Social Science Research Council

Santa Clara University
October 22-23, 2004

AGENDA

Search Engines, Visibility, and Access
Our sense of agency as users of digital networks depends greatly on how digital resources are represented and made navigable. Especially in the Internet era, breakthroughs in representing, navigating, and searching data have had repercussions on the production of digital content and on pressures for institutional change. HTML, the Mozilla web browser, Google, and peer-to-peer networks are examples of such enabling technologies. Each is—in the sense privileged by this project—a digital cultural institution, supported by concrete institutional arrangements. But representations are always partial, and the new structures of access and navigation can obscure as well as reveal features of digital culture. Moreover, we are only at the outset of this process of development: there will be other tools that support different representations and models of interaction with networked digital resources (recall the early and persistent visions of avatar-based cyberspace, and their loose realization in contemporary massive multiplayer games). This panel is an exploration of those structures of representation, navigation, visibility, invisibility, and access.

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Media Production and Use: Cultural and Socio-Economic Challenges
Communities and other publics have often disappointed producers of digital cultural resources by failing to make use of the proffered services. Again and again, uses prove difficult to anticipate: media production and use enter into complex cultural circuits shaped by economic disparities, relationships to other media, diverse skillsets, uncertain boundaries between public and private, and differing sentiments about all of these within groups. This panel seeks to identify and explore some of these challenges to the production, provision, and use of digital cultural resources—including media products and public information—in the context of an emerging ‘age of access’ that may add to and potentially amplify economic divides.

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Challenges to Knowledge Production in Open Systems: Trust, Authority, Quality
The growth of relatively open structures of knowledge production and dissemination is one of the most salient features of the Internet era—important not only within a growing number of academic disciplines but more generally in the emergence of the web as a kind of universal library. And yet traditional gatekeepers play an important role in certifying the quality of the content they produced. This panel explores a range of issues related to how systems of trust, authority, and quality control emerge (or fail to emerge) in the new more open institutions of knowledge production, and what that implies for the older institutional gatekeepers.

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New Cultural Infrastructures: Law, Technology, and Cultural Practice
Forms of cultural participation have always been shaped by an infrastructure of laws, technologies, norms, and market pressures. As digital technologies transform the economics of cultural production and distribution, this infrastructure has been profoundly altered. This panel will explore the encounter of new technologies of production and dissemination with new strategies of regulatory and technological control—Digital Rights Management, the broadcast flag, and the expansion of legal protections afforded both works and technologies of control. The panel will hopefully provide some insight into the issue that has underwritten much of the DCIP work: what are the costs of and alternatives to the prevailing vision of digital cultural lockdown, and what kinds of institutions would those alternatives support or require.

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The Future of Cultural Artifacts: Books, Music, Film
Digital technologies force us to think in new ways about the packages and containers of culture. For the first time, the ‘content’ of culture is easily dissociable from its storage medium—text from paper books, moving images from film, sound from records and compact disks. Nothing necessary anchors a digitally formatted text or video to a particular device or object. Instead, the characteristics that matter most are those of computation, electronic storage, and networks—of operations upon data, of blurred lines between storing, accessing, and copying, and of increasingly fast and costless transmission. The same characteristics force us to reconsider the institutions that evolved with those containers, from the array of corporate producers and intermediaries to diverse points and forms of delivery: music stores, movie theatres, libraries, cable services, broadcast, and others. What will these cultural artifacts look like in 10 years and what kinds of institutions will mediate them?

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Knowledge Building and Research Opportunities
There will be a short final session devoted to exploring research needs, strategies for strengthening collaboration across disciplines and professions, and opportunities for policy change and social impact in this area.

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