A last short post on the opening night of Art Futura... A speaker from the Rio de Janeiro-based www.overmundo.com.br (linked to Barcelona thanks to the initiative i2CAT, represented on the panel by Artur Serra), spoke about the current focus on collaborative production – also raised by the other participants. He suggested that at the moment, there are two views on this – one optimistic and pessimistic:

1- A current positive view is that collaborative production is a way for society as a whole to compete with the cultural industry of the 20th century, and is something to be celebrated.

2- The negative view is that content is increasingly crowdsourced by a few main players. For example, YouTube is essentially a TV channel that doesn’t have to pay to create its own content.

He then illustrated the tension between these two positions by citing the Carr-Benkler wager (a summary of which you can read here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/aug/03/guardianweeklytechnologysection and the original discussion you can find here: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/07/jason_calacanis.php).

He summarised that by 2011, Benkler believes that collaborative production will take over and become the primary source of cultural content. On the other side of the wager, Carr posits that by 2011 there will be a price for user contributions. People will stop voluntarily contributing for free and start requesting payments, expecting compensation for micro-collaborations. People now do it because they want to participate in a community task. But what happens when sites start to pay people? Will other non-paying networks be destroyed? Will anyone still be willing to collaborate for free?

On a related note, the first speaker of the night, Juan Freire, presented a really interesting look at the potential political, cultural and economic futures for the next Web, one aspect of which deals with the whole culture of collaboration, mashups, remixing and hybridity (interesting to check out the slides of his presentation that are available on his blog, as I mentioned in my first post). Something I was wondering about in this discussion was the issue of copyright and how this affects just how free we are to use, share and reuse content online. However, this was later raised by the speaker from Brazil who pointed out that currently, the US is working on making copyright laws more strict, which will have severe consequences for the future of access to knowledge. And it certainly affects the future of mashup and remix culture… And what about Creative Commons?