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About this book
Headquartered in London and working with an international network of associates, Counterpoint is a research and advisory group that focuses on the cultural dynamics of risk. Cloud Culture was developed in association with The British Council, the UK’s international cultural relations body
This pamphlet is available to download and re-use undera by-nc-sa Creative Commons license ported to UK law.This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display and perform the work, and make derivative works, in a non-commercial context, as long as you credit Counterpoint and the author, and share the resulting works under an equivalent license.
Commenting on the scope and the pace of change in our societies has become a cliché – be it to emphasise the opportunities it presents or the anxieties and pressures it creates. But whether or not the world feels bigger or smaller, global village or Devil’s island, what matters is that the experience of this change is characterised by contrast and paradox: the contrast between the permanence of daily life, made up of small and meaningful moments against the (increasingly encroaching) backdrop of a tumultuous planet; and the paradox of – for some – unprecedented individual reach in a global context where human beings can also feel meaningless and powerless. This contrast inevitably throws up two questions: How do we make sense of our place in such a world? And how do we create meaningful relationships in the context of such change?
The British Council’s work has always been about making sense of our place (both collective and individual) in the world. Building relationships across the globe, creating a sense of security through a shared knowledge of one another, providing the opportunities for exchanges – often in difficult circumstances shaped by conflict, tension or authoritarianism – have all been means to that end. These relationships have always been based on a recognition of the importance of local networks and collaborative working, and are designed to support, in the words of the human rights lawyer and former British Council Chair Helena Kennedy, ‘the great conversation of mankind’. Today we are in a position to play this role in unprecedented ways – to conduct and support more and richer relationships, in more creative and imaginative ways than ever before. This is the continuation of our work, but animated by a recognition of the profound cultural transformations that technology creates.
This Counterpoint pamphlet is about what happens when technology (mobile, open-source, 2.0) and cloud computing conspire to offer more access to more of everyone’s culture, heritage and ideas than ever before. Charles Leadbeater outlines the promise and the step-change that is cloud computing – the results of linking all sorts of devices to one another, the unprecedented level of access to vast stores of cultural artefacts and the enormous potential for new forms of collaboration, grassroots mobilisation and multinational communities. But the argument is not dewy-eyed idealism – the potential is there but we know it is already under threat. To make the most of cloud culture all of us need to sign up to maintaining an ‘open cloud’. This means mobilising to preserve diversity of provision and of access, exploring collaborative approaches to copyright, supporting online activism across the world, finding ways of sustaining public initiatives that are global and diverse and, perhaps most importantly, countering technological exclusion by supporting the development of locally developed tools and software. Creating the space for such mobilisation is what the British Council has been doing in myriad ways for over 75 years. We’re ready for the next chapter of that conversation. Welcome to cloud culture.
Catherine Fieschi
Director Counterpoint, British Council
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Catherine Fieschi, Director of Counterpoint, for her support and patience while I completed this project, Nick Wadham-Smith and Sue Matthias for their helpful comments and Annika Wong for her research. I would also like to thank the many people whose work I have drawn on and referenced in the text.