Because arts and cultural organizations are so often creatures of place — serving a geographic region or community more often than not — it’s worth watching how the ”sense of place” is evolving in our audiences, our artists, and our other constituents. Obviously, the Internet has reconfigured place — who cares where the information or its author ”lives” these days? But it seems clear that we’re just at the beginning of that transformation.
Case in point: ”cloud computing,” which has been around for a decade or so, but has recently invaded our common sphere (sometimes without us noticing). In a nutshell, cloud computing involves the collective capacity of thousands or millions of computers on a network, taking on tasks that used to require a place-based system (like your desktop computer, or a research supercomputer).
The ”cloud” metaphor comes from the vague and vaporous nature of the data storage, processing, and distribution in these systems — it doesn’t actually matter where your data is, since you can access it from pretty much anywhere.
The most popular example these days is Google Docs (descriptive video here), which provides word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation functions without the need for a hard disk or local software on your computer. But with the explosion of lower-power and smaller computing devices (like the iPhone or Blackberry), the cloud is growing to include all sorts of formerly local functions — even broadcast radio.
Why is this evolution important to computing and communications, says this article:
A move towards clouds signals a fundamental shift in how we handle
information. At the most basic level, it’s the computing equivalent of
the evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses
shut down their own generators and bought power instead from efficient
industrial utilities.
Why is this evolution important to arts and cultural managers? Just talk to your kids (or other people’s kids…with their permission) about where their computer files are, about where the information they access ”lives,” and about whether their home computer is a stand-alone device. They may not even understand what ”stand-alone” means.
The Internet and cloud computing transform the lens we all use (and especially the lens our children use) to view and understand the world. That changes how they will view information and content providers from now on. And it changes how even local, geographically bound arts institutions will work.
For several years, while writing concert program notes and doing Lieder poetry translations for the Austrian Cultural Forum (NYC and DC) I stored my files in my Yahoo email account. I did this because I sent them to both the NY and DC offices of the Forum, and could access and work on the files from anywhere. It worked.
Unfortunately, when this job ended, I copied all the program files onto a keychain drive. As I copied the files, I deleted them from Yahoo – before I had made a backup copy of the keychain. You guessed it: the keychain was stolen (one day when I was working in a public library). I lost all that data. It still exists in paper copy, but who would want to type, or scan, the whole thing? The data is, for all practical purposes, lost.
Moral: “Cloud computing” was working for me (though I was sending out the documents as attachments in the “old fashioned” way). Since I could access the Yahoo account from anywhere in the world, why didn’t I just leave the files there?
“Local” broadcast radio on the internet keeps me in touch, in real time, with what’s happening in places I need to “be”. This and online newspapers are my primary sources of information.