INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE

E-Culture?

April 11, 2000

Gigi Bradford

If you accept the premise that communication technologies convey not just data and information but culture, then it is vital to examine the balance between the public interests and economic opportunity.

Should culture play by the same rules as commerce in an online world? The commercial promise of the new information technology is now commonplace. What are the implications for culture in both for-profit and non-profit sectors? In an online environment dominated by market forces, are different rules, rates and responsibilities necessary when culture is involved?

While the Internet seems more accessible now, many worry that the creation of faster connections and broader band width will privilege websites financially able to support more creative and expensive uses of technology. Is this an arena for policy intervention on behalf of the non-profit sector? What has been the success of e-philanthropy? In what sectors has it been most successful? How can non-profits in the cultural sector take advantage of this development? Should future administrations expand existing policy streams to include cultural components, particularly with respect to communications, technology, intellectual property and international collaborations?

Welcome to E-Culture, the second program in the Center for Arts and Culture's Spring 2000 Calling the Question series. I am Gigi Bradford. I am the Center's Executive Director, and it's my pleasure to open today's proceedings and then to turn over the proceedings to Michael Shapiro and our noteworthy panel.

The Center for Arts and Culture is America's first independent think tank for arts and cultural issues. It gathers and evaluates data, publishes books and reports, runs programs about contemporary cultural questions and supplies information to all those concerned with art, culture and society.

It is deeply involved in thinking about how creativity and innovation will affect our lives in the future. In the next century, cultural issues will be the arena in which economic, legal, social and diplomatic issues are worked out, the way commerce and industry previously provided that forum and raw materials formed the basis for these concerns in the centuries before.

At the same time, the cultural landscape is undergoing dramatic change. The growing importance of the creative industries demands that we assess culture both in the United States and throughout the globe. Recent controversies -- in fact even present controversies, I see some people here from the World Bank and the IMF.

Recent controversies have focused almost exclusively on government funding issues, drowning out more compelling questions about the nation's stake in its cultural life. This program and the Center's other initiatives provide information and assessment designed to move the national conversation toward a more accurate, inclusive and productive dialogue.

In the next year, the Center will produce a major project, Art, Culture and the National Agenda, which will use the election and the onset of the next century to frame current terms of inquiry in the cultural sector. While an election may be the hook for this initiative, the Center is more broadly concerned with changing the national conversation toward a recognition that responsible cultural discussions are not just about federal funding issues or allegedly offensive artworks but about the increasing role of creativity, innovation and access in our national, economic and social future. This program and others in the series will help to inform the Center's investigations, research and publications for art, culture and the national agenda.

The Center is grateful for the support of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, the Henry Luce Foundation, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, among others, whose support has made possible this series and its other programming.

I'd also like to acknowledge and thank Joy Austin, Malissa Bennett and Deputy Director Glenn Wallach and the rest of the Center's staff who have so ably put together this series.

On your chairs are panelists' biographies and information about the third program in the series.

We are delighted that Michele Cavataio, Senior Director for Corporate Relations at America Online, will so ably step in for David Eisner this afternoon. She is joined by Donald Druker from the Technology Opportunities Program of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration at the Department of Commerce.

William Gilcher is Director of North American Media Products at the Goethe-Institut in Washington. David Green is the Founding Executive Director of the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage.

Moderator Michael Shapiro reprises his role in the Center's first Calling the Question program, which examined the feasibility of using additional revenues generated by the then-proposed copyright extension to establish a federal cultural endowment. Michael is General Counsel of the International Intellectual Property Institute and of the Art Museum Image Consortium.

We have asked each panelist to begin with a 5-minute opening statement. Then the panel will conduct a brief conversation before opening the proceedings to questions from the floor. After the panel, we hope you will join us at a reception immediately outside the auditorium in the National Building Museum's spectacular atrium.

Thanks to all the panelists for lending us your expertise and, Michael, I turn the podium over to you.

Michael Shapiro

General Counsel

International Intellectual Property Institute

Thank you, Gigi.

I am delighted to be here with you at the second program, E-Culture?, of the Spring 2000 Calling the Question Series, Information and Technology, sponsored by the Center for Arts and Culture.

Not too many years ago, it would be almost impossible to imagine professionals in the cultural sector spending time thinking about technology, much less taking time out of their busy schedule to discuss such issues in a public forum. Cultural organizations seem to operate in a self-consciously static technological space. Indeed many familiar cultural institutions formed in response to the decivilizing aspects of the industrial revolution viewed themselves as the guardians of a threatened cultural world, bulwarks against the excesses of industrialization and the advances of technology and its first cousin, commerce.

Often housed in former palaces and castles of the acien regime, museums became the custodians of artistic treasures and cultural heritage of an increasingly remote past. They held the physical collections of priceless documents, manuscripts, photographs, paintings, drawing and maps. Similarly in the nation's theatres and concert halls, performances that reproduced with fidelity the music, dance and theatre of the remote past captured a newly affluent class of arts consumers.

In a world rooted in the manufacturing age, cultural organizations clearly understood their mission to preserve, interpret, perform and ultimately celebrate the finest examples of the cultural heritage of mankind. That comfortable world is gone, a casualty of what New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman, who spoke on this podium in the fall, recently called the democratization of technology.

What did he mean by that? The innovations and computerization and telecommunications that are "enabling more and more people with more and more home computers, modems, cellular phones, cable systems and Internet connections to reach farther and farther into more and more countries, faster and faster, deeper and deeper, cheaper and cheaper than ever before in history."

Although the democratization of technology has been massively reinforced by digitalization, early in the digital revolution Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital, described it as follows: "It's as if we suddenly have been able to make freeze dried cappuccino which is so good that by adding water it comes back to us as rich and aromatic as any freshly brewed in an Italian cafe."

Today cultural organizations are embracing with enthusiasm digital technology, new media and interactive computer networks. For example, the number of museums and websites on the Internet is large and growing daily. One online directory lists over 10,000 museums in 120 countries with a new museum added to the list almost every day at a pace that is breathtaking for the culture sector. Cultural heritage materials are being added daily.

A national culture seeking audience is also beginning to make its presence felt online of which over two-thirds I understand are women, affluent, highly educated, well traveled and brand loyal. Analysts estimate that such culture consumers bought about $360 million worth of tickets online in 1998 and expect the number to surge to $5.3 billion by 2003. And, yes, cultural organizations are also beginning to engage in profit making activities.

Other non-profit organizations are beginning to use the net as a powerful tool to solicit charitable contributions. Where there is E-Culture, of course, there is E-Philanthropy. We will be hearing about those today.

So to discuss the broad range of topics that fall under today's theme, we are fortunate to have a panel of distinguished members, E-Culturalists all of them. To begin, why don't we call on David Green. As we have just heard, David Green is the Founding Executive Director of the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH), a coalition of over 70 educational and cultural organizations dedicated to ensuring leadership from the cultural community in the digital environment.

David L. Green

Founding Executive Director

National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage

What a huge subject. I have so much I feel I have to say, and so I think for five minutes a very brief outline of what NINCH is and is doing and proposing to do, I think four I hope not too self evident themes that perhaps can get us started, although I'm sure others will have other themes, and then one or two underlying issues that I would like to end with.

So first NINCH. NINCH first started six years ago with a response from some members of the academic and cultural community to the government's vision of what a national information infrastructure should be, and although there were one or two papers and outlines of how the cultural enterprise should relate to the NII, there was a feeling both that as a community we didn't really have our act together. We didn't quite know what this was and what we wanted to do with it. Were we prepared to act as a community to this rather overwhelming vision from the government of what the potential of a national information infrastructure should be.

