Culture 3.0: From Patronage to the Metaverse

2008

support when things get difficult. I am very grateful for having had the chance to discuss the topic of my research and to receive valuable comments from my dear friend Tanja Sihvonen as well as sharing the exciting experience of finishing our dissertations simultaneously. I am also indebted to my research students Lisette van Blokland, Jaap Kok, Vlad Micu, Pascal Rancuret, and Javier Sancho Rodriguez for numerous interviews with members from the homebrew and console gaming scene, as well as for their hands-on investigation of homebrew software and modded game consoles. Mark Speer pulled several all-nighters to edit my text and to improve it considerably.

Hybrid

In the past few decades, citizen participation in fields as diverse as politics, economics, arts, and media has drastically increased on a global scale. From participatory democracy to a collaborative economy, from crowdsourcing to civic technology, these new forms of political, economic, and technological organization are currently changing our society, 2 all the while colliding with opposing movements. Digital technologies have boosted this trend by offering new possibilities for expression and creation, and by functioning as a lever for innovation in different sectors. Furthermore, the distribution of digital culture, beyond the tools themselves, has confirmed a shift which now stresses the empowerment of citizens, made possible by digital technologies and the creative expression of individual freedom. 3 In this spirit of "ubiquitous participation," the arts and culture world has also been confronted with the phenomenon of rapid transformation and evolution based on participant involvement. 4 Beginning first with blogs and other Web 2.0 services, then with social networks and collaborative platforms, the Web has allowed pro-amateurs 5 to share and circulate their work and knowledge among the greatest number of people possible, in new spaces that are based primarily on a mindset of openness and common goods, which might seem more conducive to democracy. Today, more than ever, digital contribution-based projects (whether institutional, commercial, or associative) are becoming vehicles for new forms of creation, engagement, and the spread of works and knowledge in the arts and culture field. Yet, at the same time, these projects raise ethical, legal, and sociopolitical issues. As a matter of fact, this contributory phenomenon has grown year after year, attracting the interest of more and more participants in the cultural world. At first, this movement was spurred on by associations and informal communities, notably people involved in open source and digital commons, but also by knowledgeable amateurs, and by artists. 6 In time, private actors also became interested in this new mode of Cultural participation and digital platforms Hybrid, 8 | 2022

2017

In this work, I discuss the tension between the gift and market economies throughout the history of creativity. For millennia, the production of creative artifacts has lain at this intersection. From the time of Pindar and Simonides-and until Romanticism commenced a process leading to the complete commodification of creative artifacts-market exchange models ran parallel to gift exchange. From Roman amicitia to the medieval and Renaissance belief that scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest, creativity has been repeatedly construed as a gift. Again, at the time of the British and French "battle of the booksellers," the rhetoric of the gift still resounded powerfully from the nebula of the past to shape the constitutional moment of copyright law. The return of gift exchange models has a credible source in the history of creativity. Today, after long unchallenged dominance of the market, gift economy is regaining momentum in the digital society. The anthropological and sociological studies of gift exchange, such as Marcel Mauss's The Gift, served to explain the phenomenon of open source software and hacker communities. Later, communities of social trust-such as Wikipedia, YouTube, and fan-fiction communities-spread virally online through gift exchange models. In peer-and user-generated production, community recognition supersedes economic incentives. User-based creativity thrives on the idea of "playful enjoyment," rather than economic incentives. Anthropologists placed societies on an economic evolutionary scale from gift to commodity exchange, in a continuum from the clan

