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(Cereal Killer in 'Hackers', 1995)1
The internet first blinked into existence on October 29th, 1969 marking the occasion by promptly crashing after transmitting the letters ‘L’ and ‘O’ [1], lo and behold despite the crash a “consensual hallucination” [2, pp.51] was born. Today our daily lives, and our resulting social relationships and material culture, are made, re/shaped, and mediated through this hallucination. From the skyscrapers of the North Atlantic region, to jungle clearings in Chiapas, to any given conservation lab, on any given day, the internet is changing the ways in which we interact with the world, and one another. This paper focuses upon those potential points of confluence between conservation and ‘cyberspace’; it can also be considered an attempt at an auto-ethnographic study of my own place as an ethnographic conservator IRL (in real life - to use the internet nomenclature) as well as within cyberspace. The paper is lastly an exploration of the potential understandings that conservators could reach with museums, collections, and the world, in our collective embrace of these new technologies and digital culture.
Hacking as Metaphor The hacker community (or sub-culture) has been significant to the development of the internet and digital culture, this paper contends that the conservation profession could use the ideas of the hacker community as both a metaphor and means of coming to an understanding between conservation and the internet. Halpin [3, p.162] suggests: “We must all be technologists, finding what computer jargon calls hacks: elegant and clever ways of solving our problems employing the materials at hand”. It is the hope of this author that conservators will instantly recognize this position as analogous to their daily work; looking around the laboratory ask yourself how many of the instruments, tools, and materials were designed for conservation, and how many have been adapted to suit (hacked)? “The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1” [4, ch. 3]. It was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that todays programming tools, slang, and culture of hacking developed, and although writings about hackers widely exist, they vary considerably in their accuracy and merit. Therefore considering writings by hackers would be more conducive to gaining a greater understanding of the culture, and although there are no official canonical texts of hacking culture, there are writings concerning the definition of hacking and hacker culture [4, 5], and the history of hacker culture [6, 7]. However, in the spirit of a hacker it’s suggested you find out more for yourself. Collectively, these writings could be suggestive of a ‘heritage-hack’ approach, a techno-conservation, a code writing conservator, writing code useful for conserving our cultural heritage. One aspect of hacker culture that is important to understand are ethics. “Hacker Ethic is their gift to us: something with value even to those of us with no interest at all in computers” (6, Preface). These ethics are described as: - Access to computers and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative! - All information should be free; - Mistrust Authority, Promote Decentralization; - Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position; - You can create art and beauty on a computer; - Computers can change your life for the better. The Evolution of the Web: From 1.0 to 2.0
Although conservators have rarely been at the cyber frontiers, it is true to say that “the idea of conservators sharing information over the Internet is hardly new” [11] and furthermore they have in fact often been early adopters (especially within the cultural sector) of internet based technologies. One such example is the ever popular Conservation Distribution List: “the DistList was the first library, museum, and archive-oriented list on the Net” [12], having been advertised on a (non-electronic) bulletin board at the 1987 American Institute for Conservation Annual Meeting. Conservators have also been amongst the early adopters of the currently in vogue concept of Web 2.0. However, the meaning, or relevance, of this term has been somewhat disputed. In an interview the inventor of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, stated: “Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along” [13]. It has been rightly claimed that what has changed is not technology, but people, that is to say people are now thinking differently about the internet [14]. Despite these terminological inaccuracies ‘Web 2.0’ has become a synonym for the interactive nature of the internet, especially the collaborative nature of user generated content, it is that which differs from the previous common practice of read-only websites. Exploring Web 2.0 One of the distinguishing features of Web 2.0 has been the human to human contact mediated by the internet. In an interview Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, commenting on its success said; "It's a community as well as an encyclopedia" [15]. It is this community that not only creates the information in the articles, but, crucially for conservators also cares for it (cf. [16]). The creation of community itself however is not new, what is new is the networked collaborative model that has developed out of that community [17], elsewhere Shirky [18] referred to this model existing “not an edifice but as an act of love”. The model is based on exploiting what Anderson [19] calls the ‘long tail’, and Shirky [20] calls the ‘cognitive surplus’, both terms are based on using the full range of what is mathematically termed the ‘power law distribution’ [21]. This distribution is the result of collating the widest possible collaboration. It has been suggested that conservators “are naturally acclimated to the collaborative model because we often act as the expert and a contributor at the same time” [11]. Aspects of Web 2.0 have already gained wide purchase within the conservation profession, such as blogging, Flickr projects and social networking. It is possible