Children's right to culture

Before I begin, Seth Godin posted a terrific talk he gave to the music industry today. Read and enjoy it here.
OK, now on to the presentation I've been preparing with some of my readers' help. Thanks to Filip Truedsson, Charlie Trygg, Daniela Krautsack and Ruben Nieuwenhuis especially.

Children's right to culture
To be presented at Kulturtinget, Västerås, March 5, 2008

Clifford Stoll once said that "if you want to know about the future, ask a kindergarten teacher - they know". This talk is about two sides; children, who in a literal way represent the future and culture,  a word often used to describe a society's past achievements. Since I was asked to present here today, I have been preoccupied with two parts of the topic. First, what do we mean by a "right" to culture? Do we mean a "right to choose" or are we using a gentler way to say "Children needs to learn about culture"? Secondly, what do we mean by the word "culture"? And when I say "we", I should probably say "you" or "I" since the perception of that word is highly subjective as it turns out.
Let me resolve the first of my qualms quickly so that I can spend the greater part of this speech on culture. The "right" to culture is actually stated in the UN Human Rights Declaration and in the Declaration of the rights of the Child:

• “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”
• “The child shall be given an education which will promote his general culture and enable him, on a basis of equal opportunity, to develop his abilities, his individual judgement, and his sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society”
  

These don't necessarily answer my rhetorical questions at the outset by they at least state outright that "culture", whatever we mean by it, is a fundamental human right.
That brings me on to the second, and more interesting part, of the topic: What is "culture"? And what isn't "culture"? Is it a means or an end? Are we striving for monoculture, driven by national heritage, or polyculture, embracing the rich tapestry o the world's many civilizations? Is "culture" by nature rigid and static and something we use to describe artefacts or is it dynamic, changing with every genereation? These are just some of the questions that have blown through my mind. Let's see what you think? I'll start with a small quiz. Which of the following do you consider "culture"?

• Rap, R&B and Hip Hop?
• Graffitti
• Computer Games
• Industrial design
• Fast Food
• Advertising

If your answer was an emphatic and sincere "yes" or "no" to any of these, I believe you may be partially blind to what culture actually is and how it's created.
Let me begin by talking about  my Grandmother's apartment in a suburb of Stockholm. Looking at how she, and many other elderly people, furnish her rooms, it's easy to believe that there's some sort of "old people's taste in furniture" that sets it once you hit seventy. The aged furniture, the color schemes, the curtain and linen styles, and so on. However, this completely misses the point that my Grandmother's style reflects what was once high fashion in interior design. She made most of the investments in the home when she and my deceased Grandfather built a home together in the 1950's. In a number of decades, people will look at the minimalist, Phillipe Starck inspired interiors of today and call it "old people's taste" whilst many of us still regard ourselves as living in a stylish home. Culture often functions like this - defined as something in one era only to be redefined in a later one. Think about the following quotes taken from Swedish 20th century newspapers:

• "A fad without substance and value. The musicians lack proper schooling and can't read sheet music", Dagens Nyheter about jazz in 1949
• "A poor role model for the young...Music lures kids into drug abuse", Dagens Nyheter on (wholesome Swedish icon) Alice Babs, 1954
• "Over-commercialiced garbagemusic", Tabloid Expressen on ABBA, 1975