So it took two years and eventually NINCH was established now as a coalition of, as Michael said, over 70 associations representing libraries, museums, archives, the university world and the contemporary arts. And we are still figuring out what our needs are. We are still learning how we need to work together, how museums, libraries, archives and the contemporary arts do things differently, think of the world differently, have sometimes different ambitions. So how in creating a unified, interruptable cultural representation on the web do we work together?

We are beginning to map our various activities on the web. We are producing a guide to best practice for those who are wanting to digitize cultural heritage materials. We are also working with computer scientists to figure out what tools, what new software we could use that would represent the way that the cultural community thinks and acts so that we can have a better representation on the web. And we work a lot in copyright. In fact, I think copyright might be a key to much of this debate.

Our vision is what I would call an exploratorium, a digital exploratorium which brings together a digital museum, library, archive, theatre, concert hall, studio, if you like, in which the traditional walls of the cultural world will be much more flexible than they currently are.

So what are the four themes that I think are most important in this debate? And where do I think we fall in the discussion of these themes?

First of all I think access. Access, if you like, versus control. We clearly want and advocate for the fullest, richest, most useful access to materials that we can get. Following and pursuing, if you like, the decanonization that was going on in the academy before the web and that the web is clearly encouraging and opening up worlds of cultural resources and worlds of cultural materials that many of us were unaware of, emphasizing that the role of the teacher may be more of the "guide" at the side rather than on the stage leading students of all ages through a remarkably rich wealth of material.

The issue of control of material comes up within our own community. Certainly the owners of material, we've been aware of the debate especially in the museum community. How much "control" do you need of the material that is going up onto the web?

There was one very interesting -- I am already beginning to discuss the themes rather than outline them. Maybe I should move on. But I thought it was very interesting, an earlier session in this series, hearing from a commercial and a non-profit publisher. Does the world of commercial enterprise shrink the available variety of cultural materials? Or does it actually through competition expand it? We had a very interesting conversation about that, and I think that's an ongoing theme.

Well, anyway that's one theme, I think. Will we have greater access or more restrictive access if E-Commerce becomes a more active part of our online world?

Quality is, of course, an issue here, and quality of the material costs a lot. We need desperately new economic models, new business models, new models of sustainability. The universities are beginning to disaggregate the costs of what they're doing. The commercial world of distance learning is offering the possibility of huge windfalls for the academic community. There are many, I think, positive and negative opportunities here, but let's pursue the new economic models.

I have run out of time, Mike, already. Have I?

Mr. Shapiro

One minute summation.

Mr. Green

So access, new economic models. I think the debate about public space. The importance of public space is continuing public action, conserving the public domain versus the ongoing commodification of knowledge. We see this in copyright term extension, in the database act that's going through Congress right now, valuing the free public space making sure that we have a space that is free of economic concerns.

And lastly, I guess, the arena of actively building our own community, a community in which multiple voices speaking to one another, multivalency as opposed to a one-way image of cultural discourse is another theme.

So sorry, but those I think are my four themes that I'd like to focus on.

Mr. Shapiro

Thank you. Broad themes, and we'll to them all hopefully.

I'd next like to turn to Donald Druker. Donald is the Program Officer of the National Technology Opportunities Program (TOP), of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Department of Commerce. In that position, he sees a wide range of grant applications that I think allow him to kind of keep a pulse on the programs and activities with respect to culture importantly and a broad range of other topics. Donald.

Donald Druker

Program Officer, Technology Opportunities Program

National Telecommunications and Information Administration

U.S. Department of Commerce

For a minute there it sounded like you were reading our guidelines when you were talking about access and sustainability. This is all things that we deal with every day.

This is something I want you to think about. The vision I have for the web is about anything being potentially connected with anything. It is a vision that provides us with new freedom and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification systems into which we bound ourselves. It leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many. It leaves our previous fears for the future as one set among many, and it brings the workings of our society closer to the workings of our minds.

That's pretty dramatic, isn't it? I wish I'd written it. It's actually written by Tim Burners-Lee, who as you know invented the worldwide web. So I guess he would know.

Freed from the routine tasks of classifying knowledge of ordering data and cataloging resources, we can in his view use our minds and our creativity to bounce ideas off one another in a kind of global version of that wonderful chain reaction experiment you did in high school with the mouse traps and the ping pong balls. This is really very exciting. It is hyper-thinking as much as it is hyper-linking.

The problem, however, and I see this as one who has to talk with a lot of arts and cultural institutions on a daily basis. The problem for much of the arts and the humanities and for the institutions that serve and represent them is that our culture often tends to place a premium on hoarding knowledge and ideas and not on freely sharing them. I think this is a problem David wrestles with minute by minute.

It sounds harsh, and we certainly believe in widespread publication, exhibition, performance and the sharing of the products of creativity and the artifacts of culture. We care passionately about access. Obviously this is part of my job. We care about the health of theatres, about the health of museums and performance spaces and small publishing houses and university presses that disseminate serious literature and scholarship. We care about dance companies. We care about science centers, and we care institutions like this one that is giving us a chance to talk today.

But the discussion always seems to be, or quite frequently seems to be about entrepreneurship at the level of the individual institution. I think this is something that the networked world is going to make it harder and harder for us to do.

Maxwell Anderson, who many of you probably know, wrote in a recent issue of [inaudible] that was devoted to American museums. You know Max quite well, I'm sure. "While the corporate environment mandates streamlined planning and cross departmental information retrieval, the museum environment leaves ample room for fiefdoms and favorites, a system that rewards individual entrepreneurship over teamwork." And individual entrepreneurship, he believes, is rapidly becoming a managerial luxury that most museums, and by extension most cultural institutions of the future, will no longer be able to afford.

I am under no illusions about how divisive and potentially explosive these issues can be. Cultural institutions rightly pride themselves on their record of innovation, uniqueness and creativity. It's what makes their reputations and it's what gets them grants quite frankly. And it is what attracts audiences.

However, I think that in the context of a rapidly evolving networked digital environment, we have to discuss as seriously and systematically as we can the need for institutions in the arts and in the humanities to devise new paradigms for collaboration, cooperation, new paradigms for joint initiatives that permit these institutions to preserve their intellectual integrity while at the same time taking advantage of the digital tools available to them.

This is not going to come as a surprise to anybody here. This is probably why you are all here. You probably already know this. You have the opportunity to listen to people who know a lot more than I do about these issues. I am anxious to hear what they have to say as much as you are.

But I think it is equally important as we talk about crucial issues of policy, of the digital divide, of the First Amendment, of intellectual property to look at some concrete example of innovation in the use of technology as a way of helping cultural institutions redefine themselves. I'll give you two brief examples.

The first comes from a publication that we did in our program at the Commerce Department called "How Access Benefits Children." I just want to give you a little example. This is an e-mail that came in from a kid named Adam. He's 12 years old. He said, "My name is Adam. I am a 12-year-old seventh grader at North Country Junior High School." This is in Vermont. "I am writing a piece of music in performing arts class. Everyone in my class is writing a piece in four, four time, but I chose to write mine in three-quarter time. I wrote the piece by thinking of an eight measure musical phrase in my head. This first eight measure phrase was a kind of question. Then I made up the answer to that question."