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015

In this work, I discuss the tension between the gift and market economies throughout the history of creativity. For millennia, the production of creative artifacts has lain at this intersection. From the time of Pindar and Simonides-and until Romanticism commenced a process leading to the complete commodification of creative artifacts-market exchange models ran parallel to gift exchange. From Roman amicitia to the medieval and Renaissance belief that scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest, creativity has been repeatedly construed as a gift. Again, at the time of the British and French "battle of the booksellers," the rhetoric of the gift still resounded powerfully from the nebula of the past to shape the constitutional moment of copyright law. The return of gift exchange models has a credible source in the history of creativity. Today, after long unchallenged dominance of the market, gift economy is regaining momentum in the digital society. The anthropological and sociological studies of gift exchange, such as Marcel Mauss's The Gift, served to explain the phenomenon of open source software and hacker communities. Later, communities of social trust-such as Wikipedia, YouTube, and fan-fiction communities-spread virally online through gift exchange models. In peer-and user-generated production, community recognition supersedes economic incentives. User-based creativity thrives on the idea of "playful enjoyment," rather than economic incentives. Anthropologists placed societies on an economic evolutionary scale from gift to commodity exchange, in a continuum from the clan

2013

The extensive growth, in number of participants, of new commercial media environments such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc have started a trend where not only corporations, but also state organizations, cities, municipalities and NGOs use these platforms to communicate with their target groups, locally as well as globally. Organizations and associations who formerly used more neutral means of communication (from traditional postal services, door knocking, via mass media ads, and later their own ICT platforms, such as city web pages, etc) today follow the audience/consumers/citizens to these platforms to communicate and interact with them. We have lately seen a vivid debate on the producer-consumer relation; its altering states and the way convergence culture have empowered, or cut power from, users of new media, compared with in a more traditional media landscape. What has not been debated to the same extent is what this new media landscape does to the above-mentioned producers who use these new media platforms to reach out to their different audiences. With Malmo in Second Life as an empirical case study I will discuss how these new media environments also change the role of media producers, and that its much debated transformation of media users into consumers goes hand in hand with a transformation of producers (of new media platforms) into vendors. Malmo in Second Life existed as a virtual city in virtual world Second Life from early May 2009 to late February 2010. The Malmö city administration built a virtual copy of a number of Malmö (in RL) environments to establish communication with the inhabitants of the city. Due to a number of factors (economic, cultural, PR related) the virtual city’s era was short. My main argument here deals with the diverse expectations from the users of Second Life that Malmö met in the virtual world, related to the virtual world as commercial and cultural environment, which limited their freedom of action and obstructed their communication with the citizens.

In this work, I discuss the tension between gift and market economy throughout the history of creativity. For millennia, the production of creative artifacts has lain at the intersection between gift and market economy. From the time of Pindar and Simonides — and until the Romanticism will commence a process leading to the complete commodification of creative artifacts — market exchange models run parallel to gift exchange. From Roman amicitia to the medieval and Renaissance belief that scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest, creativity has been repeatedly construed as a gift. Again, at the time of the British and French “battle of the booksellers,” the rhetoric of the gift still resounded powerfully from the nebula of the past to shape the constitutional moment of copyright law. The return of gift exchange models has a credible source in the history of creativity. Today, after a long unchallenged dominance of the market, gift economy is regaining momentum in the digital society. The anthropological and sociological studies of gift exchange, such as Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, served to explain the phenomenon of open source software and hacker communities. Later, communities of social trust — such as Wikipedia, YouTube, and fan-fiction communities — spread virally online through gift exchange models. In peer and user-generated production, community recognition supersedes economic incentives. User-based creativity thrives on the idea of “playful enjoyment,” rather than economic incentives. Anthropologists placed societies on an economic evolutionary scale from gift to commodity exchange; in a continuum from the clan to capitalist system of organization. I suggest that this continuum should now extend to the “crowd society,” which features new modes of social interaction in digital online communities. The networked, open, and mass-collaborative character of the crowd society enhances the proliferativeness of the gift exchange model that lies in what anthropologists and social scientists described as a debt-economy. The exploration of the creative mechanics of online communities put under scrutiny the validity of utilitarian theories of copyright and traditional market economy models. From Émile Durkheim and Mauss to Alain Caillé, anti-utilitarian thought designed a new political economy that defines humans as a “cooperative species,” rather than Homo economicus. In this context, I look into commons theory, through the lens of Elinor Ostrom’s work, and its application to modern commons-based peer production with special emphasis on Yochai Benkler and Jerome Reichman’s work. In conclusion, I evoke Jean Baudrillard’s essential question: “Will we return, one day, beyond the market economy, to prodigality?” I consider whether the digital revolution that promoted the emergence of the networked information economy is that “revolution of the social organization and of social relations” that might bring about, according to Jean Baudrillard, “real affluence” through a return to “collective prodigality,” rather than our “productivistic societies, which [. . .] are dominated by scarcity, by the obsession with scarcity characteristic of the market economy.” I argue that a possibility for the reinstatement of Baudrillard’s “collective prodigality” might have materialized in the “crowd society” thanks to technological advancement and the emergence of a consumer gift system or “users’ patronage,” promoting an unrestrained, diffused, and networked discourse between creators and the public through digital crowd-funding.

