An alternative to the internet as shopping mall is emerging – a place where creative assets can be redistributed for non-commercial use
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/05/digital-public-space-britain-missing-national-institution
Many of the concerns I have raised in this column – that we are primarily now consumers before citizens, that the ferocious disruption of technology is not being tempered with ethical oversight, about the failure of the BBC to embrace a digital future – all point in the same direction. We have a missing national institution.
The idea of a Digital Public Space was discreetly mooted by some of the BBC’s most overlooked and visionary staff as far back at 2010. February’s Warwick Commission report, a barometer for the UK’s cultural and creative health, picked out the project as one of six key goals, a digital cultural library of artistic and cultural assets.Many of the concerns I have raised in this column – that we are primarily now consumers before citizens, that the ferocious disruption of technology is not being tempered with ethical oversight, about the failure of the BBC to embrace a digital future – all point in the same direction. We have a missing national institution.
Commercial interests have shaped the internet, and have created such powerful organisations that governments now struggle to keep up – out-funded, out-lobbied and outwitted. Rather than reflecting the real world, the internet absorbs and amplifies it, re-presenting a version of our lives, our work and our culture, from the gross disproportion of privilege and access afforded to those even able to access the internet to the misogyny that cripples meaningful debate. Even acknowledging its infancy, the internet does not represent a version of ourselves of which we can be proud. From privacy and surveillance to our collective cultural record, where is the internet we are truly capable of? Quietly, excitedly, and in a modestly British way, there is an alternative emerging. Rather than the internet as shopping mall – defined and dominated by commercial interests – how could we build the public park of the internet?
Many of the concerns I have raised in this column – that we are primarily now consumers before citizens, that the ferocious disruption of technology is not being tempered with ethical oversight, about the failure of the BBC to embrace a digital future – all point in the same direction. We have a missing national institution.
The idea of a Digital Public Space was discreetly mooted by some of the BBC’s most overlooked and visionary staff as far back at 2010. February’s Warwick Commission report, a barometer for the UK’s cultural and creative health, picked out the project as one of six key goals, a digital cultural library of artistic and cultural assets.Many of the concerns I have raised in this column – that we are primarily now consumers before citizens, that the ferocious disruption of technology is not being tempered with ethical oversight, about the failure of the BBC to embrace a digital future – all point in the same direction. We have a missing national institution.
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