All three examples here have since been re-evaluated and appreciated as fine cultural examples.What we learn from this is that what we call "culture" might have been a rock n' roll revolution when it first occured. The accordion was once the electric guitar or DJ Turntable and represented youth culture at its most revolutionary. Today we have things that people may not understand or define as "culture" but that may in fact be considered ubiquitous when describing 21st century culture in the future. One example is the Reactable music table in the clip to the right.  Youth culture is often signified by its tendency to alienate the establishment and/or older generations. Take the favorite "whipping girl" at the moment, Britney Spears who's often frowned upon for her very public meltdown. This completely disregards the fact that so many of our cultural giants were myogynistic, sucidial, manic-depressive, drug-addicted, alcoholics from Hemingway and Strindberg to Gauguin and Sylvia Plath. If you then claim that Ms Spears's work isn't on par with the works of these giants, then consider this: Platinum Blue Music Intelligence, a Barcelona-based company who have developed a software able to analyze the hit potential of songs by cross-referencing with earlier Top40 songs and classical masterpieces have found many of Britney Spear's hits to be near perfect in their hit potential, echoing not just earlier 20th century chart hits but also certain classical compositions. Songs like "Oops, I did it again" may in fact be timeless classics veiled in modern composiiton. Another interesting aspect is the view of many that culture needs to be somewhat uncommercial or not-for-profit in order to truly qualify as "culture", possibly a self-serving meme of the many poorly managed museums, opera houses and theatres around the world. Looking back however, many works considered "haute culture" today were highly commercial and accessible when they first appeared. Shakespare, as opposed to many of his peers, was a a great class unifier symbolized best by the many different classes - from royalty to groundlings - watching his plays at the Globe Theatre. Mozart wrote many of his best works as commissions by the Austrian emperor, similar to how many of today's top artists do corporate gigs or write jingles. The artist Paul Gauguin used an advertising agency to stir debate and thereby sell art. And so on. Yesterday's commercialism is often today's culture. But neither this statement, neither the one before about yesteday's rock n' roll revolutions, are bound to have many people in the so-called "cultural establishment" agreeing. They utilize a system whereby a work needs to be in a kind of "cultural quarantine" for a number of years before it can be considered culture. For them, only aged works can be considered worthy of the C-word. To quote a Swedish report that I found in preparation for today:
"In the state-sanctioned cultural sector, the biggest obstacle is the condescending attitude that many display. You should tech people what good culture is and the only offer them the best (something that only they know). This authoritarian way of thinking is out of sync with today's society. For most young people, this approach is a certain way of creating aversion to "culture". But instead of protesting and demand their right to choose, many simply ignore the public cultural sector alltogether and devote themselves to whatever they like".
This is reflected by a survey I read wherein young people are asked what they think about when hearing the word "culture". A typical answer is: "Boring - created for old farts".
The problem is that people draw mental boundaries - in time and space - for what culture is and what it isn't. Mozart but not Mos Def; Renoir but not Roxette; Byron but not Banksy and so on. Culture. instead of being a living, thriving life force, becomes a stale public institution left to feel sorry for itself. Take some of the headlines in Swedish media in the past year (reflected in other countries around the world):
"Libraries are dying"; "Quality cinemas are closing down"; "Museums stand empty and underappreciated" and so on.
The truth is that cultural offerings are thriving like never before. Book sales have been rising by near double digits in Sweden since the VAT leveraged on books was lowered a few years ago (and distribution radically expanded to include newsagents and supermarkets - Thanks Niclas Lilja for that comment!). People don't read less, they just want to own a cheap paperback version of a book instead of leafing through an old hardback edition (and pay fines for late returns). The market for niche movies have never been better with an abundant online market for DVD's, where you can find almost anything, and (illegal) file-sharing sites where these movies are available for free. iTunes is full of classical music as well as chart music, and so on. In fact, the Internet may be the best thing that has ever happened to the cultural sector. With computer power and bandwidth almost free and still getting cheaper every day, it makes everything accessible to everyone not just those fortunate to live close to a good library or cinema. This brings me on to my first trend: Culture has moved from the confinements of museums, libraries, opera houses, cinemas and theatres into a digital realm that is

• Always open
• Free (or at least very cheap)
• Unlimited in its supply
• Immediate
• With a global reach

The net is almost too good to dream up. If I told you of a new type of theater or museum that had these qualities, the cultural establishment would weep tears of joy but since the Internet is a bottom-up movement, often understood better by the young, the cultural establishment often frowns upon it and retreat to their dusty catacombs.

