Cloud Culture

Charles Leadbeater has a knack of summarising and sometimes creating the Zeitgeist, whilst remaining on-side with the establishment. (We have him to thank for "personalisation"....) His Cloud Culture [87 page 1 MB PDF, designed to be read on screen], published by the British Council's Counterpoint think tank, with a Foreword by David Milliband, is no exception.

In his recent Learning from the Extremes (co-written by Annika Wong, who worked as a researcher on Cloud Culture), Leadbeater summarises an argument with a handy four-cell grid. In Cloud Culture he boils his argument down to an equation, which is risky, a prompt for "yes buts", and has a touch of snake-oil about it:

More cultural heritage stored in digital form
+
More accessible to more people
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People better equipped with more tools to add creatively to the collection
=
Exponential growth in mass cultural expression
=
Cloud Culture

Cloud Culture hits several nails on the head, for example, with his reference to cloud-based socially useful and significant services like Kiva (featured in Fortnightly Mailing some time ago), in drawing on Stephen Webber's The Success of Open Source, and in a strong and convincing critique of the "old media" industry, and its attempts to defend itself with copyright.

Personally I am torn - in a head/heart way. I spend my working life "in the cloud", and I've been banging on about the generally beneficial (and/or inescapable) impact of cloud-based services on education from before it became fashionable. And I strongly agree with Leadbeater on the need to keep things open. But at heart I feel cautious about the long term impact on culture and human relationships that the cloud embodies. (For much more on this see Jaron Lanier's You are not a gadget - A manifesto [Review by Boyd Tonkin]) .