O Alku Tarkowskim

Alek Tarkowski jest doktorem socjologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. Obecnie koordynuje projekt Creative Commons Polska w Interdyscyplinarnym Centrum Modelowania Matematycznego i Komputerowego Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. Czlonek Zespolu doradców strategicznych przy Prezesie Rady Ministrów. W latach 2006-2008 autor codziennych felietonów o nowej kulturze w Polskim Radiu Bis. Interesuje sie relacjami miedzy kultura i systemem wlasnosci intelektualnej, kultura remiksu i cyfrowa kultura popularna oraz socjologia nowych mediów i technologii.

O Kultura 2.0

Kultura 2.0 jest polskim blogiem o dzialaniach kulturalnych powiazanych z nowymi mediami. Jest prowadzony przez Alka Tarkowskiego i Mirka Filiciaka.

Ponizsza rozmowa pomiedzy Alek Tarkowski a Annette Wolfsberger zostala przeprowadzona 13 kwiecien 2009 roku z uzyciem Skype Chat, i jest dostepna tylko w jezyku angielskim.

Could you describe your background? When did you start blogging and why? Did you start by yourself or as a collective (you seem to have several authors on the blog)?

My background is in sociology. I did both an MA and a PhD in it. And since about the final year of my MA studies, I’ve been interested in the sociology of new media and new media in general. Also, for the last four or five years, I’ve been actively involved in setting up and running Creative Commons in Poland, which gives me another point of view of basically the same issues – the interface between culture, society, new media and the intellectual property system.

Initially, I had a different, private blog, which I started in 2003. It was called terminal internetyki – which you could translate as "the terminal of internetics", the last word being a word game of sorts. We had plans to collaborate more closely on the subject of "sociology of the internet" with a group of other PhD students. We planned to have a group blog, but in the end only I had the energy to write it. So I wrote it, irregularly, until the end of 2005, with varying energy and patience, mainly as a personal thing. I don’t feel it was read too much or had any greater significance.

Regarding the current blog, at the end of 2006 I was invited to co-organise a conference on culture and new media, which we called "Culture 2.0", in relation to the term "Web 2.0". It was organised by the Polish Audiovisual Publisher, a state-funded institution responsible for producing audiovisual content, mainly of the high art sort. Through the conference and a subsequent report, PWA was interested in exploring new issues in the field, such as the influence of new media, digital archiving, digital popular culture, copyright related issues, etc.

So that was a starting point for the blog I guess?

The conference team was led by Edwin Bendyk, who is a journalist with a major Polish weekly called Polityka, which at that time was starting a batch of blogs on its website. So Edwin created the Kultura 2.0 blog as a blog about "new digital culture", at the weekly’s site.

So it started within a kind of 'institutional' website!

We started writing in September 2006 – the conference took place in December 2006. We’ve been writing since then, but since Edwin already had his own blog on the site. At some point he stopped writing at "Kultura 2.0", and another person also dropped out, leaving me and my friend Mirek Filiciak, a media and film scholar, as authors.

Would you still consider Kultura 2.0 to be more of a platform than a personal blog?

Well, the blog wasn’t really an institutional site for the conference or PWA. Or course we wrote about the conference, but the idea was to write first of all about related issues, using the blog as a venue for promoting certain issues that are not well developed in the Polish public debate.

Also, it was personal from the start, in the sense that the voice was personal. We were not writing as employees of PWA, or Polityka, for that matter. The common thing was the name and the subject matter. The blog fits into a "network" of organisations and events, centred around us – its organisers. Furthermore – this is important, I think – Polityka has never in any way tried to influence our blog, which is very comfortable for us.

Have you considered getting more people/writers on board or are you happy with the way it is now? And is your blog still part of Polityka or has that changed?

The blog is still based at the weekly’s site, and current blog posts are visible on the main site of the weekly – unless they get bumped by more current posts by someone else. Regarding more people – we haven't really considered it. More precisely, we have talked with good friends several times who we thought might be a good addition. But our experience is that, in the end, most people are not able to do it. They seem to lack commitment or ideas. We’ve had maybe five times a "guest post" and that's it!

How do you manage your time between the blog and your actual job?

These are basically separate. I work at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (sounds scary, I know), where I run the Creative Commons Poland project. I am also involved in other activities related to Open Access, and what we call Open Science in general. So my work does not involve this cultural aspect – but on the other hand culture is an important field for Creative Commons. And it is also something that interests me. For instance, in 2005-2006 I had a short daily radio slot for three minutes called "the other side of culture", which was basically about same things as the blog.

Because of these interconnections and my personal interest, I’ve been writing the blog, and we’ve also been running the "Culture 2.0" project as this on-and-off initiative. We partially organised one more conference with PWA, did a summer workshop with a different institution, and then in the academic year 2007-2008, we did a series of monthly meetings on the subject, again with PWA. So writing the blog helps me feel that I’m dealing with these cultural issues that I’m interested in. I also consider it a way of indirectly promoting Creative Commons (and related subjects) to a broader audience.

