The Remixable Culture of
Prosumers and the Role of
Public Libraries
22.10.2008
Bjarki Valtysson, University of Roskilde
Overview



The Library as Information Centre: The Ideal
Public Sphere
The Degeneration of the Library?
The Library as Information Black-Hole:
Information Overload

The Remixable Culture of Prosumers

Europeana
The Library as Information Centre
I





The library has always served a specific role
Changes during different times, dependent upon
different regimes of truth and different discursive
formations
Cultural and informational institutions
Public access to books, multi-media and
information stored in digital form
Carries the heritage of the Enlightenment on its
shoulders; enlightening and educating institution
where the cultural heritage is not only chosen but
also reshaped, reinterpreted and recommunicated
The Library as Information Centre
II





Has affinities with what Jürgen Habermas calls
the public sphere
People's public use of reason
The town – The cultural public sphere – The
political public sphere
Public venues – the coffee house – the salons –
the table societies – cultural institutions – media
Venues where societal status was disregarded,
the domain of common concern became an
object of public attention and everyone was
able to participate. (Open and inclusive)
The Library as Information Centre
III




The institutionalisation and the actual
manifestation of the taste hierarchies that were
formed in and by the rational-discourse taking
place in the public sphere, was not as open and
inclusive as Habermas maintains
Power, cultural, political and economical capital
has always mattered
Which discursive formations were privileged,
what kind of knowledge was accepted as valid?
Here, the public library plays an important role...
The Library as Information Centre
IV



In its ideal manifestation, the public sphere and
the public library, have similar roles...
...to enlighten and educate the general public,
to serve as a venue where people come
together as a public, search information, talk,
engage in social and cultural events, debate in
a rational-critical fashion, thereby contributing to
informed critical discussions...
Pretty much as the case was with the coffee
houses, salons and table societies in the 17th
and 18th centuries
The Degeneration of the Library?
I





The illusion of the inclusiveness and
homogeneity
Too much emphasis on discursive argumentation
and rational-critical communication
What about the role of passions, the affective,
the irrational?
Contradiction: As more people entered the public
sphere, its quality diminished
The market, the mass media, the state colonise
the lifeworld and the inter-mediating public
sphere
The Degeneration of the Library?
II




Has the public sphere, and the role of the public
library ever been a neutral, inclusive and open
space?
Or has it always been a place of limited access
and limited selection procedures?
What has happened to the public library in a
culture-political landscape characterised by a
shift from cultural democracy to market culture?
Is it indeed increasingly looked upon as an
´experiencescape´?
The Degeneration of the Library?
III

Experience / the public library as a strategic tool to
sell a product

Experience / the public library as setting, or staging

Experience / the public library as content



Is it degeneration, or has the role of the public library
simply acquired more dimensions than serving as an
ideal venue of rational-critical debate, a temple of
enlightenment and education?
Can the public library inform, entertain, educate and
give experiences at the same time? To edutain?
Should it?
Cerritos Experience Library
Cerritos Experience Library
Cerritos Experience Library
The Library as Information BlackHole I




The Digital-Add on; the network society, the
information society
Where is the demand? Where are cultural products
being made, remade, mixed, remixed, distributed and
redistributed?
Web 2.0 (platforms like YouTube, MySpace,
Facebook, Flickr....)
The network society feeds on informationalism where
computers and digital communication are the most direct
expressions, particularly their self-expanding processing
and communicating capacities, their ability to recombine
on the basis of digitisation and their enormous
interactive, digitised distribution flexibility
The Library as Information BlackHole II

The culture of real-virtuality: captures most
cultural expressions in their diversity; ends the
separation between audiovisual media and
printed media, popular culture and learned
culture, entertainment and information

No uniformity, only fragmentation

A shift from content to process

Michael Wesch. Video on Web 2.0
The Library as Information BlackHole III


Challenges for the public library: Different
copyright systems, the fringe of copyright, the
scrambling concept of authorship, aesthetics,
ethics, commerce, cultural governance and the
cultural identity of the participating public
Information streams do not pile up, they
circulate

The selection process becomes a lot harder

Information-and-Disinformation

The growing importance of information
literacy
The Remixable Culture of
Prosumers I




A shift from object-oriented culture (culture
made of discrete objects existing independently
from each other) to exchange-oriented culture
(culture made out of continuos processes)
The global network of new media and the nature
of digital data
Digital remixability becomes commonplace (a
culture of copy-and-paste)
The rise of the prosumer, i.e. users on Web 2.0
produce as well as consume
The Remixable Culture of
Prosumers II


Volume of Prosumption: The selection process of
librarians a lot harder in a gigantic volume of cyclical
self-published digital material. Are blogs, vlogs,
podcasts, individual homepages and all the uploaded
files made by prosumers and distributed through the
Internet supposed to be preserved and communicated
for future generations?
Nature of Prosumption: What is a public librarian to do
with a remix of a remix of a remix, existing in different
versions on different platforms, in different quality, widely
available for other prosumers to get engaged with? Who
is the author? What about copyright? Were is the artist
and were is the audience? What about the status of the
artwork? What about the cultural industries?
Europeana I





There are being developed databases and legal
instruments that respond towards such
remixable culture of prosumers
The Europeana is supposed to be one of them
Demonstrates many of the problems, and sadly,
many of the answers
Is in fact Europeana 1.0
Single access point that coordinates the
different databases of different libraries in
Europe
Europeana II

Not just a meta-database, but also the real thing

Will open in November 2008 with 2 million items

Will then expand to 6 million items


“The EU's digital libraries initiative sets out to
make all Europe's cultural resources and
scientific records – books, journals, films, maps,
photographs, music, etc., accessible to all, and
preserve it for future generations”
Kind of impossible!
Europeana
Europeana
Europeana
Europeana III






Has anything changed?
Web 2.0 interface is not the same as exploiting
the remixable culture of prosumers
6 million items is not much at all
All items in the demo version are in the public
domain
What about copyrighted material? What kind of
access? What kind of remixes? What kind of
selection procedure?
The user is still only following pre-programmed
paths. Can it be otherwise?
Europeana 2.0 I




Interesting potentials left unanswered
“in due course, the intention is for users to
contribute materials too (through an open-source
approach, like Wikipedia)”
Future library users will not be content with
finding information, they want to produce
information. The are not content with just
consuming information, they want to produce
information.
Indeed, the want to prosume information
Europeana 2.0 II



Prosumers are doing this already in colossal
volume on Web 2.0 platforms
If the public library as an institution does not
respond, it is neglecting its role as being
sensitive towards changes in society
This will not mean a total shift from content to
process, from selection to unhindered access,
object-oriented culture to exchange-oriented
culture, but it will certainly mean that those concepts
will have to be thought of as a whole as the
remixable culture of prosumers has yet again
diversified the scope of the modern public library