And with these words, Adam begins a dialogue with a professional composer, with teachers and with other students, not just in his own school but throughout the state of Vermont. And over the next month his peers, his teachers, his mentors will go to their computers, listen to his composition, which he calls "Rhondo," and read his explanation of the creative ideas behind it. Then they will tell him how the piece affects them. They will respond to his questions about how to embellish his melody and they will offer details suggestions, sometimes pinpointing specific notes that should be changed.

At one point a professional composer will even compose a suggested revision and send it back to him for him to consider, and he will incorporate some of his suggestions into his work, and he will explain politely why he disagrees with the composer about other parts of it. Finally, he will announce his composition is finished. He will thank his advisers. He will report that he is going to play it on a piano at a real recital and he will invite others to do so themselves.

These are kids in Vermont that are using computers not just to compose music but to share their work with their peers, their teachers. Similar projects are harnessing computer networks to teach kids visual arts, creative writing. Soon there is going to be a project that will create a kind of online theatre performance, and they are even starting to venture into dance as well.

You can hear a lot of this work on their website. You can hear it on our website, and I will give you the address if you want to hear some spectacular composition by kids age 12 through 18.

This project, which is called the Millennium Project in Vermont, demonstrates how computer networking is bringing new opportunities to kids, but it is important to understand that this is more than technology. This is not a project about technology. It is a project about teachers and other adults devoting their time in planning how to use the tools to enhance education and work closely with the kids.

Another example is dance, something you don't think that you can do online. But, in fact, they are going to try this in Vermont. We are already seeing it happen in the Twin Cities and in Minnesota. Ballet Arts Minnesota in the fall of 1997 with a grant from U.S. West Foundation took young dancers in two Minnesota communities, one called Plymouth and one called La Crescent. I don't know if you know where they are. If you do, then you really know Minnesota because they are way out in the country.

These kids are simultaneously learning dance technique from master teachers who are in Minneapolis. In addition, they are able to improvise new choreography with their dance partners so that kids in one town are able to improvise against other ideas by kids in another town 200 miles away, and as far as I can tell, this is the first time this kind of technology has been used to do this.

It formed the basis for a grant we made that involves the Minnesota Conservatory of the Arts, Beyond Broadcast, Arts Services, the Chris Aiken Dance Company, the Higher Education Telecommunication Consortium, Minnesota Public Schools and a bunch of other organizations, including Ohio University.

The important part of this to understand is that what you are seeing are new models of collaboration. These have implications not just for pedagogy but also for policy. The Vermont project developed out of a state mandate that the schools should provide a certain level of arts education. They didn't tell them how they were going to pay for it, and you know how schools normally do this. They scrape for money locally.

What the Vermont schools did instead was to work with the Arts Council, which in Vermont is not a state agency. It is unusual in that respect. Worked with a number of private organizations and with artists and composers to develop a networked solution to a local problem. Think locally, network globally. That's the way it worked. And this gives new meaning to the term "artists in residence." These artists are in residence where they live, but they are also being able to mentor kids online.

We are seeing in the museum world the Art Museum Network, a good example, linking scholarship to educational resources using the interactive potential of art museums. We are seeing them posting museum calendars online, other kinds of information. They are working with AMICO, the consortium that you work with. It underscores the argument that museums -- and this again is Max Anderson's words -- "Museums can choose to inhabit an indexed world instead of a hyperlinked one but the penalties will be the compromised accuracy of our findings, their data quality and our potential absence from the consciousness of other researchers who ply their trade online."

We are looking for new models. New models that avoid the prospect of arts institutions simply turning themselves into intellectual theme parks and downgrading and denigrating the value of what they do. But rather new synergies that pool the resources of these institutions together which bypass the old administrative separateness which has too often hampered arts organizations to take what we have learned from the commercial world in terms of collaborating online and make it possible for arts and cultural institutions to reach out in ways that would never have been possible otherwise.

Mr. Shapiro

We turn next to William Gilcher. Bill Gilcher is Director of the North American Projects with and about the media at the Goethe-Institut in Washington, D.C., an international non-profit organization that fosters an appreciation of the German language and promotes intercultural dialogue.

Prior to joining the Institut, Dr. Gilcher advised the White House on arts appointments in 1993, a particularly distinguished episode in his career. He'll explain. And served as Media Program Officer for the NEH from 1984 to 1989. Bill.

William Gilcher

Director of North American Projects

with and about the Media

Goethe-Institut

Thank you, Michael.

Yes, the Goethe-Institut a lot of people don't know what that is. It is based in Munich. It is a not-for-profit organization with a contract with the German government for cultural exchange programs and the fostering of the German language working with teachers of German throughout the world. There are about 125 centers around the world. Here in North America there are 9 and I work at the one in Washington where we have a special emphasis on media related issues, discussions and projects, Internet, television, radio.

Actually when I took the job 7 years ago I didn't know, well, the internet wasn't there really. I was trying to figure out to use e-mail at the time, but it has become, of course, an increasingly important part of my work and all of your work I expect as well.

In this brief history in these past few years, we have seen really a phenomenal growth of online education and possibilities for cultural organizations, people involved in culture everywhere where there is access to the Internet. One of the things that we've noted in this short time, and this has become also apparent in the discussions here at the Center for Arts and Culture, is that we have moved very quickly to the web being a very strong tool for institutional presentation, both for the for-profit and also for the not-for-profit sector. We have seen, we have experienced how the Internet is becoming modeled on commercial and advertising models like commercial television and radio. And we now are witnessing people writing us letters or e-mail saying, "Please don't send me any more e-mail even if you think I ought to know about this event. I don't really want to be on the list anymore." Maybe that's a topic for another time with list serves as fascinating as they always are.

The web is also, of course, a tremendous and growing source of cultural and educational data and that ordering of data into what we call information which must be sorted for accuracy. One of my colleagues here on the panel pointed to that, the need for the teacher to actually change the role that he or she plays in the classroom now in the life of students. We need a kind of blend of teachers and librarians.

When we look at the source of cultural and educational data, it's really totally astounding. Just today I saw an article and heard a radio piece about the new website in German, for instance. It's called lostart.de, which is a way to search for paintings and other cultural objects that were pillaged by the Nazis. So there is a whole site where people can got and do research on this. It's not perfect. I looked at it and noticed that the English is not too good. The German is a lot better if you speak German.

Or we have another project -- I was not involved in that project at all. We have another project on the Holocaust education in German schools that is a website as well as CD Rom. All of this kind of information for various kinds of people are now out there and we're getting more and more and more of it.

We're also noticing that contrary to some of our fears that the language of the web is no longer just English. There are more and more sites popping up in more and more languages, and there is extraordinary richness and variety of web offerings from other cultures outside of the United States, outside of North America, outside of Europe. And that is an interesting phenomenon. It is particularly interesting because it is beyond our control. Isn't that terrific?

There are at the same time real dangers inherent in the globalization of the marketplace for education. I wanted to say a couple of words about that because that's something that we are concerned about at the Goethe-Institut.

Do we really want to end up with Third World basically outsourcing their higher education to virtual universities in North America and Europe? What would that world look like if it was left entirely to the marketplace to determine? If I am a student in Costa Rico, and I was talking with a professional from there a few months ago, saying, "Well, we don't really need to have local universities anymore because actually everybody can take all the classes they want on the Internet and we just need some people around here occasionally to counsel them as to what they're doing."

