[Reader-list] The Digital Commons & hybridisation
Eric�Kluitenberg
epk at xs4all.nl
Mon Apr 14 03:31:22 IST 2003
Dear members of the Reader List,
Since its beginnings I have been a lurker on this list, often
impressed by the level of discussion in this forum. I am working on a
text (that might still change shape significantly) around the theme
of the Digital Commons. Since the excellent writings of the RAQS
media collective and the work of Sarai introduced me to this concept
and a whole new array of thinking about media and the city, I also
want to distribute this work-in-progress here...
The text collates ideas about the notion of the Digital Commons as
introduced by the RAQS media collective from Delhi, with ideas we
have been exploring with a number of Russian and Dutch artists in the
urban / media project "Debates & Credits - Media Art in the Public
Domain", initiated by Moscow based curator Tatiana Goryucheva. The
latter project deals very much with urban intervention by means of
electronic media, and cross-connecting physical / urban space with
the placeless space of electronic media.
(project web site: http://www.debates.nl)
I am trying to figure out how to connect the discussion of the
digital commons to the attempts to reclaim public space and turn it
back into community space. I can see that the text as yet does not
succeed fully in making that connection convincingly, and so I am
collecting responses and criticism. The attempt does point towards
something I consider crucial, however: strategies of hybridisation,
i.e. direct connections between the open channels on the internet and
the closed channels of mass media (radio, television, satellite),
connections between electronic media space and public physcial space
(the city), and finally connections between different disciplinary
discourses that can each contribute important insights for this
discussion.
I hope some of you will find this material useful or interesting...
kind regards,
eric
----------------------------------
Constructing the Digital Commons
A venture into hybridisation
by Eric Kluitenberg
March 2003
Democracy can be understood in two notably distinct ways. In the
institutional view democracy is understood as the interplay of
institutional actors that represent 'the people' and are held
accountable through the plebiscite; public votes, polls and
occasionally referenda. The second view on democracy is radically
different in that it sees the extent to which people can freely
assemble, discuss and share ideas about vital social issues, organise
themselves around these issues, and can freely voice their opinions
in public fora, as a measure for just how democratic a given society
is.
In the second view the state, as the suspect usual embodiment of
institutional democracy is not necessarily ruled out. It is, however,
clearly delimited in its role as the carrier of democracy. Rather,
the state would be seen here as the unfortunately necessary
institutional actor that should guarantee the space to exist where
democracy as understood in the second view can unfold.
We1 can put name tags on both views. We speak here about a shift from
representational; democracy towards participatory democracy. Implied
is also a secondary shift, away from the state and towards the by far
no less problematic notion of community as an organising principle
for democratic social ordering.
Now, my purpose here is not to write an essay on political theory,
but rather to prepare the grounds for a discussion of a concept that
is closely aligned with these macro-political trends, and that has
surfaced recently in a range of different discussions, and across a
range of different disciplines and contexts: the notion of the
"commons".
Interestingly the concept of the commons has popped up quite
persistently in discussions about the social dimension of
communication and networking technology, and the shaping of an
emerging network society. What all these discussions and projects
share is a concern that the potential of digital networking to create
an open and democratic knowledge and communication space is
squandered in favour of narrow short term economic interests.
Interests, however, that are promoted by some of the most powerful
economic and political players on the globe today.
That the figure of the commons pops up in this context may hardly
come as a surprise. In societies saturated with media and
communication technologies, social processes cannot be understood in
isolation anymore, but only in relation to the interconnectedness of
all social, political and cultural domains through the various
systems of real-time mediation: television, radio, satellite
communications, internet and digital networks, cell phones and third
generation wireless media. Conversely the space of electronic
communications cannot be separated from the real-life contexts it is
interwoven with, the remnants of musings about a disembodied
'cyberspace' now lie dormant in dead websites as pre-historical
remains, the vestiges of the virtual, much like the palaeontological
study objects of the various extinct dinosaurs species....
