Jonas Andersson poses the serious problem that a demonitezing cultural production dissuades ambitious projects:

– the problem:

“The problem with distribution on the Internet is that it is granular, and dispersed in a way that is in fact antithetical to panopticon-like overview. Instead, it favours an accessibility that primarily operates through a search function.

The online topology thus overlays the offline topology of naturally segmented producers, or occasional acts of cultural production.

In local, creative environments like the London hotspots of Deptford, Hackney, Brixton etc. the problem has become one of improving the connections in-between such acts of production – essentially, making them aware of one another, so that they can start feeding off each others’ creativity, and generate those collective sums that exceed the individual parts – but also to improve the visibility, communicability and relevance of these acts to the wider world, in an economically viable way. (Hence the pressure on urban redevelopment that Ben Gidley presents in chapter 1.3.: a lot of societal benefits, and a lot of pure profit can be found in effective interlinking of such creative hotspots.)

This economic viability is precisely what also Armin Medosch’s article comes down to: once the damaging expectancy has taken root that culture is to be produced with very little economic gains or incentives to these producers, the table does turn towards a mode of production which is more sanctioned the more transient it is. Effectively, what is favoured are amateur forms which do not require much involvement in terms of personnel, time, capital investments etc.

This favouring of transient, agile, mobile, lean modes of production is not exclusive to the corporate sponsors, but is found across the board among new media sympathisers – this book included! Hence the common fascination among us all for anything “grassroots,” and hence the active support among copyleftists and activists for typically minute, D.I.Y. musical forms such as grime, dubstep, laptoptronica and punk rock over more traditional, multi-vocalist, multi-intrumentalist, studio-intensive, dare I say ambitious ones. One might say that these latter forms are dismissed for being too “polished” – not “polished” as a formal property, since a purely stylistic surface thanks to Logic, ProTools, Ableton etc. is increasingly accessible to all – but rather because they embody a mode or ethos of production that is accomplished, the opposite of minute, and comparatively investment-heavy.

What is presented to the poor struggling artist or musician who is bloody-minded enough to pursue these latter, more unweildy, more ambitious forms of expression is a double burden: a climate favouring opportunist media creation above anything else, on top of the crisis of distribution that I have already outlined. The key is to become known, to find avenues to get one’s productions recognised by the wider public in the white noise of millions of competing cultural messages. The easy route is of course to put on a funny hat and perform a YouTube mime to any given pop song, but if your aspirations are somewhat more labourious than this, what is the right outlet?

Further, even if finding an initial outlet, one can expect to be copied, appropriated, pirated to degrees that are simply beyond one’s own control. Is the luxury of public discovery something which can no longer be afforded without accepting vast degrees of free use and consumption of one’s work? Perhaps so, but in order to become pirated to begin with, one needs to have a name which is recognised and – ultimately – respected.”

Jonas concludes:

“Cultural production and consumption takes place everywhere all the time; the problem is when these instances remain discrete, muted, and soon-forgotten. The digital ameliorates this, it helps making known that which is unknown, but only to a degree:

Any Internet-mediated cultural production, no matter how banal, becomes textually instantiated and searchable. As Clay Shirky recently, rather provocatively stated, most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum, and hence not actually “content” at all, since it is not designed for an audience in the first place (Shirky 2008). All this conversational material drowns out the potentially audience-orientated, adds to the noise.

So the common word that digitisation makes it easier to access stuff is in fact only superficially true. Once again, on the raw, jungle-like networks this accessibility is directly determined by the search function. Mesh-like spheres like p2p and Web 2.0 networks might help to heighten the visibility of individual acts of consumption/production, but only in a way which is temporary, never fully overseeable, and ultimately statistical, where a panoptic view can only be attained by means of a search. And searches, as we all know, require prior knowledge.

Precisely because of this, well-maintained and comprehensive metadata is not enough. Active and deliberate connectors are still needed, especially since one of these primary connecting practices is the one linking the online with the offline, a gap which should not be seen as a barrier but which becomes exacerbated by the purely online ventures of social networks and torrent archives. Here Piratbyrån, Deptford.TV and burntprogress share similarities, despite the decidedly different practices of these three examples. They re-territorialise and by doing so, compel everyone into opinion or at least awareness. They shed light. They editorialise. They redistribute, or at least help users organise themselves to privately re-distribute in more orchestrated and thus more meaningful, potentially profitable ways. That can only be a good thing.”