Well, that could happen. I mean, this is a catastrophic event if it were to happen, and yet there are also some advantages we have to talk about what this might mean. For instance, would the language of education become only English, French, eventually Spanish, maybe a little Portuguese and someplace down the line Japanese and Chinese? Would all other languages cease to be languages of scholarship, of academics, of poets and writers? I don't think so, but these are the kinds of dangers that we have to think about.

At the Goethe-Institut we have started exploring some of these issues bringing in international, intercultural issues into conferences on online education, on online culture. Here in the Washington area, for instance, the conference that was at the University of Maryland, University College, last fall and will be again this fall on online education and virtual universities, or the consortium on school networking conference, that sort of thing. This is one of our goals is to bring in an international, intercultural perspective and dialogue to these conferences and to these meetings where people are getting together and talking about their issues.

Our areas of concerns are largely in the arts and humanities, foreign language education, because in the online environment and online education these disciplines seem to be playing hooky an awful lot. There is a frightening tendency towards a marginalization of the arts and the humanities within the new virtual universities. This is because of the market driven nature of online education. There are courses in technology and computer science, of course, way ahead of the rest because those people who are doing it, first of all, know how to do it. That helps. Second, there is a rush towards filling a need for credentialing for filling in knowledge lacks, for getting one more certificate so I can get that raise or that appointment.

This is changing, however, and there are more courses, more dialogue about the arts and the humanities and online education happening. Even the more traditionally conservative faculty members in the arts and the humanities are starting to realize that an online forum that brings together people from all kinds of different backgrounds is an extraordinary opportunity for interchange of ideas. You have to fight against the coldness of the medium sometimes, but there are real possibilities for what even the Greeks called the forum.

Maybe even ethical issues might be addressed one of these days. Who knows?

So we need to take advantage of the diversity of participants both among the faculty and among the students who potentially could sit together in an online forum and be from Australia, India, Africa, Europe, North America, South America, everywhere else, and talking about a similar subject, if we can remember that we don't all have the same term, the same definition of what those basic things are.

The word "culture" is one of my favorites. Whenever we talk in Europe or in the United States, we bring together people to talk about cultural topics. We realize usually at the end of a day and a half that nobody was talking about the same thing really. We were all talking about our own idea of what the word "culture" means. So it's very, very important to keep that in mind, but it has such a potential.

E-culture is becoming its own thing, although I do think we're going to have to drop the use of these e-things. Everybody agree? Yes. E-mail is alright, but e-culture is not so cool.

We has non-profit cultural organizations can shape, however, this culture that is developing. We can insist that it be multi-lingual, that it be multi-cultural. One way is by making sure that people from countries outside of North America and Europe are involved and that they have access to the web, they have access to these things, that they are providers of content, that we can help them feel free to express themselves on the web so that we can also profit from it. Not just delivering things to other people but actually hearing other points of view.

We have to struggle, another thing that we're involved in at the Goethe-Institut more and more, to reinvent curiosity. We have to get students and ourselves interested again in the other, what is different from us. How are things different in various places around the world and among other peoples.

In general, I think the web needs us. It needs arts. It needs the humanities. It needs emotion. It needs history. It needs art. It really needs memory. Thus, for me sites, for instance, run by radio networks where their archives are sound features are among the most interesting that are happening right now. They bring information. Yes. We all know how good the web is at doing that. But they also bring the experience and sounds of the real world and real human experience into my life.

The web needs to find more connections to the magic and drama of the real world so that being more than a useful tool, it becomes an extension of our hands and minds as we go about creating and expressing culture. Our goal as non-profit cultural institutions must be, I think, to make the Internet a cultural space where artists and thinkers are welcome, where emotion, the arts and the humanities, all kinds of cultures lead us as creators and as users -- because that's one of the interesting things. We're doing this stuff all the time, both creating and using. To make the jump really, to help us make that jump from data to information to knowledge and maybe even the chance a little bit of wisdom.

Mr. Shapiro

Thank you, Bill.

I mentioned in my introduction where there is e-culture there is e-commerce, where there is e-commerce there is inevitably e-philanthropy. To bring us up to date on this topic, we have Michele Cavataio. Michele is the Senior Director of Corporate Relations for America Online, and in her position she assists the company and the America Online Foundation in insuring that the new online medium is one that benefits all members of society. She works on projects that help to build bridges across the digital divide.

Ms. Cavataio created the premier non-profit e-philanthropy portal Helping.org which helps individuals find opportunities to volunteer time or donate money. Michele.

Michele Cavataio

Senior Director of Corporate Relations

America Online

Thank you.

I wanted to talk today about the impact of the Internet on the non-profit sector. We've been hearing a lot of talk lately about the digital divide, this gap between the technology haves and have-nots. There are fears that our schools and our children are falling behind, that America's workers need to keep pace with the new technology, that certain demographic segments are lagging in their access to technology and their ability to keep up with changing workforce demands.

I would submit that equally importantly when we consider this digital divide is the fate of our non-profit institutions. Non-profit organizations in many cases are both perpetuators of the digital divide and victims of it. On the one hand, the non-profit community is often technologically unsophisticated and sometimes rejects the transformation role that technology is playing in society. Funding organizations, for example, fail to promote technological readiness for grant recipients. Service providers fail to integrate technology into their delivery of services. Other non-profits often neglect the value and opportunity of information technology to enhance their missions.

On the other hand, one could view the non-profit sector as the victim of the digital divide deserving of all the education, training and technological support that we seek to provide individuals. Even in the most technology savvy of communities, Silicon Valley, only about 60 percent of non-profits are networked. And as you probably suspect, well funded organizations are more likely to have computer networks than small organizations. Additionally, there is a gulf between types of organizations. Health and human services non-profits are more likely to be networked than arts and cultural organizations.

Today, the Internet is becoming essential to everyday life as the phone and the TV. Right now, 53 percent of U.S. households own a PC, up from 39 percent in 1995. Already 37 percent of households have online access when just a few years ago most Americans didn't know what online access was. Five years ago, AOL had one million members. Today, we have 22 million members. Five years ago, our members spent an average of one hour per week online. Today, they spend one hour per day online.

The Internet is clearly reshaping our lives in enormous ways, and while certain sectors may be slower to adopt the new technology, it is likely to have a profound impact on our non-profit institutions. Even though it's still in its early days, we can see that this medium holds the promise of dramatically expanding the quantity and quality of philanthropy.

A study by Kraver Matthews found that 50 million Internet users give money or time to social causes, but only 3.5 million have so far donated to a cause online. The Internet can integrate service and giving into millions of peoples' lives in ways that had never before been possible. It can bring art and issues to people around the world who never would have had access or a voice before, and it can substantially improve the ability of non-profit organizations to pursue their missions and to address core inequities in society.

The Internet has the potential to dramatically change the way non-profits and cultural institutions do business. I am going to talk through just a couple of ideas how this might happen.

First, the Internet can give voice to issues that might not otherwise be heard. Whole campaigns around issues have been launched online. Even the smallest organization in rural China can voice its issues and reach millions of people around the world.

Second, the Internet is a tremendous tool for building community. It has the potential to organize and activate communities around important issues. Non-profits like the Environmental Defense Fund realize this potential. They have opportunities for taking action right on their website. On their site, you can plug in your zip code and find out how polluted your community is. Many sites now allow you to e-mail members of Congress about issues of concern or sign up to volunteer for a cause.

Third, the Internet demands two-way relationships. The Internet is not a digital version of a school PA system that allows the principal to blast a one-way message into classrooms. It is a two-way medium. It fosters conversation, even argument, and sometimes that can get a little messy, but the alternatives are really worse.

