Page 139 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015139for traditional media. It takes the form of all kinds of text articles, animated video, audio and stills. The publishing platforms that hire artists and designers for fixed content undoubtedly contribute to a healthy economy within their fields of action. However, models of payment for the new content dealt with here have yet to be established.Direct monetisation models, crowdfunding, exchange, online donations, mixed payment and funding schemes and the creation of currencies such as bitcoins are models that are progressively gaining the confidence of Internet users and must be taken into consideration when design- ing cultural management programmes.We institutions need to rise to this challenge. We still take content in its limited sense, to mean fixed objects in text, audio-visual, audio and image format; files that are contained in containers. Currently, with the new Internet applications and platforms, content is the container of other content and so on cyclically. It has a changing and organic form, is related and cross-referenced with other content all the time and has a direct impact on the material world and on how our work is organised. We have to be very open to investing in the pro- duction of this type of content and to finding economic models which function under more horizontal schemes that assign economic value to increased participation in accordance with the economic benefits it provides to society directly or indirectly.Capitalising on the prestige secured through sharing content on the networks has proved to be effective in certain cases. A clear example ofeconomic benefits superior to those of direct monetisation through content, obtained asa product of popular prestige secured on the networks, is Zoella,30 a 24-year-old vlogger who gives advice to teenagers. A week after her book Girl Online was released, it outsold Harry Potter, with sales of 78,000 copies.Is it feasible to model swarm intelligence economically on the same pattern as the social brain, so that the sharing economy can be democratised? I believe that governments should regulate online commerce under new types of logic, as it is unfortunately following the same corporate pattern as in physical spaces; unlessit is legislated under schemes that are more adaptable to the actual Internet structure, it could render exponential the inequality and exploitation of those who produce and are committed to a non-profit economy and those who replicate the lucrative business logic. Culture is not free, even if it is made up of the production of “non-professional” users.Culture must find bridges of communication between those who produce and are committed to a non- profit economy and those who replicate the lucrative business logic.Our role as managers of culture in the digital world must go further than digitising, producing and promoting cultural content for technolog- ical devices so that it has an economy basedon supply and direct demand. To address these challenges, and based on what has been learned in digital creation spaces, I propose:Grace Quintanilla