concept of the ownership of the intellectual property and it has also clear implications about cultural trends and influences between authors.
Definitely Internet is changing the essence of cultural components. Recent researches alert us about how technology is modifying our cognitive process: while our visual skills are improved, our ability for the critical thinking and analytic reasoning is declining. The proliferation of multitasking and visual elements in the Internet communication are the origin of this phenomenon that affects to the way we enjoy the arts. Seemingly now we prefer even more the visuals experiences with a high degree of interactivity than traditional artistic experiences. Art works widely accepted in other times now are unable not get our attention. Even worse, the overwhelming offer of cultural goods allow us select them by a simplest criteria: getting immediate pleasure. Others deeper stimulus are simply flooded by these tidal of easier understandable works.
Last but nos least, there are also concerns about the economic aspects of this new phenomenon. Copyright laws were created in the XVIII century to assure the author’s survival . Their redaction took into account the existing distribution channels of the arts and also the extension of the works, the average time to produce them, their price, the value chains defined around the art and so on. Obviously these laws have been re written once over and over until nowadays but even thus they don’t reflect the current situation on Internet. The analysis of these new issues might help to make a new legal frameworks.All of this makes Internet an interesting ecosystem for the study of new cultural phenomenons. However it is needed to answer many issues about it. We need to produce:
- Typologies of cultural communities on Internet, trying of get qualitative and quantitative characterization of them.
- Models about production and distribution of art works. Models about the influence of technological infrastructure in the digital communities.
- Characterization of the Long-Tail model of cultural communities.
- Models about collaborative IP construction. Model about dynamic cultural trends in Internet.
- Cognitive characterization of digital art.
- Proposal for more convenient copyright law frameworks.
So who never know…. maybe very soon we can give you some clues about this issues…