So we shouldn't use this medium as simply another way to command and control. We should use it to give all the stakeholders a voice. In the new economy, nobody is as smart as everybody.

Fourth, those non-profits that use the Internet to build partnerships will have the greatest opportunity for success. Just as the business community is finding that partnerships allow organizations with differing expertise to build on that expertise, the non-profit community has begun to recognize similar opportunities for collaboration.

Fifth, in the same way that the Internet has affected retail establishments and automobile purchasing, for example, I believe that the Internet will encourage if not force non-profits to be more transparent about what goes on behind the scenes.

Sixth, unfortunately I think we are likely to see some amount of dislocation as some organizations dismiss the new technology as irrelevant and find themselves marginalized.

Finally, technology is an important thing, but it is not the only thing. Technology is a tool, not a miracle. Yes, the Internet offers the promise that non-profit organizations will be able to perform important functions in pursuit of their mission more effectively. That includes fund raising, recruitment, advocacy, publicity and every other part of managing an organization. But that greater efficiency is not what is revolutionary.

The truly tranformative impact that the Internet will have on non-profits is in building community, and we know that the strongest communities in the world are those where people share a common passion. I believe that if the non-profit community pushes forward with integrating this new technology, ten years from now the most powerful online communities will be those devoted to public interests.

We must ask policymakers to help your cultural institutions and non-profits gain access to the technology that is fueling the growth of the rest of our economy. If we continue to let these organizations fall behind, we will fail to address the digital divide and we will fail to build the stronger, more passionate communities that the Internet promises.

Mr. Shapiro

Thank you, Michele.

Now is our opportunity to I guess for me to engage the panel, and I will do that forthwith.

The first question is directed at David largely because he let off and because he raised an important theme. It was also mirrored in Gigi's opening comments. Whether the growing commercialization of the net is squeezing out cultural opportunities on the net or, in fact, increasing them. In my opening remarks, I talked about the emergence of what at least Wall Street analysts tell us a highly affluent, two-thirds female, highly educated, well traveled and brand loyal culture seeking audience. In a different period, they were called the culture vultures.

Now, responding to this audience Comcast Interactive Capital Group recently invested $3.75 million transforming culturefinder.com from a simple arts guide to a major online e-commerce company that combines a comprehensive arts listing and content with an online ticketing agency. And when I last visited this site, I guess it was back a year ago, there were 350,000 events listed in more than 1,300 cities.

Now, is this the type of development that is welcome or is it crowding out opportunities in the non-profit sector as they begin to kind of tentatively appear on the net? It's for David, but anyone on the panel can come at it.

Mr. Green

I think we have already seen many examples in which new activity, if you like, shocks the non-profit cultural world into a certain kind of mode. I think famously before I started this job there was the incidence of the, I think even before it was Corbis Corporation, somehow scaring the art museum world into thinking that the museum world was sitting on billions of dollars worth of cultural assets and Corbis started by asking for exclusive rights to digitize museums' cultural assets. Some museums were interested and most of them were totally scared because they had never thought this through. However, it then I think inspired or shocked the museum community into thinking about the potential of its digital assets.

My own take of what happened subsequently was that that perhaps was responsible for many of the museums' fear of what would happen to their assets online as they felt that perhaps they, as I think they were generally overvalued, but by this time I think museums perhaps have more of a sense of a realistic evaluation of their digital assets, and moves like the Art Museum Image Consortium, which is a consortium, Michael, of what, 50 art museums.

Mr. Shapiro

Yes, a little less than that, but we'll claim credit for 50.

Mr. Green

In which museums actually realize that they probably won't end up with very much financially out of developing a mechanism for distributing their product. That was a very long answer to, I think, imply that major corporate moves would probably shock us into thinking about what we can do with our own materials.

Mr. Shapiro

I guess the question is still open. Shock us into being fortress cultural institutions or into new cross marketing arrangements. When I look out over the landscape both from a kind of private side corporate perspective and from a kind of non-profit perspective, I see precious few of those alliances beginning to develop. Perhaps some of the other panel members might see more out there.

Mr. Druker

I think there is a tendency in the non-profit world and in the arts world to value entrepreneurship as long as you don't call it that, you know, as long as you pretend that you're not really doing it. In my little world, we've seen a lot of examples of community networks developing into community marketplaces. There is nothing to prevent a locality from making it possible for local crafts people, for small arts organizations to market their work, whether what they're marketing are seats in a theatre or whether they are marketing artifacts. There is no reason why that can't be done with taste and with gusto and with a profit in mind.

When you go to a craft fair, when you go to small shows, when you buy things and you come back from your vacation saying, "Look what I got," you know it's always that you discovered. You discovered it physically, and discovering it online should be equally as exciting. And so we are beginning to see this happening particularly in smaller communities that have developed very thriving community networks.

Tourism is an obvious example of where arts organizations, particularly performing arts organizations can make a killing. I mean, the point is that it comes back to what I said before. The individual organizations are going to have to act collaboratively. They're going to have to act in unison, and that can often mean arts organizations acting in partnership with organizations in their own community that they might not otherwise form any kind of alliance with because there is only going to be one network locally. There is one web. There is one Internet. You are part of it. You plug into it. You make yourself accessible through it. But you want to do it in a way that is going to give people a chance to find you.

By every little storefront operation, and I use that metaphorically, trying to have its own presence on the web, I think that that's not the way it's going to happen. It's going to happen in a much more systematic way, and this can be a good model for collaboration among organizations, whether they're thematic, whether they're geographic, whatever.

I mean, that's one answer. It's not the only answer, but it is something that we're seeing happening right now.

Mr. Shapiro

You need strategic alliances.

Mr. Druker

Absolutely.

Mr. Shapiro

Bill, do you have a comment on this one?

Mr. Gilcher

Well, it's a couple of things that occur to me. One is that we don't have a whole lot of experience yet with advertising on the web. That is we're at the beginning of this but it's happening extremely fast. It took the non-profit sector in radio and television a long time to debate exactly what is the role of the corporate funder, how do you give appropriate credit, and I don't think we have ever come to a definitive answer about it but we have some guidelines and lots and lots of discussion about it. The use of this new medium, the web, as an advertising medium on that model as a way to support not-for-profit ventures is a whole area for intense discussion, but we'd better do it fast if there is going to be anything meaningful happening there.

I don't have an answer only that comment.

On this same point, I'm thinking another extraordinary temptation has happened to me in the web and that is the chains of independent bookstores, used bookstores, this is the networking kind of thing that you're talking about. These people around the country, around the world, in fact, who have the huge dusty piles of books and some of them, many of them are now on the web with their offerings and they are linked through a site. So it's a horrible temptation for me to go in and find that book that has been out of print forever and somebody told me about it and I can't get it. And now I can get it.

This is a wonderful thing and it does take advantage of this kind of networking. So it's out there. It doesn't have to be Amazon. It doesn't have to be bn.com. It can be these little guys.

The poets who can now get their work out to people anywhere. If I hear that somebody has a terrific poem, book of poetry, I can have access to it. It's wonderful, fabulous. At the same time, I get a little annoyed when I got to Gutenberg.de and look for a major text of a classic writer and the whole thing is full of banners for advertisers. I mean, I understand but at the same time, it's annoying.

