Counterpoint pamphlet explores the future of cultural relations

The official think tank of the British Council has published a paper entitled ‘Cloud Culture: The Future of Global Cultural Relations'. Written by Charles Leadbeater, a former special advisor to Tony Blair, it discusses the potentially transformative impact of technology upon collective expression.

Whereas the last decade has seen the rise of Web 2.0 and social media, with the likes of Facebook, Wikipedia, Skype and Twitter breaking new ground, Leadbeater bets that the coming decade will be characterised by the rise of cloud computing. This trend will, he posits, provide an unprecedented platform for mass self-expression.

Cloud computing is the term given to describe the increasing trend towards accessing the sort of services, software and data that users have traditionally stored locally on their own machines, through the internet. Increased security, privacy controls and connection reliability have conspired to make this a genuinely viable model that will serve to connect people, devices, data and programs ever more intensively. 

Cloud computing is becoming a reality at a point when people can now freely create and distribute content in the form of text, images, music and film over the web. In turn, this can then be mashed-up, amended, remixed and adapted by others. The result, Leadbeater suggests, is the creation of a ‘cloud culture' in which communities of collaboration are formed around shared interests and ideas on a scale hereto unimaginable. Like the clouds in the sky above us, these cultural clouds will come in all shapes and sizes. Some open; some closed. Some corporate; some social. Some permanent; some fleeting.

The pamphlet, as well as videos of its subject matter being publicly debated on 8th February, can be downloaded here: www.counterpoint-online.org/cloud-culture-a-new-counterpoint-publication-and-ica-debate