Page 131 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

The transgressive power of sharingGrace Quintanilla, @G_KintaniyaThis article takes as its point of departure the fact that, in the digital world, the future isthe present continuous. This continuity is not limited solely to a temporal quality but extends to the blurring of boundaries between special- ised disciplines, production habits and formsof marketing that seem to be opposites in the material world. I shall concentrate on physical and digital cultural spaces whose content is produced by users as a clear example of this continuity, for there is no precise moment in the temporal processes of networks at which the consumer becomes a producer, at which the amateur becomes a professional and at which the buyer becomes a seller.I propose we concentrate on this continuumas a place of action for devising models for the design, production and economic feasibilityof cultural projects through my experience as director and founder of Conaculta’s Centro de Cultura Digital1 (Digital Culture Centre, CCD)in Mexico, and by sharing a few findings made this year at various events related to digital culture, open data and entrepreneurship.Professional amateurThere is a sort of unwitting professionalisation among the users of devices, applications and authoring software, who acquire knowledge passively by being exposed to an overwhelming amount of Internet content. This knowledgeis applied in the production of materials of high creative, technical and experimental quality, a fact which is making the gap between professional and amateur increasingly flexible. A recent and very well-known example of this phenomenon is David Uzochukwu,2 a boy aged only sixteen who won the EyeEm Photographer of the Year Award3 in 2014 out of more than 14,000 photographers. Reactions of surprise and condemnation were not long in appearing