Mr. Druker

On the web, nobody knows where you are. What that means is the end user doesn't care where the information is coming from. So if you see a website that possible provides you with the greatest array of a particular kind of art or a particular kind of craft, you don't have to know that each individual item may be coming from a different source. Somebody is handling that for you. It's the middle man function that websites provides. It's the portal function that they provide. So, yes, in some ways it's going to destroy the concept of the small, little out of the way store that you go into and find something, because now all those small, little out of the way stores really have the potential to become part of one big array of offerings and the end user doesn't want to know, really doesn't want to know that he or she may be looking at information coming from a variety of locations. That destroys what's so convenient and accessible about the web. So that's why again the collaboration can be global. It doesn't have to be simply an American phenomenon or German phenomenon or whatever. It really --

End of Side 1

Mr. Shapiro

Bill, as long we we've got you next to the microphone, it did occur to me in my introduction that the Goethe-Institut, one of the missions is, of course, to foster an appreciation of the German language. Yet the net by its very nature is a dominantly English language forum. Is that an issue? Do we need to worry about this as a cultural homogenizer?

Mr. Gilcher

Yes and no. Actually as I was saying in my other remarks, increasingly the web is not only an English phenomenon. The growth in websites in German, in French and Spanish is extraordinary, but when you look at the number of websites that are in Finnish, that are in Estonian, these things are also expanding. We just aren't aware of them because I don't read Estonian so I don't go to those websites but they're there. It's really interesting how people are excited about the web, excited about using English, but also then come back and say, "Well, actually I want to reach people, an audience, I want to reach a market in my area. I want to talk to these people, and I can't do that in English. I don't want to do that in English." So there is a reaction there.

There is a problem with lesser used languages in the web because too often younger people think, "I only want to learn English now." Within Europe there is a policy issue of how can we foster the speaking of several languages, and they have to fight to get kids to recognize that it's not just my language plus English but it's also my language plus German or Italian or Spanish or whatever.

Mr. Shapiro

We're getting to that point where we simply have to open it up to the audience. I wanted to pose two quick questions for the panel to make sure that we have our kind of first sweep through. A real quick one for Donald Druker. I was in a cab in New York City during I guess it was last Tuesday's heart stopping 500 point dip in the NASDAQ and I think an equally 500 point dip in the Dow Jones. This is the engine that has highly capitalized American websites.

Mr. Druker

I can't tell you where I was when that happened.

Mr. Shapiro

Of course, a recent wag pointed out that the over regulation by government agencies was probably at fault for this market drop. But where do you see the future going in kind of capitalization of sites? Is there a role for government subsidy here or is this a marketplace phenomenon?

Mr. Druker

Well, since I'm in the business of subsidizing sites, I guess I would say there is a role for it unless until I reach retirement age. But really I think that government funding, and I spent a lot of years at the National Endowment for the Arts and half of the people I worked with are sitting over there. And I work in public philanthropy now at the Commerce Department, and I have always felt that government funding in these areas is catalytic. You try to fund good ideas and you hope that the good idea will generate enough support locally not only to make it work but also to institutionalize and sustain it.

I will give you one example. We funded a project in Los Angeles called "Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles," which is revolutionizing the way ordinary citizens are able to use information about housing, about property, about the way regulations are working, the way inspections are going. They are really going to be able to get the information that's going to give them power to take control of their neighborhoods.

Well, I just got an e-mail from the director of that project who says that he is now being flown at government expense, not ours, but the Brazilian government expense down to Sao Paulo where they would like to replicate that project in Brazil. He is then going to go to Norway where he is being asked to speak on how this data, these mapping techniques that they have developed to be used. So it's the model, it's the technological model, the translation part is going to be fairly easy. And I think it's important to point out that just because a site is located in the United States doesn't mean it's in English. That site that I'm talking about, "Neighborhood Knowledge LA," is available in Spanish, English and Korean because those are the end users they're serving.

So I think there is a role for government, but it is clearly a catalytic role and I think it's still the role of funding good ideas, of encouraging good ideas, particularly risky ideas, and then giving the recipients the tools and the wherewithal to get some breathing space to develop the idea to show that it will work and then it has to eventually stand on its own. If it does, fine.

Mr. Shapiro

Thanks, Donald. One last question for the panel and then we'll open it up. As you heard in Michele's day-to-day life, she straddles both the for-profit side and the non-profit side, America Online and the America Online Foundation, and in preparing for today's session, I noticed the following site and I just thought I'd elicit a comment. For-profit, e-commerce companies are being formed to assist in charitable organizations in their fundraising efforts. I am thinking of planetgive.com which is a website that is in essence a charitable cybermall. Their web visitors can purchase products from any number of retailers knowing that a percentage of the sale goes to the charity of their choice. Are these kind of partnerships the wave of the future? Is it going to be philanthropy old style just on the net?

Ms. Cavataio

This is a great question because I think I get asked this question almost every day by non-profit organizations who are right now being flooded with marketing and phone calls to partner with this new for-profit organization, whether it's igive.com, greatergood.com, and there are dozens of them that have sprouted up in the past year. They promise to help internets largely raise money.

I typically caution them that they need to look really closely at what they're being offered. I mean, I think that non-profits need revenue streams, and to some extent these opportunities do provide new ways to bring in revenues. However, some of the organizations can be rather unscrupulous. They take large cuts of the donations that go in, and I think it's really important for non-profits to realize the equity of their name, the importance that their name holds and not to sell it easily to these organizations.

So I think it's a hugely growing market. I don't know how long all of these organizations are going to be sustainable that have grown over the past year. We at the AOL Foundation have created our philanthropy site. It's called helping.org as Michael mentioned. It's a completely non-profit site. So we don't really see ourselves competing with the for-profit ventures. We don't take any cuts. We take no commissions or fees so everything get passed right through from the donor to the organization. So I think it's growing fast but it's something for organizations to look very cautiously on.

Mr. Shapiro

Thank you. That is helpful.

Well, all too often I find myself commuting home at 8:00 P.M. and on National Public Radio here comes the Derrick McGinty Show and they say that portions of this have been pre-recorded -- not anymore, I haven't been commuting lately -- pre-recorded and we're not taking questions from the audience. That is not the case here. We are here to take questions from the audience so the mikes are open. I think the way we have to do this is to step up to the microphone, identify yourself and direct the question to one or more panelists.

Dick Arnt

My name is Dick Arnt, retired cultural diplomat. Mr. Gilcher has done us a favor by reminding us that the world "culture" has many, many meanings and they're rarely defined, including in this room and throughout this while series. I would ask the panel whether they would like to fill that gap.

The second insight is this. We swim in a world in which the word globalization is with us. Next weekend we will see it in particularly sharp effect. It is obviously having an impact in the rest of the world and particularly in a world in which half of the world's population has not yet made a phone call. I would like to ask the panel to reflect also on that implication, because the two most recent panels here have not mentioned the impact of all of this on other countries.

Mr. Shapiro

Panelists?

Mr. Green

I guess I have to confess that I haven't developed a working definition of "culture" other than the belief structures and products of a group of people, whether it be those living in a particular neighborhood or those living in a very large proportion of the globe. Certainly the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage works with a very broad and open definition of culture and increasingly I think the Internet has and the web has the potential to open that word, that definition as broadly as possible, and I think it's that overused imperative only connect which is usually only perhaps meant partially. It's not only about yourself connecting to the web. It's about all the multiple sites on the web connecting to each other and engaging in conversation.

I believe that one of the impacts of the Internet will in fact, or should be, to broaden our sense of what culture is and how many cultures can, if you like, be put into play. And I would like to add to what Bill was saying earlier about that.