that the rapid growth in the number of conservation blogs is because “technology has its most profound effect when it alters the ways in which people come together and communicate” [22, pp.4]. This reminds us that “blogs are not a genre of communication, but a medium through which communication occurs” [23].That is to say they are a medium for bi-directional communication. With the probable exception of wikipedia, it seems that social networking sites appear to be the most widely used Web 2.0 application amongst conservators. “What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks” [24]. It is this articulation of social network that leads to their rapid growth and acceptance. It only later becomes apparent that these now visible networks could potentially be used as a new means of sharing skills and information away from the traditional, and expensive, meetings and symposia, whilst also allowing for a new forum for public interface. This becomes significant when we consider that many view a public centered conservation as a major factor in the future of conservation (cf. [25]). Where next: Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web? Assuming that Web 2.0 is adopted as a standard technique (technology) of conservation, it is worth looking out to the new frontiers, asking what is possibly in store in the future. The immediate goal of those at the cyber frontiers of the internet appears to be what is termed web 3.0. “The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web” [26]. The purpose of this scouring would be to fully answer complicated questions. It is for this reason that Web 3.0 has been described as a system that is “read-write-execute” [27] an expansion on the idea that Web 1.0 is ‘read’ and Web 2.0 ‘read-write’. However, in truth the phrase Web 3.0 is really a catch all term used to describe anything and everything that could potentially become the next ‘evolutionary’ step of the internet. One of the key areas of development has been in what is known as the ‘Semantic Web’, this aims at the introduction of an artificial intelligence to the web, allowing software to carry out sophisticated tasks or services for users, the claim has been made that if “properly designed, the Semantic Web can assist the evolution of human knowledge as a whole” [28]. For many “it is not a question of if web sites become web services, but when and how” [29]. It would it seem wise, although admittedly incredibly difficult, if potential heritage-hackers began to consider the implications, and the potentials, of such a system now, as it is being developed. The implications of a new internet that was able to reliably answer complex questions, quickly searching all available resources on the internet are phenomenal. Whilst the term web 3.0 is widely debated as to its usefulness, versus being simply an advertising gimmick or buzz word, the Semantic Web is a concrete idea, it is not however without its critics. The practicalities of a system that is based on reliable meta-data have been dismissed by Doctorow [30]: “A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities”. Furthermore, one of the foremost proponents of Net Culture, and particularly Web 2.0 has also been critical of the idea saying: “This is the promise of the Semantic Web - it will improve all the areas of your life where you currently use syllogisms. Which is to say, almost nowhere” [31]. Deconstructing, convincingly and with some level of humor, various examples of descriptions of Web 3.0, and what he terms it’s “proof of no concept” Shirky [31] continues to describe the Semantic Web as having two goals: “one good but unnecessary, the other audacious but doomed” [31]. The first is to get people to use more metadata, the second is to take up the Artificial Intelligence project in a new context. However, despite these problems Shirky [31] suggests that “much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it is not coming because of the Semantic Web”. He suggests that although there are disadvantages to a system developed piecemeal without a meta-narrative, there is one significant advantage to this bottom up design; that it works now. Although the concept of Web 3.0 as it is currently applied is flimsy, at best, it will inevitably remain in common usage. We can be sure that the internet will continue to change and develop, and Web 3.0 will inevitably become a catch all term for these developments whatever form they take. Whether this Web 3.0 and Semantic Web ever come about in the way they are envisioned is not the concern of either this paper, or the conservation profession. The important information is that the internet is altering the profession and the institutions in which we work. “Already, Google, YouTube and Flickr have established themselves as museums of the digital world and are actively trying to redefine the idea of curating content. Who knows what emerging entities (Web 3.0? Web 10.0?) will encroach even further on the traditional (and future) functions of museums?” [32, p.15]. As conservators we have a duty of care to come to an understanding with such technologies, and attempt to work with these changes, as such monitoring the development of new technologies becomes an ever increasingly significant part of our profession. Conclusions
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DANIEL CULL
Conservator The Musical Instrument Museum Website: http://dancull.wordpress.com Contact: daniel.cull@themim.org Daniel Cull is a Conservator, Wikipedian, Social Networker, and Blogger from the West Country of the British Isles. Trained at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, where he received a BSc in Archaeology, MA in Principles of Conservation, and an MSc in Conservation for Archaeology and Museums. He was later awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the National Museum of the American Indian/Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. He currently works as an ethnographic musical instrument conservator at the Musical Instrument Museum, in Arizona.
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