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Transformations of cultural production, free culture and the future of the Internet
intriguingly, however, are the other incentives that come into play – incentives
typical of creative rather than consumptive behaviours: self-expression, knowledge
acquisition, social recognition, reputation, sharing, collaboration. For young
generations reared on the Internet, the culture will come naturally defined in terms of
creative behaviour: “Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships
without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s
targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for... they just
assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing”. 4 This indicates the
deeper transformation that culture and media as forms of communication are
undergoing: from consumptive to productive, from monodirectional to
multidirectional.
In this article we wish to delve into the social implications of this transformation of
cultural and media production, to reflect on the context of copyright regulation where
the structural clash between incumbents – cultural and media industries – and their
consumers-turned-producers is being played out, and to see how this clash might
ultimately impact the future of the Internet. Technological sea change over the last
two decades, spearheaded by the Internet, has led to an unprecedented ability of
individuals and communities to communicate, organize, grow and express
themselves freely. It has allowed both for greater diversification and greater
integration, creating an unprecedented visibility of socially and culturally diversified
communities, while at the same time exploding the cultural diversity out of its
confines of national cultures and national languages. The central issue of this article is
that: collaborative cultural production and free cultural works are two pivotal forms
of how this transformation will sediment and augment cultural diversity. This article
therefore emphasizes how collaborative cultural production and free cultural works
emerge in particular forms of cultural interest and particular forms of cultural
exchange.
Commons-based peer production
To understand the social implications of collaborative cultural production and free
cultural works we need to go back to an event that predates the Internet. In 1984,
Richard Stallman, a software developer at the MIT A.I. Labs, came to realize that
software, up to that point developed through the same collaborative and open
methodology through which scientific discoveries were made and distributed in an
uncommodified form as a complement to the computer it was sold with, was starting
to become closed, packaged and sold – no longer accessible for others to study,
improve and distribute. Thinking that software – the code running the computing
4 Clay Shirky, “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”
http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html/
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