Obviously that plays into the concept of globalization. I was actually at a conference in Kyoto that was all about how Kyoto could somehow -- what were the strategies that the cultural community, the libraries, archives and museums of Kyoto could put into play to counter globalization. By globalization I think they were actually meaning Disneyification. How can local culture, if you like, fight back, or how can local culture deploy itself effectively on the Internet.

And I think it's not enough necessarily just to say because of the Internet we can be there. One still has to find ways of activating it. I think the Internet is still to passive. It's still too one-way. And I think simply deploying one's cultural assets as a brochure with very little that activates it, that connects it to anything else, is one of the imperatives for us.

So that's my off-the-cuff response.

Mr. Shapiro

More takers?

Ms. Cavataio

Well, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo and I can tell you that the vision of ever seeing an Internet connection in my village is unimaginable. I think that you are absolutely right that this is an incredible challenge, but I think there are a few glimmers of hope. When we look at, for example, countries like Bangladesh that have been able to institute some interesting programs where they jump generations of technology so they weren't able to put in phone lines, so they are using wireless technology pretty successfully. And I think that it's visions like those that will make technology possible in some of our more remote and unconnected communities.

But I do really feel that those countries that make the investments in a technology infrastructure in especially training the people of those countries in technology, they will be highly rewarded because with the globalization of technology we see jobs moving all the time to India and other countries that have highly skilled technology workforces that can do simple work like data entry that is no longer really cost effective to do in the United States. So I think there is an enormous opportunity for countries to be investing in this area, but I think it is going to be incredibly difficult.

Mr. Gilcher[?]

We don't talk about culture as commodities. We talk about it as ways of thinking, ways of doing things, ways of confronting the world, and we take the position that communications networks are not delivery systems. They don't go in one direction. They go in both directions, and so we were hoping and we take very great pains to look at this when we review proposals. The degree to which the end user is as much a source of information, as much a source of ideas as the sponsoring organization. For that reason we define cultural institutions very broadly. We are not talking about high culture. We're not talking pop culture. We're talking about institutions that exist within a community that allow that community to look at itself and look at the world in particular ways, whether it's a science museum, whether it's a nature center, whether it's an organization in a neighborhood in Los Angeles that has a particular ethnic orientation and celebrates it through local organizations. The point is to give each of these organizations some method for channeling the values and insights and memory of their communities into this stream of information which is flowing in every direction at once.

Mr. Shapiro

Thank you. I see lots of interest out there, so perhaps we need to move on. Yes?

Mary Case

Hi, I'm Mary Case. I got kind of lost in defining culture as I was standing there. I think I maybe forgot my question.

Defining myself, I am certainly a culture vulture, an information junky, a lurker, a flamer and usually confused about technology even though I stand on the upside of the digital divide. My question is is there a difference in the people on one side or the other of the digital divide and the haves or have nots in the real world?

Mr. Druker

Are they different people? Are they a different species?

Ms. Case

Yes, is there a difference? I mean, is there any real difference between what we must do to close, if that's our goal, or cover the digital divide and what we must do for the people who have and have not, regardless of technology?

Mr. Druker

Addressing the question, I mean, in some ways since we kind of invented that term through one of our reports at Commerce I suppose we have to take responsibility for the term "digital divide," but really our society, and I'm talking about our global society as much as our own society here in America, is full of dysfunction, is full of gaps, is full of inequities. We have a tool at our disposal, and it's really not just one tool. It's a variety of tools. It's a variety of ways of exchanges information, ways of finding things out that makes it possible for people to get a kind of grip on their lives that maybe they wouldn't otherwise have.

Certainly the investment that needs to be made in getting that grip probably is a financial investment. It is also an emotional investment, a cultural investment and that's why I come back to saying the problem of the digital divide is not something that is going to be solved by assuming that every single individual will somehow make a decision at some point in her or her life that they no longer want to be offline. They want to be online.

It's going to have to be the work of cultural institutions and individuals who are close to the communities who can develop techniques for overcoming not just the economic barriers that are obvious but also the cultural barriers, the social barriers, the emotional barriers, the physical barriers. There are all kinds of barriers and they're not all economic that keep people from being part of this online world. I can give you numerous examples of barriers that exist that are frustrating as hell to the people who have to confront these barriers, because they are not financial barriers. They are other kinds of barriers.

Mr. Shapiro

I can certainly associate with that comment. Long before there was a digital divide in the technological sense, I think there was a cultural divide. There is a marvelous essay that Robert Coles did an early collection edited by Sherman Lee on understanding the art museum where he talks about the impediments to accessing knowledge within the arm museum of a patient of his who was not empowered to use that. I think the challenge before the cultural community is then double because we have to talk about how to kind of access cultural capital even as we begin to talk about how find technological access. My sense is that the problem is only becoming more complex. Bill, did you have more?

Mr. Gilcher

Just very briefly. It seems to me that the problem there that bothers me is more the economic one rather than the cultural one. I think it's a problem for education and training when children or adults because they don't have access to the technology that other people do are stuck behind someplace. We are solving that to some degree in the U.S. with e-rate and with a lot of these innovations. I think that it's extremely important. How that gets spread out in other parts of the world is a huge other topic.

The culture ones, I mean, personally every time there comes a big, new invention in the Internet I keep thinking, "I think I'll buy myself some paper and a pen. I'll throw out my computer and I'll write on a scratch," because I don't have any papyrus. You know what I mean? There is a kind of feeling that, oh, this is too much. I want to get back to really saying something and not worrying about this other stuff.

So for me the big problem is there because we will always people who just aren't really interested in the technology and find other ways to express them. As a matter of fact, I worry about losing ways of thinking because everybody has moved into this age. I worry about people in a rural area deciding that living there with their old ways of thinking, ways of relating to the land, to place, to people, to plants growing, to children is suddenly going to be changed and not necessarily for the better because they are now part of this e-culture. I don't know.

Mr. Shapiro

More comments? I'm conscious that I'd like to everyone in the line a chance to speak up. Michele, you had something?

Ms. Cavataio

Well, I was just going to suggest there is an interesting study that came out a couple of weeks ago by the Children's Partnership that looked at the barriers to Internet use by low income communities. They identified language and relevant content as two really important areas, and I think I have to say I'm on this camp rather than camp that relevant cultural content is really essential to bringing people online. I wholeheartedly disagree with Bill that rural communities will have, I don't know, disincentive to stay in their communities because of the online medium. I'm not sure if that's exactly what you were saying, but I think the online medium does exactly the opposite. It empowers people to live wherever they want to live, to have a level playing field for rural communities and for urban communities in terms of resources available, information available, cultural content that's available to them.

Mr. Druker

As long as you have got kids shooting each other for Tommy Hilfiger jackets, a website is not going to save your community. You have got to have some mechanism for reaching out to kids. I was sitting in the front office of an organization called the Chaos Network in Leewood Park in L.A. where kids were shuffling in with the hooded sweatshirts and the sunglasses and they were coming in, "Yo, what's up?" and they were all coming in to use the computers to get online because they were linked to other organizations and because it was all being taken care of by the energy and the creativity of a large arts organizations called Cal Arts that had linked these neighborhood together. Now, these kids were doing things online because there was relevant things for them to do. There were exciting things for them to do. They weren't out on the street doing something else. This was an alternative for them. It was because the organization which was close to the street which knew what the kids wanted to do were giving them ways to express themselves, to create online, and that was the way it was going to happen, not that somehow sprinkling money on these communities and buying people computers and hoping that there would be this tremendous attitudinal shift that that was going to be the answer. The answer is you've got to do the work.