My second trend begins in new technologies as well. Over a hundred years ago, when the first grammophone players entered the market, composer John Philip Sousa lamented that:
"These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country”
Far from being a funny technology-hostile statement in hindsight, this statement might actually have some substance. The grammophone took music from something that every community engaged in - from church to campfires - to something that became a packaged, standardized product. Music became an industry, even an oligopoly, favoring the most elite talents. What we're seeing in today's digital marketplace is a shift back to the time before when everyone was a potential singer or musician. This isn't just an artistic development. The entire wealth in society has shifted in the past fifty years, from being predominantly inherited to self-made. A society based on inherited wealth (where credits market are regulated and interest rates high or, at least, volatile) is bound to be a conservative one favoring preservation and frowing on excessive risk-taking. Today's society is quite the opposite. Credit is easily accessible (try SMS-credit, for example) and the low (if currently volatile) interest rates makes capital cheap. The driving force today is change and challenging the status quo. The modus operandi of an entrepreneur is to challenge the establishment by supplying something that isn't already there be it more comfortable shoes, more efficient energy sources or a better bank.
We can call this development "Punk Capitalism". Punk was chracterized by two things predominantly; a push to challenge the establishment and a sense that anyone, regardless of skill, can play a musical instrument. In today's marketplace, we're giving the tools of production to just about anyone with a laptop and a brain (from the sourcing

factories of China to GarageBand software, blogs and digital cameras). We move from "Media" to "Wedia" - from few authorities in an industry characerized by high barriers to entry to an industry characterized by virtually no entry barriers where everyone can participate if they want - on a blog, by print-on-demand books, by movies made on Nokia N90's and broadcast over YouTube and so on. To quote anthropoligist Wade Davis: "Culture is the product of imagination". Albert Einstein elaborates on this by claiming that: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand". To understand just how accessible high-level filmmaking has become, check out the clip to the left made by Richard Hammond showing a recreation of the D-Day landings using a cast and crew of only three people.
Something that often gets shunned in this development is the idea of copyright. Many beieve that society has evolved beyond copyrights and patents and thereby forget that intelllectual property is also a human right established by the UN:
"“Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.”
To accomodate copyright in a copy-paste world is challenging but also something that the Creative Commons license has sought to do.

My third trend has to do with children themselves. In the past few weeks, UK charts have

been dominated by Swedish artist Basshunter's catchy-borderline-irritating song Now You're Gone. Using different lyrics, this song was a big hit in the summer of 2006 in Sweden. I thought the song then was called "Anna The Boat" and that Basshunter sang about maritime life set to a techno-y rhythm. The song was in fact called "Anna The Bot" and was about a sophistcated piece of software that trawls the internet and IRC-channels keepting them clean from spammers. Talk about a complicated subject, You hardly needed that kind of technological expertise to understand "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah" by the Beatles, right? This isn't the only example I have of complexity in popular culture. Kate Bush's song Pi (whoch recites that mysterious figure to at least a hundred decimals), Katie Melua changing the lyrics of Nine Million Bicyles to be more scientifically accurate, Tool's song Lateralus using the Fibonacci sequence (see video on the right) and many of Steven Berlin Johnson's examples in Everything Bad is Good for You showing how popular culture offerings have grown increasingly complex and sophisticated in the past few decades. All this tends to favor sociologist James Flynn's finding that IQ has risen over the past century, the so-called Flynn Effect. We are smarter than our parents and our children, in turn, are smarted than us. And we keep getting smarter (by "Me", I mean "them"). Looking at some of the developments in society today, it's easy to see how the next generation will be one of unsurpassed intelligence, from mother's chewing Omega 3 during pregnancy to Baby Einstein videos for toddlers.Will Wright's next game Spore, due any day now, is an interactive and addictive excercise in evolution that Wright (of The Sim's fame) has called "an experiment in foresight". We are, in other words, teaching children to be better at future-thinking.

