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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

cloud computing « Previous | |Next »
March 8, 2010

Charles Leadbeater in Cloud Culture: the future of global cultural relations for the British Council says that the combination of mass self-expression, ubiquitous participation and constant connection is creating cloud culture, formed by our seemingly never-ending capacity to make and share culture in images, music, text and film.

The rise and spread of the internet and the world wide web are first and foremost a cultural phenomenon. Their impact will be felt first in culture and only later in politics and commerce. The web allows more people than ever to create and make content; distribute and share it; to form groups and conversations around the ideas and issues that matter to them, which shape and express their identity and values. The current expression of that process – Web 2.0 – began to emerge in the late 1990s, created by social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, blogging and wikis. The next phase of that process will turn on a distinctively different kind of internet, the rise of cloud computing, which will allow much greater personalisation and mobility, constant real-time connection and easier collaboration...The next most likely stage of the web’s technical development – cloud computing – will act as a giant accelerator for cultural cloud formation. It will be like a giant machine for making clouds of culture.

He adds that the net we have grown up with was based around data and software stored quite close to where it is used on personal and mainframe computers. That gave people a sense of ownership and control, exploiting cheap local storage because the bandwidth to download data from remote sources was too expensive and unreliable. The net was a way for us easily to link these disparate and disconnected machines, with their separate data and software.

However, in the world of cloud computing our data – emails, documents, pictures, songs – would be stored remotely in a digital cloud.We should be able to access our data from anywhere, thanks to always-on broadband and draw down as much or as little as and when we need. Instead of installing software on our computer we would pay for it only when we needed it:

Sharing our programs, storage and even data makes a lot of sense, at least in theory. Pooling storage and software with others should lower the cost. Cloud computing would turn computing power into just another utility that we would access much as we turn on a tap for water..When computing becomes merely a utility we plug into, the focus for innovation will shift to the demand side...The cloud should also encourage collaboration. Different people, using different devices should be able to access the same documents and resources more easily. Work on shared projects will become easier, especially as collaboration software and web video conferencing becomes easier to use.

The web has already had many incarnations. Once it was thought of as the digital superhighway. Others have likened it to a frictionless market. In the last decade the social and networked features of the web have come to the fore. In the decade to come it is likely that the cloud will be the most persuasive and powerful metaphor, to link both technical developments in how computers and the internet work but also to understand its cultural impact and significance.

In this world you will be defined not just by what you own but by what you are prepared to share and how much effort you put into making it easy for others to share with you. It is not just what you do but how you link with others that counts.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:36 PM |