Mr. Shapiro

The good news is that we have time for two more questions. The better news is that after that we can continue the discussion in the lobby over drinks and nibbles. Yes?

Eleanor Fink

My name is Eleanor Fink. For more than a decade I have been involved in playing a catalytic role to get organizations to collaborate and create digital cultural gateways. It has inspired things NINCH and AMICO and projects like LA Culture Net. So I don't think there is any question in my mind that the web offers a space that be filled with creativity and to help people understand and deepen the appreciation of culture.

But I think when talk about e-commerce and e-culture we are raising an economic question, and we then have to think about how culture can compete with other sectors in terms of turning a profit, income revenue generating. With that, I think we do have to think about culture as a commodity, and I think unfortunately that that may be a really hot issue.

So I'd like to ask the panel, do you feel that culture as a commodity is a possibility, or is this now totally against what we would like to as a policy see happen?

Mr. Gilcher

My initial reaction is no. A commodity is dead. Culture is alive. Culture is about, if you like, what you do with an object. It's about the stories around an object. It's about the objects play together. That's the role of a museum curator. It's the role I think of anybody organizing a web presence is to dynamize, activate cultural objects where many of these objects will be sounds, music, but I think you know what I mean.

One of my strongest interests right now is exactly in trying to develop sustainability models, new business models, new cost recovery models. Ester Dyson is perhaps most famous for her litany of possible ways of making money on the web. You give the object away. You pay for the value added services. You find new ways of recovering costs.

There are some examples, some that I mentioned. I don't know whether others have other examples, but I would I guess advocate that, no, culture is not to do with commodities. It has to do with keeping objects alive. I'd be very interested in the discussion on that.

Mr. Shapiro

Before we turn to our last questioner, Bill.

Mr. Gilcher

The issue of cultural object as a commodity reminds me also there is a kind of trend toward the experience as a commodity. This is linked to ideas about shopping centers and theme parks and even downtown tours of Washington. I was at a presentation yesterday that the people come and they want to learn something, and this can be packaged as a commodity, this experience, which has got a wonderful side to it but also a very scary side if it's sort of replicable, if it's not seen that the experience around this cup as a cultural object is seen, if it's limited by this, if we encourage people to limit it rather than think not only is it all these things that I might be able to list if I were really good about what this cup means, but it's also 20 other things that only you as a viewer, only you as a user can inform yourself and then me about.

That happens with commercialization of experience and of culture and commodification I guess is another awful term for it. But it's something that does concern me.

Mr. Druker

A culture produces commodities. I have stacks and stacks of CDs at home, and they're all commodities. I paid for them and they become music when I listen to them. They are exciting and I am encouraged to go and listen to the real thing, the real thing being the live performance, if possible and if the performer, the particular artist that I'm listening to happens to be in town or I happen to be going to a city where that performer is going to be performing live. There is a way in which the commodity links me to an experience. It's replicable, sure, but ultimately I crave the real thing from time to time in the say way I can see thousands of productions of works of art but if I have a chance to go to the museum and see the thing itself, I'll take that opportunity. It's the way it's marketed. I'm sorry. It's the way you pitch it. Culture is not a commodity. Culture can yield commodities and it can even be made into a commodity itself. But I think that as long as we understand there is a distinction between the commodity as a thing and the culture which is a living, breathing collection of ideas and habits and histories, then we understand that the commodity is to a certain extent dead. It's fixed. It's a thing. And the culture is alive. And museum shops trade on that, don't they? Museum shops sell you books of reproductions. They sell you postcards. They sell you everything they can think of. Coffee cups with paintings on them, but you know it's not the real thing and you know it's basically a souvenir, an aide-memoire. It's something to allow you to remember the experience or to prompt you to have that experience.

Unidentified Man

I just want to ask a question through a comment. I just want to begin by comparing the TV culture and the e-culture. Many years ago when TV was invented, there was great expectations about what TV can do, create a new community, social networking, educational resources and so on and so forth. Nowadays when we look back, we find TV as a greater source of alienation in personality, cynicism and alienation. And that's why we are cursing all this kind of trash TV programs. Nowadays we have a new culture which is called the e-culture, so people are doing the same thing again, have a lot of great expectations building community, cultural resources, political activism and all that.

My question is are we going through the same cycle again? Is cyberspace becoming a new source of alienation in personality, cynicism, which by the way has been addressed through the book by [inaudible] by William Mitchell at MIT and by the book Cultural Captivism. I forgot the last name.

By the way, the question has a good reason because culture does not exist in a vacuum insofar as a vacuum itself is contextualized between a culture which is capitalistic in nature this kind of relationship the primary one is destroyed or minimized. What you have instead is a secondary, tertiary together with the [inaudible] that we are facing. What are we going to do to fix them? Thank you very much.

Mr. Shapiro

We have got a group that is hungry for food for the soul but also food for the body, so perhaps we can have a quick response and take the discussion outside.

Mr. Gilcher

I think there was a question in an earlier session in this series, or a comment, that in fact it was radio that was the biggest disappointment and that radio started as really a potential two-way system more than TV. I think the potential is always there, but I have the feeling that the web has enough stamina to pull through for multivalency, if you like, to predominate over the broadcast model.

Mr. Druker

We can never anticipate what is going to happen when a new technology is introduced into the culture. We have high hopes for it, and we're generally wrong. But that doesn't mean that we should give up on the technology. It took radio 50 years before it became anything approaching a medium for education. It took television a lot longer than that apparently. The telephone was supposed to break down the isolation of people. It was supposed to do all kinds of things that it didn't do. You always have to come back to the ingenuity of individuals. They will use this technology, they will put it to a use that works for them, and it may not be the one that you anticipated and it may not be one that you even approve of. Why are there so many porno sites on the web? I mean, it's the fastest growing industry on the web because it's easy to distribute pornography on the web. And so, you know, entrepreneurship being what it is, there they go. That doesn't mean that there is something wrong with the web. It comes back to Tim Burner-Lee's vision. It can connect anything to anything, which gives free rein to creativity, it seems to me, and so the burden is on us not on the technology.

Mr. Shapiro

I think we've got two more comments from the panel and I'll wrap it up and we can move on. Yes, Bill.

Mr. Gilcher

Just briefly, it seems to me that, yes, cynicism and alienation are very real possibilities down the line. I think it's less likely than with television, and I don't actually agree with radio at all. But I think it's a bit less likely because it's so easy to set up a different voice. You can have so many different voices in the web. It can't be dominated by just a few channels. So I think there is more possibility inherent to escape the cynicism and alienation issues. But I am sure there is a whole big elephant walking thorough the room at me that I don't even see at the moment in terms of these issues. I don't know what they are yet.

Ms. Cavataio

Just one quick closing statement, my boss, Steve Case, always says that the Internet is still big enough to matter but it's young enough still to be shaped and I think that we as the leading Internet service company have staked our future, our reputation, our very existence on building a medium that benefits society. And we see ourselves at the cusp of this new medium and it's up to us right here, everybody in this room and us as a company to take advantage of this opportunity to shape this new medium.

Mr. Shapiro

I guess I'd only add that I think I recently read that downloads of digital music in MP3 compressed technology have now surpassed downloads of pornographic images. So I don't know what that says about copyright ethics, but certainly in terms of cultural expression, I think we're headed in the right direction.

Thank you so much. [applause]