My fourth and final trend is about something we all feel the effects of on a daily basis - the scarcity of time. When

money has become easily accessible (as I described above), it's time that becomes the scarcest resource. This has spawned new industries and offerings, from Dutch technology giant Philips promising "Sense and Simplicity" to reductionistic design of the iPod. Wired wrote about Snack Culture in 2007, outlining how media and culture is being consumed in one-minute snack bites, rather than full servings. One of the most amusing examples of this trend is White Stripes' legendary one-note show in Canada in July last year.

These four trends - the shift to culture offered in open forums, the move to creative consumers, the rise of intelligence and the scarcity of time - are fundamental if we are to understand how culture will be shaped in the coming decades. But what about the challenges? I began this presentation with the rhetorical question of culture as a means or an end in itself?
Let me begin that pointing out what many of you feel - that the abundance of the internet isn't just a force for good. Super-abundance has merely made the bell curve fatter and longer, not necessarily raised the general level of quality. We can, in other words, spend months watching porn and trashy videos where we could only spend hours before. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert brought this up in a recent BBC debate drawing the parallell to our insatiable appetite for sugar. It is common knowledge today that a diet based entirely on sugar is a bad idea. The same might be said for an "information diet" based only on trash news, porn and illegally downloaded Hollywood blockbusters. I know that this may sound like a contradiction to my laissez-faire attitude in the earlier parts of the speech but I will get to that in a second. Outlining this "information diet" is our first challenge.
The second challenge has to do with cultural diversity. Bob Geldof remarked in his closing statement at the recent TED conference how over 50% of the world's 6,000 languages no longer are taught to kids, slowly erasing entire cultures. This, to use a quote from The Big Lebowski, will not stand. Flying around the world has never been cheaper and the Internet makes other cultures (arguably not all) accessible at the touch of a button. We need more cultural exchanges and more offerings that embrace polyculture - where ancient traditions merge with modern expression. Pangea Cinema Day is an example of this. As is current Swedish TV show featuring a gobetrotting Papa Dee who visits everything from Cambodian rappers to Jamaican rockers.
The third challenge has to do with education. On an average day, people today read abour 10Mb of text, hear roughly 400 Mb of sound and see 1Mb och information flash before their eyes every minute. This means that in less than a decade, all that a person reads, hears or sees in an entire lifetime can be stored in a cellphone. Schools have mainly been about memory - learning capitals and chemical formulas and the regurgitating them in a closed-book quiz. We need to change this model.
Culture is a means and an end. It's an enjoyable, thought-provoking, enlightening way to spend your time but it may also have a great impact on those who use it. I believe that the one goal we need to set out, when educating out young and creating the cultural offerings of tomorrow, is to prevent evil. Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford-prison-experiment fame, recently pointed to seven steps towards evil that we can and should avoid, ingeniously entitled "Seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil":

• mindlessly taking the first small step
• dehumanization of others
• de-individualization of self (anonymity)
• diffusion of personal responsibility
• blind obedience to authority
• uncritical conformity to group norms
• passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference
• and that particularly in new or unfamiliar situations

The antidote, according to Zimbardo, is a "culture of heroism" that "celebrates heroic imagination".
So, how can we combine open-mindedness to new cultural offerings with an urge to provide an "information diet", expand cultural horizons and prevent evil from prevailing?
The answer already lies before us. In the past few years, there has been a movement that unifies "important" with "sexy". We see it in the rise of hybrid cars - fusing high performance with smaller environmental impact. We see it in the rise of organic food - celebrating culinary achievent and sound environmental cultivation. We see it in movies like Murderball, An Incovenient Truth and Good Night and Good Luck by Participant Productions who want to "change the world, one story at a time". These are commercial movies intended to compete on the same arena as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter but they also carry a message of change, hope or social criticism. We can combine important message and "nutritious" information with the sexy, contemporay packaging needed to reach all people - not just children and teenagers. To quote Walt Disney:
"Entertain and hope to educate - not educate and hope to entertain"
Thank you!