The Remixable Culture of Prosumers and the Role of

Public Libraries

22.10.2008

Bjarki Valtysson, University of Roskilde

Overview

The Library as Information Centre: The Ideal Public Sphere

The Degeneration of the Library? The Library as Information Black-Hole:

Information Overload The Remixable Culture of Prosumers Europeana

The Library as Information Centre I

The library has always served a specific role Changes during different times, dependent upon

different regimes of truth and different discursive formations

Cultural and informational institutions Public access to books, multi-media and

information stored in digital form Carries the heritage of the Enlightenment on its

shoulders; enlightening and educating institution where the cultural heritage is not only chosen but also reshaped, reinterpreted and recommunicated

The Library as Information Centre II

Has affinities with what Jürgen Habermas calls the public sphere

People's public use of reason The town – The cultural public sphere – The

political public sphere Public venues – the coffee house – the salons –

the table societies – cultural institutions – media Venues where societal status was disregarded,

the domain of common concern became an object of public attention and everyone was able to participate. (Open and inclusive)

The Library as Information Centre III

The institutionalisation and the actual manifestation of the taste hierarchies that were formed in and by the rational-discourse taking place in the public sphere, was not as open and inclusive as Habermas maintains

Power, cultural, political and economical capital has always mattered

Which discursive formations were privileged, what kind of knowledge was accepted as valid?

Here, the public library plays an important role...

The Library as Information Centre IV

In its ideal manifestation, the public sphere and the public library, have similar roles...

...to enlighten and educate the general public, to serve as a venue where people come together as a public, search information, talk, engage in social and cultural events, debate in a rational-critical fashion, thereby contributing to informed critical discussions...

Pretty much as the case was with the coffee houses, salons and table societies in the 17th and 18th centuries

The Degeneration of the Library? I

The illusion of the inclusiveness and homogeneity

Too much emphasis on discursive argumentation and rational-critical communication

What about the role of passions, the affective, the irrational?

Contradiction: As more people entered the public sphere, its quality diminished

The market, the mass media, the state colonise the lifeworld and the inter-mediating public sphere

The Degeneration of the Library? II

Has the public sphere, and the role of the public library ever been a neutral, inclusive and open space?

Or has it always been a place of limited access and limited selection procedures?

What has happened to the public library in a culture-political landscape characterised by a shift from cultural democracy to market culture?

Is it indeed increasingly looked upon as an ´experiencescape´?

The Degeneration of the Library? III

Experience / the public library as a strategic tool to sell a product

Experience / the public library as setting, or staging Experience / the public library as content Is it degeneration, or has the role of the public library

simply acquired more dimensions than serving as an ideal venue of rational-critical debate, a temple of enlightenment and education?

Can the public library inform, entertain, educate and give experiences at the same time? To edutain?

Should it?

Cerritos Experience Library

Cerritos Experience Library

Cerritos Experience Library

The Library as Information Black-Hole I

The Digital-Add on; the network society, the information society

Where is the demand? Where are cultural products being made, remade, mixed, remixed, distributed and redistributed?

Web 2.0 (platforms like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr....)

The network society feeds on informationalism where computers and digital communication are the most direct expressions, particularly their self-expanding processing and communicating capacities, their ability to recombine on the basis of digitisation and their enormous interactive, digitised distribution flexibility

The Library as Information Black-Hole II

The culture of real-virtuality: captures most cultural expressions in their diversity; ends the separation between audiovisual media and printed media, popular culture and learned culture, entertainment and information

No uniformity, only fragmentation A shift from content to process Michael Wesch. Video on Web 2.0

The Library as Information Black-Hole III

Challenges for the public library: Different copyright systems, the fringe of copyright, the scrambling concept of authorship, aesthetics, ethics, commerce, cultural governance and the cultural identity of the participating public

Information streams do not pile up, they circulate

The selection process becomes a lot harder Information-and-Disinformation The growing importance of information

literacy

The Remixable Culture of Prosumers I

A shift from object-oriented culture (culture made of discrete objects existing independently from each other) to exchange-oriented culture (culture made out of continuos processes)

The global network of new media and the nature of digital data

Digital remixability becomes commonplace (a culture of copy-and-paste)

The rise of the prosumer, i.e. users on Web 2.0 produce as well as consume

The Remixable Culture of Prosumers II

Volume of Prosumption: The selection process of librarians a lot harder in a gigantic volume of cyclical self-published digital material. Are blogs, vlogs, podcasts, individual homepages and all the uploaded files made by prosumers and distributed through the Internet supposed to be preserved and communicated for future generations?

Nature of Prosumption: What is a public librarian to do with a remix of a remix of a remix, existing in different versions on different platforms, in different quality, widely available for other prosumers to get engaged with? Who is the author? What about copyright? Were is the artist and were is the audience? What about the status of the artwork? What about the cultural industries?

Europeana I

There are being developed databases and legal instruments that respond towards such remixable culture of prosumers

The Europeana is supposed to be one of them Demonstrates many of the problems, and sadly,

many of the answers Is in fact Europeana 1.0 Single access point that coordinates the

different databases of different libraries in Europe

Europeana II

Not just a meta-database, but also the real thing

Will open in November 2008 with 2 million items Will then expand to 6 million items “The EU's digital libraries initiative sets out to

make all Europe's cultural resources and scientific records – books, journals, films, maps, photographs, music, etc., accessible to all, and preserve it for future generations”

Kind of impossible!

Europeana

Europeana

Europeana

Europeana III

Has anything changed? Web 2.0 interface is not the same as exploiting

the remixable culture of prosumers 6 million items is not much at all All items in the demo version are in the public

domain What about copyrighted material? What kind of

access? What kind of remixes? What kind of selection procedure?

The user is still only following pre-programmed paths. Can it be otherwise?

Europeana 2.0 I

Interesting potentials left unanswered “in due course, the intention is for users to

contribute materials too (through an open-source approach, like Wikipedia)”

Future library users will not be content with finding information, they want to produce information. The are not content with just consuming information, they want to produce information.

Indeed, the want to prosume information

Europeana 2.0 II

Prosumers are doing this already in colossal volume on Web 2.0 platforms

If the public library as an institution does not respond, it is neglecting its role as being sensitive towards changes in society

This will not mean a total shift from content to process, from selection to unhindered access, object-oriented culture to exchange-oriented culture, but it will certainly mean that those concepts will have to be thought of as a whole as the remixable culture of prosumers has yet again diversified the scope of the modern public library