Over the last few years the real-existing powers of vested interests
have come into play quite dramatically in the on-line world. After
the dotcom invasion and the general push for commodification of the
information space, the powers of policing, surveillance and control
moved prominently into the digital networked domain. The great
experiment of an unfettered communication space that internet as a
public medium seemed to provide now seems more like a historical and
temporary window of opportunity. If we still care about a common
space of knowledge, ideas and information, mediated world-wide by
networked digital media we can no longer accept that as a given; i.e.
as 'naturally' embodied in the Internet. Instead the space of
interconnected digital networks should be seen as a new site for
political controversy and struggle, where the open zones, the on-line
gathering places, the shared resources should be safeguarded and
protected from the powerful forces that threaten them. There is still
a huge potential for the digital commons, but it requires the
formulation of a political agenda that needs to be actively pursued.
All this hints at the necessity for a new set of conceptual tools
that can help us to understand the conditions under which these new
social dynamics unfold. The first dynamic that should be grasped is
that of hybridisation: hybridisation of media and communication
modes, hybridisation of space, but also hybridisation of disciplines,
and hence also hybridisation of discourses. Hybridity is a defining
condition where the figure of the commons should to come into play.
No clean cuts here, no hygienised or independent cyberspace, no
virtualisation, but also no stable 'real' that puts our feet on the
ground -not even on the battle field, even though people still die
there... No escape from the dirt: the domain of hybridity is a messy
place.....
Defining 'The Commons'
Main Entry: common
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1) plural : the common people
2) plural but singular in construction : a dining hall
3) plural but singular or plural in construction, often capitalized
a : the political group or estate comprising the commoners b : the
parliamentary representatives of the commoners c : HOUSE OF COMMONS
4 : the legal right of taking a profit in another's land in common
with the owner or others
5 : a piece of land subject to common use: as a : undivided land used
especially for pasture b : a public open area in a municipality
[Source: Webster on-line dictionary]
The origin of the concept of the commons dates back to the 14th
century and refers to the notion of "common land" as it emerged in
England at that time. The idea was introduced together with
protective measures to tackle the problem that walking paths,
required to connect disparate villages and regions with each other,
were continuously transformed into farming land, i.e. privatised,
thus cutting of the connections between various communities. It
turned out that for these paths to remain open they needed some form
of public protection, and this protection had to be enforced for the
greater good of the "commons".
In their conversation on the digital commons by the members of the
Raqs video collective, co-founders of the Sarai new media initiative
in Delhi, Monica Narula recounts that particular history
"I was told by a friend of the ramblers in England - who go on long
walks for the wonderful pleasure of taking in "mountain, moor, heath
and down" - that when they walk, they do so partly to keep public
paths public. Many of these walking routes have emerged from being
trod by countless people over countless years. By law, if they are
not used by the public to walk on them, they will revert to private
ownership."
by Monica Narula, "Tales of the Commons Culture", in Mute Magazine,
London July 2001.
So there is an almost Witgensteinian formula here. For the paths to
remain common land they have to be used, i.e. the common space is
defined and constructed through use. It is not a given, it is a
product of living social praxis (indeed like language), and it
evolves over time. It is not permanent but can be maintained over
many generations, just as long as the next generation actually cares
enough about the commons to actually use them.
Importantly the commons here is also not a passive principle, some
kind of available resource that can be used, or not used, according
to will. If no one takes responsibility for the commons (here for the
common land of walking paths, the space of connection) then the
commons disappear. It is organically interwoven with the very fabric
of the communities who share this common space .
The commons at first sight is close to the wider notion of public
domain. In our FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) about the public
domain, we, a group of writers from Amsterdam, defined the public
domain as follows in '99:
"The public domain is traditionally understood as a commonly shared
space of ideas and memories, and the physical manifestations that
embody them. The monument as a physical embodiment of community
memory and history exemplifies this principle most clearly. Access,
signification, disgust, and appropriation of the public monument are
the traditional forms in which the political struggles over
collective memory and history are carried out."
Source: FAQ about the Public Domain - a.o. at:
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9901/msg00063.html
The American writer and policy strategist David Bollier however
points out that the wider concept of the public domain should be
differentiated from that of the commons2. The public domain in his
view implies a passive open space that can be shared by anyone and
everyone, and thus belongs to everyone and none at the same time. The
public domain invites the problem of responsibility. Since there is
no boundary implied, nor any kind of ownership, neither private nor
collective, nobody feels responsible for the resources that reside in
the public domain.3
The concept of the commons on the contrary implies boundaries. The
commons refers to a resource, to common land, to common means of
production, knowledge or information, that are shared amongst a more
or less well-defined community. There is ownership here, but the
ownership is collective, rather than individual. Furthermore, the
rules of how these common resources are shared, and amongst whom, are
not necessarily fixed in intransmutable rules. In the case of a
digital commons, the notion of the commons no longer refers only to a
territory, i.e. to a geographically situated community, but can also
refer to a group of people who share a common interest or set ideas,
yet who may be distributed potentially world-wide. Here we see where
the hybridity comes in: the commons is extended from a set of shared
physical resources (common land) to an immaterial domain (ideas,
knowledge, information), and secondly the commons is extended from
something that is necessarily geographically situated (walking paths)
to something that is shared across geographical divides, because it
is electronically mediated via digital networks. But in all of these
cases the commons are not entirely 'free'. There are rules and
mechanism of access, and limitations on use that are defined by the
shared values of the community sharing these resources.
