Page 132 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

Cultural business models on the Internet132in the media, as it is difficult to conceive how a self-taught sixteen-year-old could have lived long enough to acquire a profession through actual experience, as dictated by the norms.Uzochukwu is one of the millions of young people who have adopted technology intuitively without necessarily possessing historical and theoretic knowledge of the languages they use and without being aware of the social, economic and cultural value of that production. Many of these individuals regard themselves as consumers of digital culture, but do not value their roleas producers of cultural content; they learn languages empirically without being fully aware of the expressive, aesthetic and commercial scope of these languages. Millions of photographs, videos and texts are produced and shared on the Internet daily as objects that reflect, more than finished works, experimentation processes ranging in quality from very poor to highly sophisticated.On networks, the system of merits and (self-)assessment is more flexibleand appropriate to the intelligence of each individual.These facts are forcing the artistic communityto reinterpret its role in society, as training, production, exhibition and marketing spaces have lost their legitimising capacity and, unless they adapt to this new reality, public and private institutions will become obsolete in both their substantive and administrative purposes.Young people identify emotionally with strangers from uncertain parts of the world andoften find that skills that are not acknowledged in classrooms or young people’s institutions are valued on the Internet. On networks, the system of merits and (self-)assessment is more flexible and appropriate to the intelligence of each individual. Networks have become crucial spaces for self-realisation, for providing incentives for creative production according to collaborative models that are not considered feasible in the logical training and dissemination channels.We live in a world of demanding, self-taught and self-administered audiences/authors, where children with Internet access learn to read and write before they reach school age; there are neither left- nor right-handed people whenyou write with a keyboard; they call themselves cyborgs; they learn languages as needed; they build principles of citizenship (digital) and replicate them in their daily life; they choose to learn from their peers through tutorials on social platforms such as YouTube because “they explain better than teachers and parents, are more upto date and you can choose the subject or skill you need at that particular moment with just a couple of clicks”. It is more efficient to search on Google than to ask adults or go to libraries to look things up in printed books.We are thus witnessing the imminent demysti- fication of academic and cultural institutions as the highest validation organisations. Profession- alisation is currently gained in spaces that are self-generated by peers who design their learning eclectically, incorporating “unconnected” disciplines and matters that are unthinkable within rigid academic programmes geared more towards specialisation than hybridisation. The new professionals are unaware of institutionalThe transgressive power of sharing