Cultural Openness
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009Most of the sites and platforms that have made publishing one’s work as easy as clicking a mouse aren’t “open source” in the formal sense that applies to software. Instead, they’re tools to facilitate cultural openness.
That quote comes from a Wired article about how the internet is supporting the rise of a real alternative to “mass media”:
The dirty secret of mass media, though, was — and still is — that a great deal of it belongs to the companies that distribute it, rather than to the people who make it. That’s begun to change as the internet rewrites the rules about who can put creative work into the public sphere as well as who can take it out. Mass culture has traditionally required corporate middlemen to operate the machinery of publishing and broadcasting; without them, no one’s creation had any hope of reaching a broad audience. In the age of Flickr, Blogger, YouTube and Twitter, that’s simply not true anymore.
My hope with Public Patron is that creators, at least of video & audio content, could make their creations accessible to the whole world without losing the creative rights to them, while simultaneously supporting themselves and a family. Culture should not be held hostage behind a pay wall nor reliant on the whims of commercial interests for distribution. We need to, and now we can, make it simple and almost automatic to support a lot of the culture that defines us.