I do not wish to sketch a parochial image here, there is by no means
a nostalgia for the traditional (village-) community. The commons
communities can take a host of different forms, informal, permeable,
professional, situated, dispersed, formal, or anarchic. But they
share a set of common characteristics that move them away from the
free-for-all notion so often attached to the early developmental
stages of the internet as a public medium. Most importantly the
concept of collective ownership implies responsibility, and the
survival of common resources rely on the willingness of people to
take responsibility for them. Often the commons take their vitality
from their connectedness to real-life embodied needs and issues, not
from their separation and disconnectedness from these earthly
concerns - this fleshes out a further sharp distinction from the
cyber-utopian discourses of the late 90s. It re-emphasises the need
to explore the conditions of hybridisation that inform the digital
commons and that require specific strategies to make them viable.
Hybrid Media
The first immediate strategy to engage this new terrain of hybridity
is to no longer consider the networked media as separate from the
rest of the media landscape. On the one hand there has been a much
discussed technical convergence of media, where the means of
production of traditional media have become increasingly digital and
thus promote cross-connections between formerly separate media forms,
disciplines, and fields of application. But more important and
interesting is the paradox that while a plethora of new media forms
emerged because of digitalisation of different media forms and
because in the course of this development media production tools
became radically simplified and cheaper, this trend at
democratisation of the media on the level of its technical
realisation has in no way threatened the dominant position of
mainstream media in determining public discourse. So where is that
dreamt of democratic media space?
In fact enormous concentrations of media production facilities,
companies and distribution lines in the hands of only a very few
corporate media giants has pursued the digitalisation and convergence
of media as much as it supposed democratisation. This move towards
integration (horizontal and vertical, i.e. not only production but
also distribution of media products) has seriously diminished the
diversity of the mainstream media landscape. Standardisation of
formats and one-sided programming choices are exported world-wide in
a move towards unification rather than diversification. The
alternative media have been left behind in a marginalised position,
not able to communicate to a wider audience beyond their own
constituency, often relegated to the ghetto of the Internet.
The counter strategy here is hybridisation of the media themselves.
Where the corporate mainstream embraces hybridisation as a way of
extending its market share, the 'other' media seek to broaden their
communication space. It is here where the lessons can be learned from
the sovereign experiments that have been conducted throughout the
late nineties by the artistic and subversive media producers: The
successful mediator needs to be platform independent, must be able to
switch between media forms, cross-connect and rewire all platforms to
find new communication spaces. In this context we see where the
experiments with web casting and cross connections to radio,
television, cable and even satellite become extremely valuable - they
become tools to break out of the marginalised ghetto of seldomly
visited websites and unnoticeable live streams.
All these cross connections can create a sovereign media space that
is not defined by functional interests (power, money, market share),
but orient themselves primarily on establishing a new kind of public
communication space, no longer the exclusive domain of the
professional media elite...
Hybrid Space
The second strategy is that of hybridising different spatial logics.
The commons today exist primarily in the sphere of mediation, which
by virtue of satellite and network connections have become
potentially global. While places do still matter very much, if only
because more than 80 percent of the worlds population is disconnected
from the sphere of electronic and in particular digital mediation,
social discourse and communication and thus ultimately the language
of power itself is shaped in this sphere of electronic mediation. It
has become a common place observation that in war the centres
electronic mediation and communication, the relay points, have become
the prime target of any attacking force.
But this electronic mediation only makes sense if in the end it
reconnects to embodied material reality. If we want to make the new
sphere of power democratically accountable, and carve out the open
spaces for unfettered public communication, we need to think about
models that can address the hybridity of these spaces; the
connections and disjunctures between the places in which people live
and the sphere of electronic mediation that increasingly determines
the conditions under which they live in those places.