How would you describe the focus of your blog? How do you decide what to cover and what not? And, for those who don’t read Polish, what do most of your posts contain (reviews, announcements, interviews…)?

The blog is called "Culture 2.0. Future’s Digital Dimension". The subject range was initially determined by a) the conference and report scope and b) our interests. The four main areas defined for the conference were: Future, Convergence, Heritage, Creativity and Participation. But I think that we haven’t stuck closely to these subjects and have been writing about the things that interest us. Mirek is the one interested in games, movies and film industry, media education; I write more often about copyright, free culture, and so on. And some issues interest us both: participatory culture, new models of cultural production and distribution, transformation of media industries, or research on new media.

I think that our posts usually have one of the two formats: either they are a short summary and a discussion of a link that we found interesting and worth sharing (but we seem to always try to write something more than just a summary), or it’s more of a short essay, putting together several sources into a narrative. We usually write about current links/events/news and very rarely create long, subject-based posts that serve as "compendia" on some subjects. I would say that the blog is more like a public notebook. We’ve had several interviews, but not more than probably five, and similarly only several book reviews.

We also publish announcements for different events, in particular ones that we are involved in. When the series of monthly "Culture 2.0" meetings was running, we published announcements and afterwards descriptions of meetings, as documented by the colourful icons on the right-hand side of the blog. And as you can see, we don’t write too often, not more than ten, maybe at most 15 entries by one of us, sometimes less, in a month. The blog is clearly a side effort for both of us…

I guess that most of your audience or community comes via Polityka? Are there any other tools you use to attract and alert your potential new audience to your blog?

Regarding readers – when we look at statistics, about 10% of people return to the blog. We assume that this smaller group is our core group, who are interested in the subject; taking into account the small size of the community interested in these issues, we might know each other personally, or at least know them from their online writing. The larger group are the "random readers", coming from links at the Polityka's main page, or from searches. Personally, I have a bit of a problem when I write – whether I can write for the core, as "expertly" as I want – or whether I should explain things again and again for the random group. We mention our blog at meetings or presentations we give, but otherwise do not promote it. I do not know of a mailing list devoted to new media and culture, comparable to say nettime.

I think there is a strong community, also an online one, interested in new media from the artistic point of view. It is tied to art galleries, museums, publications, etc. – but we are not part of this community.

This already links to my next question – I was wondering if your blog belonged to a certain ‘scene’!

Well, I think that it belongs to a certain scene by virtue that the authors belong to a certain scene: of people interested in the transformation of cultural production, distribution, consumption and participation because of new media (or related issues, like copyright for instance). But this is a small scene, and people come from different backgrounds. Some are interested more in technology, some more in law... it’s a small scene, and lacks visible personas, in the sense that someone really famous in Polish cultural circles is interested in these issues. Or if they are interested (for instance academic anthropologists), they do not blog. In general, researchers in Poland do not blog.

With what you mention above, engaging different groups of readers – have you had comments about the accessibility of your posts? Or are you trying to find a balance based on feeling?

No, we do not have any such comments. And commenting is in general rather weak on our blog. I’d say at most once a month a post stirs up a decent discussion. And 80%, maybe even 90% of commenters repeat themselves and these are people we somehow know, online or offline.

So it sounds like there is still a lot to develop and your blog definitely responded to a lack of critical writing in that field?

As for responding to a lack, yes, I’d say the blog is an easy and flexible way to write about things that don’t get written about by "major media" – so for me it is a way of introducing issues into the debate on culture in Poland.

Geert Lovink in his book Zero Comments (2007) states that blogging is relatively underrepresented in the new media arts sector (or visual arts), as opposed to, for example, (popular) music. What's your take on that?

I don’t have a good scientific overview of blogging in Poland, but my intuition would be that there might actually be more art blogs – not necessarily new media art blogs, but "new art" blogs – or what you might call visual arts, than music blogs. It’s difficult to compare, but the difference is that professionals from the art scene do write – it seems to me – more often than professionals in the music business. Though again, I know a couple of music critics who do write blogs, so I guess I’m unable to give you a good response on this one. In general, good blogging, by semi-professional or professional writers, on cultural issues, is rare in Poland – but you can always find at least several good titles, which I guess might be enough.

I keep track of the blogs that I feel are related to my interests and I rarely read something original worth writing about. People mainly seem to do what I do, link to or comment on texts/events from abroad. And if there is discussion, it is almost always in the comments, and not between blogs. In this way Polish blogging seems limited – it rarely produces original ideas that resonate broadly. Blogging seems more like ephemeral note taking, commenting on current events.