2017

This panel focuses on an emerging set of techno-economic relations reshaping cultural production and networked publics. In a growing number of industry segments—from journalism to games and from music to video and fashion—cultural entrepreneurs are finding audiences and advertisers on and via digital platforms. In response, they are reorienting their production and circulation strategies. This process of platformization appears to fundamentally transform the organization of cultural production, distribution and marketing. Preliminary studies on digital news publishing, for instance, indicate that ‘datafication’—the systematic collection and algorithmic processing of user data—marks a shift from editoriallyto demand-driven modes of production and distribution. These shape-shifting industrial practices seem to render cultural commodities ‘contingent’; that is, they are not only modular in design, but also continuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback (Niebor...

2019

electronic form only:: NE

This provides a context for developing of new working practices in cultural sector that, in the past decade, has been manifested in construction of cultural portals. The article analyses the findings of an international survey of cultural portals that the author has conducted on behalf of the Culturemondo Network and the Culturelink Network, in the first half of 2009. The aim of the survey was to look at cultural portals in an international context. It has incorporated answers from over 100 cultural portals from Europe, Americas, Asia, Australia and Africa that provided data on their working context. Based on the information gathered in the survey, the article examines trends related to cultural portals and the ways cultural sector adapt itself to new possibilities offered by digital networks. The focus was put on new participatory trends, aiming to find out whether the cultural sector engages users in the virtual environment and whether new working practices have emerged. The findings provided information on standard ways of operation in the domain of cultural portals, and even though they cannot be considered comprehensive, they have provided insights into current trends and challenges related to the development of cultural portals and have placed cultural portals in the context of the overall trends of the developments in digital culture. The research results have shown that definitions that described portals 10 years ago do not fit their role today. The portals' role of gateways to existing information on the Internet is replaced today by search engines that can find content quite efficiently. But the digital landscape still needs tools that enable the users' engagement with digital culture. No longer simply sign-posting to other web resources, portals today are producing, aggregating and organizing cultural content. Today, cultural portals are online publishers and online cultural platforms for the discovery of content, for communication and interaction, still searching for adequate business and communication models. Today, low technical entry barriers enable easy start-ups of virtual services, which mean that anyone with initial enthusiasm and motivation can start some kind of virtual service, website or portal, but running them continuously depends not only on technology, but on a well thought out idea and service offered to a target group, as well as on secured resources. Success depends on securing longterm viability as well as long-term relevance. Their sustainability will require new business models across the cultural sector within which online cultural platforms operate, and, even more importantly, bridging the gap between policy and practice and the need to embed digital culture in cultural policy making.

Bastina

The paper discusses the interaction and inter-relationship between culture and socio-technological changes caused by the development of digital media, with an overview of changes that are happening in the field of culture and cultural participation in the last few decades. These changes occur in the domain of audiences, cultural creativity, cultural institutions and cultural markets. Paying special attention to the participatory turn in the field of culture, the paper provides an overview of the main trends and innovations in the field of cultural creativity and dissemination of cultural goods given to digital media, which are illustrated by various practical examples. The review and analysis of the transformation of the cultural sphere offered in this paper may be of importance to cultural theorists and practitioners, individuals involved in the process of cultural creation or management of cultural institutions, and cultural policy makers.