There are no simple formulas to describe how these different spheres
actually relate to each other, the connections are manifold and often
site specific, yet the complexity is to great to go by them on a case
by case basis. So we should approach them with necessarily incomplete
models and descriptions. What we can do is to explore the spatial
logic and social dynamics of the physical public space and the
mediated public communication spaces. Rather than theorising them it
seems more productive to approach them by creating specific
conditions of experiencing the differences and connections between
these two spatial logics. This move from discourse to experience
invariably brings us to the domain of the arts.
reBoot
In 1999 we, De Balie centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam and
the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, organised an interesting
experiment that very consciously explored the relationship of the
physical public space, in transitory setting and where possible
connected in real-time to the 'place-less' electronic media space.
The project called reBoot - a floating media art experiment, put
about 50 artists (German and Dutch) together on a big party boat for
a week, which was transformed into a floating media laboratory and
presentation and performance space. The boat moved between Cologne
and Rotterdam and Amsterdam, and docked in the cities Düsseldorf,
Duisburg, Emmerich,. Arnhem and Rotterdam (all on the river Rhine,
and finally ended up in Amsterdam.
reBoot website: http://www.khm.de/~reboot/
The interesting experience was first of all the fixity of the media
location of the project, a web site with a fixed URL, some live
streams with sound and video material and TV broadcasts mainly on
Amsterdam cable television. During the week as much material as
possible was released through these fixed media channels. The
permanently changing position of the boat and the artistic
experiments that were conducted on board in reference to the changing
scenery and context the boat were in sharp contrast with the fixed
media location. Suddenly the media location seemed to be much more of
a stable point, a 'place', a reference point, than the physical space.
It introduces us to a reversal of perception that will become
increasingly strong over the coming years as we stand on the
threshold of the wide adoption of a new generation of wireless media.
Increasingly our physical location will become transient and fluid,
whereas our media location becomes increasingly fixed. There seems to
be a compelling need to always be connected, to have a fixed and
continuously accessible media location, while at the same time there
is a growing anxiety and desire for control over the new fluidity of
the physical location. As wireless and mobile media become more
sophisticated they increase the potential for physical mobility
(since you can now be reached anywhere and you can work everywhere),
but this mechanism only increases the anxiety about the loss of grip
on the "other's" whereabouts. Today this is already exemplified in
the continuous question by mobile phone users "Where are you?" to the
person at the other end of the line.
Urban Intervention
Where before the social space was the town square, the parks, the
halls of assembly, the sites of demonstrations and mass gatherings:
the sites where social discourse was shaped, now electronic media
introduce a new scale to human affairs and social relationships. This
is nothing new. It is an on-going process since the invention of
telecommunications, radio and television, and the many new
communication technologies that followed them. Yet, the feeling
remains that whoever controls the city space holds true power. The
sway of control over public urban space projects a strong sense of
power that also works in the media environment, perhaps as a sign of
the lost 'real', who knows?
If you want to have stake in shaping public discourse you need to
create not only a hybridised presence in the media environment beyond
the ghetto of the internet, but this presence should also manifest
itself on the streets. It is in the interplay between these two
spaces in particular, urban and mediated, that social discourse and
communication takes shape. If these spaces should be opened up for
alternative arguments, ideas and participants hybridised forms of
intervention are required.
I worked together with Moscow based curator Tania Goryucheva on the
Russian / Dutch art and media project "Debates & Credits - Media Art
in the Public Domain". For the project four artists and artist
collectives from Russia and four from The Netherlands were invited to
design interventionist media projects for the public urban space.
These projects were finally executed in the Fall of 2002 in
Amsterdam, Ekaterinburg and Moscow respectively.
The project was triggered by the obvious crisis of the urban public
space in Moscow. The city is completely overgrown with commercial
advertising, a new form of propaganda. Driving around the city one is
struck by the pervasiveness and aggressiveness of this new urban
visuality. The advertisements have escalated into a completely
over-dimensional scale. Billboards transform into giant kinetic
sculptures, the original structure of the city lay-out at times
disappears completely in a sea of billboard messages, competing for
attention. At other times entire buildings are transformed into a
corporate message, while elsewhere historical buildings and sites are
re-branded as a monument for a mainstream brand of beer or a luxury
car producer.
The city space seems out of control, fallen into anarchy... But when
we started to investigate how to place our artistic projects inside
this public space we found out that this seemingly anarchic out of
control space was in fact tightly regulated. So much so that some of
the projects planned for the Moscow edition of the project had to be
executed without any permission (and with significant risk), or
cancelled or reframed.
The project looked at public space deliberately as a combination of
physical and media spaces. The artists also developed a wide range of
different interventions that somehow played with this double
character of social space, from small scale street performances
(filmed and broadcast on television) to spectacular mobile projection
actions in characteristic spaces in Amsterdam and Moscow, art works
prepared specially for TV and in Ekaterinburg also for outdoor
electronic screens in the city centre, projects for public transport
sites, wall paintings, but also an internet forum on legality and
illegality initially connected with street interventions
These interventions, often poetic, at times confrontational,
sometimes intimate, personal, sometimes spectacular, can be seen as
attempts to develop models for opening up urban and media spaces for
other forms of social communication that deviate from the main-stream
norm. The estrangement of these spaces by the intrusion of alien
elements in the main-stream public environment breaks the norm of
these spaces and can (temporarily) open them up for a variety of
alternative discourses, cultural forms, and ideas.
Debates & Credits - A Dutch / Russian Art / Media Project:
http://www.debates.nl
http://www.balie.nl/d&c
Hybrid Discourses
Finally it is important to note that the figure of the commons has
emerged across a wide variety of disciplinary contexts. This implies
that the adoption of this concept by all these different disciplines
gives rise to hybridisation of different disciplinary discourses.
Besides the concept of the digital commons as put forward by the RAQs
and Sarai group from Delhi, two other strong initiatives have emerged
that embrace the notion of the commons in the struggle for a more
open and democratic knowledge and information space.
The Information Commons:
http://www.info-commons.org
The Information Commons is a project that stems from the American
Library Association that see a big threat in the commodification of
the digital information space and the imposition of ever stricter
copyright rules and Intellectual Property Laws. They see this
development as a mayor impediment to their appointment to make as
many information and knowledge resources available to the wider
public as somehow, anyhow, possible. Where technically the digital
media hold an enormous potential for their mission, the new legal
frameworks, most notably the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
pose increasing limitations on their ability to fulfil their mission.
The Creative Commons:
http://creativecommons.org
Similarly, the Creative Commons is another project that reacts to the
stringent limitations imposed by new legal systems such as the DMCA
on the digital world. But here the project is coming from the side of
Information Law. Driven primarily by information law specialists
Lawrence Lessig and James Boyle, the creative commons offers a set of
licensing systems that enable people to release their intellectual
products with various degrees of freedom. Lessig, Boyle, and many
others are afraid that the ever stricter IPL frameworks stifle
cultural and intellectual development, and in the end will kill-off
the creative and innovative potential of digital networking. Cultural
development has always relied intrinsically on the exchange of new
ideas and innovations, and should be considered an incremental
process. New forms and cultural concepts don't just drop out of the
sky like some deus ex machina, they are created by dialogue,
contention and disagreement. The question of 'ownership' here is in
any case questionable, and in many cultures actually non-existent
when it comes to cultural concepts, forms and ideas.
Beyond the rethorics of innovation it is important to recognise that
a democratic society and a democratic mode of social communication
cannot exist without open access to information, knowledge, and
ideas. Even more so it requires the possibility for citizens to get
access to this variety of communication spaces I sketched here;
physical, urban, and mediated. These resources and spaces are no
natural givens, no passive entities, they need to be created,
protected and maintained, they are the commons, that what is shared
by a community of people who care enough to sustain them through
actual use.
1 "We" should be understood to refer to a number of theorists who
have circled around this conceptual shift. Most recently Naomi Klein
critiqued the World Social Forum for loosing sight of this important
political distinction (Klein, The Hijacking of the WSF, Jan. 20, 2003)
2 See david Bollier's website for further details: http://www.bollier.org/
3 There is a further complication that outside of the Anglosaxonic
cultural sphere the notion of public domain and its translations
means a host of different things - the concept of "la domaine
publique" in French for instance refers strictly to the domain of the
state. The commons as a term remains by and large untranslatable
since the notion of common land is not a transferable concept, but at
least it does not give rise to erroneous cross-language
interpretation...
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